Can't help but look at that list and think to my self upper middle class first world problems. Most who post here are well off. The people I am friends with are mostly minimum wage workers. A night out for most is going round a friends with a few cans of beer or ordering a takeaway, not a restaurant or pub as its too expensive. Maybe my friends are exceptional but I doubt it in the previous year I think we went to a pub 3 times for peoples birthdays, restaurants never, foreign holidays don't know anyone that has been on one in the last 5 years in my friends circles. Most manage a gig once or twice a year. Sport is on tv for those that like it.
20 years ago yes that list is things they could afford to do and did. Not so much now. Most have also seen their accomodation degrade over that time as cost has forced them to ever downsize. 20 years ago they were renting a house now they are renting a 1 bed flat, a studio appartment, a room in a house.
Good post. It is people such as these - the bottom quartile in financial terms - who imo must be protected entirely from contributing to the cost of corona in future years. Indeed they should be elevated. All of which means the cost to others - particularly the top quartile - must not be shirked. In the new tradition of national mantras, following yesterday's 'Get Brexit Done' and today's 'Stay Home Protect the NHS, Save Lives' the one for tomorrow, post virus, must be - Can Pay WILL Pay.
But your kind want to put up taxes so they will have even less
I actually read that and think that property prices (especially rent) is too high and solving that will fix a lot of other issues.
Sentiments beautifully expressed and much sympathy for those feeling this way - but IMO overwrought. A vaccine is near certain in 2021. Virus to be controlled until then by living cautiously. In a matter of a year or so back to normal except a bit poorer...
Virus:
My understanding is that a vaccine for any coronavirus has never been achieved. I think you are being overly optimistic.
Even if a virus is found, it will likely not be anywhere near 100% effective. Also, administering it to the global population would be problematic to say the least. From the availability and sheer quantity of the "stuff" that makes the virus, to questions about who delivers it, which nations get it first, and which groups of people within each nation gets it first.
Geopolitically, the Chinese, Russians and Americans (at least) will try to buy up availability en masse. Cold or even hot wars could be fought over this.
My premise has always been that a vaccine is not likely to be our salvation. More likely the virus will naturally die out, or some degree of herd immunity will protect us to some extent. Therefore we mustn`t slip into the coma of trashing our economy and freedoms in the hope that a vaccine will rescue us....
That's not strictly true. A vaccine for the MERS virus, which appeared from early testing to be effective, was produced. It was never taken through clinical trials because the brief epidemic disappeared, and there was no funding for it. A SARS vaccine program was similarly frozen. Along the same lines, we've never had vaccines for the common cold type coronaviruses as there was never a market for them - they are four of them, and they account for only a fraction of common cold infections, so what was the point ?
In contrast, we already have several vaccines to this one which have been given to human volunteers (and well over fifty more in development). The initial antibody responses to the first ones seem encouraging (and at least one vaccine has already been shown to be protective in monkeys).
Having said all that, I don't necessarily disagree with you about the policy choices over what to do in the meantime while we wait for a vaccine. We can't lockdown for a year or more.
I thought that there were at least two vaccines for animal coronaviruses:
I'd really like someone to ask at the daily conference what the government strategy is though. Wait for a vaccine or gradually acquire 'herd immunity'?
It's possible (I would guess likely) that the thresholds for animal vaccines are (considerably) lower than for humans, in terms of patient safety.
Set against that, this is an unusual situation in that we've probably got much more tolerance than normal for a vaccine that's only partially effective.
Can't help but look at that list and think to my self upper middle class first world problems. Most who post here are well off. The people I am friends with are mostly minimum wage workers. A night out for most is going round a friends with a few cans of beer or ordering a takeaway, not a restaurant or pub as its too expensive. Maybe my friends are exceptional but I doubt it in the previous year I think we went to a pub 3 times for peoples birthdays, restaurants never, foreign holidays don't know anyone that has been on one in the last 5 years in my friends circles. Most manage a gig once or twice a year. Sport is on tv for those that like it.
20 years ago yes that list is things they could afford to do and did. Not so much now. Most have also seen their accomodation degrade over that time as cost has forced them to ever downsize. 20 years ago they were renting a house now they are renting a 1 bed flat, a studio appartment, a room in a house.
Good post. It is people such as these - the bottom quartile in financial terms - who imo must be protected entirely from contributing to the cost of corona in future years. Indeed they should be elevated. All of which means the cost to others - particularly the top quartile - must not be shirked. In the new tradition of national mantras, following yesterday's 'Get Brexit Done' and today's 'Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives' the one for tomorrow, post virus, must be - Can Pay WILL Pay.
Agreed. We're all going to be poorer, almost inevitably. Those least well off don't have the same capacity to take the hit.
A spitfire and hurricane doing a triple pass over Colonel Tom evokes so many memories for me
He and they are an utter inspiration
To think, we could have charged the Duke of Westminster a 0.3% wealth tax and raised just as much for the NHS.
There can be no doubt that the wealthy are going to have to pay much more tax
If you are so desperate to raise tax BigG you may as well join Starmer's Labour Party as he will certainly impose a wealth tax, Boris won't
The Conservatives are happily to jettison a great many principles for power - but the hill they'll die on is making rich people pay a bit more tax. But with Boris... who knows I guess.
Boris does not want to lose marginal seats like Kensington, Esher and Walton or Cheltenham as wealthy Tory voters stay home on election day so he won't
He is far more likely to lose the red wall if he protects the rich
Everyone is going to have to pay more and services are going to get worse all round. This is shaping up to be Britain's worst immiseration in living memory.
Genuine question - why not just print our way out of debt?
It has the added benefit of stealth taxing assets.
That is in practice a policy choice that I expect to be taken. There are consequences of such a decision, however: it is not cost-free.
Its a more logical response to the economy grinding to a halt and needing to kick start it again afterwards than ramping up taxation. When a body suffers cardiac arrest you give it a jolt and epinephrine you don't tax it more.
A temporary VAT cut or other tax cuts should be in the next budget.
A spitfire and hurricane doing a triple pass over Colonel Tom evokes so many memories for me
He and they are an utter inspiration
To think, we could have charged the Duke of Westminster a 0.3% wealth tax and raised just as much for the NHS.
There can be no doubt that the wealthy are going to have to pay much more tax
If you are so desperate to raise tax BigG you may as well join Starmer's Labour Party as he will certainly impose a wealth tax, Boris won't
The Conservatives are happily to jettison a great many principles for power - but the hill they'll die on is making rich people pay a bit more tax. But with Boris... who knows I guess.
Boris does not want to lose marginal seats like Kensington, Esher and Walton or Cheltenham as wealthy Tory voters stay home on election day so he won't
He is far more likely to lose the red wall if he protects the rich
Everyone is going to have to pay more and services are going to get worse all round. This is shaping up to be Britain's worst immiseration in living memory.
Genuine question - why not just print our way out of debt?
It has the added benefit of stealth taxing assets.
That is in practice a policy choice that I expect to be taken. There are consequences of such a decision, however: it is not cost-free.
Its a more logical response to the economy grinding to a halt and needing to kick start it again afterwards than ramping up taxation. When a body suffers cardiac arrest you give it a jolt and epinephrine you don't tax it more.
A temporary VAT cut or other tax cuts should be in the next budget.
Vat cut?? I would be amazed. Vat increase morelike
Government have a tricky issues here. They need to get people into shops and restaurants and pubs when it's safe to do so. Making them even more expensive isn't going to get that done.
I've got an idea. Why don't we tax rich people?
because there isnt enough of them, even if you raised an extra 10000 a year of the top 10% that would only amount to 30 billion or so and the top 10% is probably anyone earning 60k a year or more so most of them you wouldn't even get that much
Sentiments beautifully expressed and much sympathy for those feeling this way - but IMO overwrought. A vaccine is near certain in 2021. Virus to be controlled until then by living cautiously. In a matter of a year or so back to normal except a bit poorer...
Virus:
My understanding is that a vaccine for any coronavirus has never been achieved. I think you are being overly optimistic.
Even if a virus is found, it will likely not be anywhere near 100% effective. Also, administering it to the global population would be problematic to say the least. From the availability and sheer quantity of the "stuff" that makes the virus, to questions about who delivers it, which nations get it first, and which groups of people within each nation gets it first.
Geopolitically, the Chinese, Russians and Americans (at least) will try to buy up availability en masse. Cold or even hot wars could be fought over this.
My premise has always been that a vaccine is not likely to be our salvation. More likely the virus will naturally die out, or some degree of herd immunity will protect us to some extent. Therefore we mustn`t slip into the coma of trashing our economy and freedoms in the hope that a vaccine will rescue us....
That's not strictly true. A vaccine for the MERS virus, which appeared from early testing to be effective, was produced. It was never taken through clinical trials because the brief epidemic disappeared, and there was no funding for it. A SARS vaccine program was similarly frozen. Along the same lines, we've never had vaccines for the common cold type coronaviruses as there was never a market for them - they are four of them, and they account for only a fraction of common cold infections, so what was the point ?
In contrast, we already have several vaccines to this one which have been given to human volunteers (and well over fifty more in development). The initial antibody responses to the first ones seem encouraging (and at least one vaccine has already been shown to be protective in monkeys).
Having said all that, I don't necessarily disagree with you about the policy choices over what to do in the meantime while we wait for a vaccine. We can't lockdown for a year or more.
I thought that there were at least two vaccines for animal coronaviruses:
avian infectious bronchitis CoV (IBV) porcine respiratory CoV So it is definitely possible.
I'd really like someone to ask at the daily conference what the government strategy is though. Wait for a vaccine or gradually acquire 'herd immunity'?
Indeed there are (I wasn't counting them). But yes, we know it's possible, and it will be the quickest and least costly way to arrive at 'herd immunity'.
I'd also point out that an effective vaccine is quite likely to provide a stronger and longer lasting antibody response than the infection itself. In some mild cases, the antibody response doesn't appear to be particularly strong - and in some severe cases there seems to be a effect of immune exhaustion (which could conceivably affect immune memory).
Sentiments beautifully expressed and much sympathy for those feeling this way - but IMO overwrought. A vaccine is near certain in 2021. Virus to be controlled until then by living cautiously. In a matter of a year or so back to normal except a bit poorer...
Virus:
My understanding is that a vaccine for any coronavirus has never been achieved. I think you are being overly optimistic.
Even if a virus is found, it will likely not be anywhere near 100% effective. Also, administering it to the global population would be problematic to say the least. From the availability and sheer quantity of the "stuff" that makes the virus, to questions about who delivers it, which nations get it first, and which groups of people within each nation gets it first.
Geopolitically, the Chinese, Russians and Americans (at least) will try to buy up availability en masse. Cold or even hot wars could be fought over this.
My premise has always been that a vaccine is not likely to be our salvation. More likely the virus will naturally die out, or some degree of herd immunity will protect us to some extent. Therefore we mustn`t slip into the coma of trashing our economy and freedoms in the hope that a vaccine will rescue us....
That's not strictly true. A vaccine for the MERS virus, which appeared from early testing to be effective, was produced. It was never taken through clinical trials because the brief epidemic disappeared, and there was no funding for it. A SARS vaccine program was similarly frozen. Along the same lines, we've never had vaccines for the common cold type coronaviruses as there was never a market for them - they are four of them, and they account for only a fraction of common cold infections, so what was the point ?
In contrast, we already have several vaccines to this one which have been given to human volunteers (and well over fifty more in development). The initial antibody responses to the first ones seem encouraging (and at least one vaccine has already been shown to be protective in monkeys).
Having said all that, I don't necessarily disagree with you about the policy choices over what to do in the meantime while we wait for a vaccine. We can't lockdown for a year or more.
I thought that there were at least two vaccines for animal coronaviruses:
avian infectious bronchitis CoV (IBV) porcine respiratory CoV So it is definitely possible.
I'd really like someone to ask at the daily conference what the government strategy is though. Wait for a vaccine or gradually acquire 'herd immunity'?
Indeed there are (I wasn't counting them). But yes, we know it's possible, and it will be the quickest and least costly way to arrive at 'herd immunity'.
I'd also point out that an effective vaccine is quite likely to provide a stronger and longer lasting antibody response than the infection itself. In some mild cases, the antibody response doesn't appear to be particularly strong - and in some severe cases there seems to be a effect of immune exhaustion (which could conceivably affect immune memory).
I agree about a vaccine being the final solution.
But of course the requirements of herd immunity depend on how people are behaving, and I suspect the way this is going to be resolved in the medium term is by a combination of social distancing and acquired immunity in the population.
Given that the lockdown in Germany has supposedly reduced the R number by about 70%, I can imagine by late Summer a third of the UK population may have been infected, and that a milder form of social distancing that reduced R by 40% would be sufficient to suppress further transmission.
Lockdown lingo - are you fully conversant with the new terminology?
*Coronacoaster* The ups and downs of your mood during the pandemic. You’re loving lockdown one minute but suddenly weepy with anxiety the next. It truly is “an emotional coronacoaster”.
*Quarantinis* Experimental cocktails mixed from whatever random ingredients you have left in the house. The boozy equivalent of a store cupboard supper. Southern Comfort and Ribena quarantini with a glacé cherry garnish, anyone? These are sipped at “locktail hour”, ie. wine o’clock during lockdown, which seems to be creeping earlier with each passing week.
*Le Creuset wrist* It’s the new “avocado hand” - an aching arm after taking one’s best saucepan outside to bang during the weekly ‘Clap For Carers.’ It might be heavy but you’re keen to impress the neighbours with your high-quality kitchenware.
*Coronials* As opposed to millennials, this refers to the future generation of babies conceived or born during coronavirus quarantine. They might also become known as “Generation C” or, more spookily, “Children of the Quarn”.
*Furlough Merlot* Wine consumed in an attempt to relieve the frustration of not working. Also known as “bored-eaux” or “cabernet tedium”.
*Coronadose* An overdose of bad news from consuming too much media during a time of crisis. Can result in a panicdemic.
*The elephant in the Zoom* The glaring issue during a videoconferencing call that nobody feels able to mention. E.g. one participant has dramatically put on weight, suddenly sprouted terrible facial hair or has a worryingly messy house visible in the background.
*Quentin Quarantino* An attention-seeker using their time in lockdown to make amateur films which they’re convinced are funnier and cleverer than they actually are.
*Covidiot* or *Wuhan-ker* One who ignores public health advice or behaves with reckless disregard for the safety of others can be said to display “covidiocy” or be “covidiotic”. Also called a “lockclown” or even a “Wuhan-ker”.
*Goutbreak* The sudden fear that you’ve consumed so much wine, cheese, home-made cake and Easter chocolate in lockdown that your ankles are swelling up like a medieval king’s.
*Antisocial distancing* Using health precautions as an excuse for snubbing neighbours and generally ignoring people you find irritating.
*Coughin’ dodger* Someone so alarmed by an innocuous splutter or throat-clear that they back away in terror.
*Mask-ara* Extra make-up applied to "make one's eyes pop" before venturing out in public wearing a face mask.
*Covid-10* The 10lbs in weight that we’re all gaining from comfort-eating and comfort-drinking. Also known as “fattening the curve”.
A spitfire and hurricane doing a triple pass over Colonel Tom evokes so many memories for me
He and they are an utter inspiration
To think, we could have charged the Duke of Westminster a 0.3% wealth tax and raised just as much for the NHS.
There can be no doubt that the wealthy are going to have to pay much more tax
If you are so desperate to raise tax BigG you may as well join Starmer's Labour Party as he will certainly impose a wealth tax, Boris won't
The Conservatives are happily to jettison a great many principles for power - but the hill they'll die on is making rich people pay a bit more tax. But with Boris... who knows I guess.
Boris does not want to lose marginal seats like Kensington, Esher and Walton or Cheltenham as wealthy Tory voters stay home on election day so he won't
He is far more likely to lose the red wall if he protects the rich
Everyone is going to have to pay more and services are going to get worse all round. This is shaping up to be Britain's worst immiseration in living memory.
Genuine question - why not just print our way out of debt?
It has the added benefit of stealth taxing assets.
That is in practice a policy choice that I expect to be taken. There are consequences of such a decision, however: it is not cost-free.
Its a more logical response to the economy grinding to a halt and needing to kick start it again afterwards than ramping up taxation. When a body suffers cardiac arrest you give it a jolt and epinephrine you don't tax it more.
A temporary VAT cut or other tax cuts should be in the next budget.
A spitfire and hurricane doing a triple pass over Colonel Tom evokes so many memories for me
He and they are an utter inspiration
To think, we could have charged the Duke of Westminster a 0.3% wealth tax and raised just as much for the NHS.
There can be no doubt that the wealthy are going to have to pay much more tax
If you are so desperate to raise tax BigG you may as well join Starmer's Labour Party as he will certainly impose a wealth tax, Boris won't
The Conservatives are happily to jettison a great many principles for power - but the hill they'll die on is making rich people pay a bit more tax. But with Boris... who knows I guess.
Boris does not want to lose marginal seats like Kensington, Esher and Walton or Cheltenham as wealthy Tory voters stay home on election day so he won't
He is far more likely to lose the red wall if he protects the rich
Everyone is going to have to pay more and services are going to get worse all round. This is shaping up to be Britain's worst immiseration in living memory.
Genuine question - why not just print our way out of debt?
It has the added benefit of stealth taxing assets.
That is in practice a policy choice that I expect to be taken. There are consequences of such a decision, however: it is not cost-free.
Its a more logical response to the economy grinding to a halt and needing to kick start it again afterwards than ramping up taxation. When a body suffers cardiac arrest you give it a jolt and epinephrine you don't tax it more.
A temporary VAT cut or other tax cuts should be in the next budget.
Vat cut?? I would be amazed. Vat increase morelike
Government have a tricky issues here. They need to get people into shops and restaurants and pubs when it's safe to do so. Making them even more expensive isn't going to get that done.
Mmm.Is that really what they will be doing? For the next few months I will be shops when necessary. Price will be an irrelevance when comes to getting me in a pub or restaurant.
Last night Keir Starmer’s new Shadow Immigration Minister, Bell Ribeiro-Addy, along with Diane Abbott, was caught attending a Zoom Conference in which antisemitism within the party was denied without challenge from her, Ken Livingstone was defended and former Labour Councillor Jo Bird claimed some party members had died as a result of disciplinary cases. Also in attendance was Jackie Walker, whom even Corbyn found too antisemitic to remain as a Labour member…
The first one is hardly a surprise, given that Ribeiro-Addy used to work for the PSC, and is a former associate of Galloway's campaigns, and is a former National Officer of the NUS.
Starmer has lots of house-cleaning to do, some of it quite difficult in a party riddled with groups promoting identity politics.
Wandering off-topic but this should remind WFH converts that remote conferencing is not secure.
Yep. Certainly not Zoom.
No one broke into our family sharing of kitten and flower photos, though. Nor of the one with the donkey-gonk in the wildlife park invading the car.
Offtopic? Us?
No-one broke in but your second cousin George took a snapshot of the screen showing your illegal wildlife park trip and has forwarded it to the lockdown police, the Daily Mail and Guido.
A spitfire and hurricane doing a triple pass over Colonel Tom evokes so many memories for me
He and they are an utter inspiration
To think, we could have charged the Duke of Westminster a 0.3% wealth tax and raised just as much for the NHS.
There can be no doubt that the wealthy are going to have to pay much more tax
Define wealthy.
Pensioners currently living mortgage free? Families with salaries over 80k? People with more than one property?
All of the above?
Yes, that`s the problem isn`t it. I suspect that BigG meant much more wealthy than the three examples that you cite.
To answer your question
Many mortgage free pensioners are living on their pension and not wealthy
Any family with £100,000 plus are doing very well but may not be wealthy
Anyone owning two homes may well be wealty
But my target are celebrities, footballers and highly paid CEO and others
Trouble is there aren't quite enough celebs, CEOs and footballers to dent the national finances.
If you are serious about this black hole, you will probably need to tax both the comfortable income and the mortgage free pensioner.
I am a mortgage free pensioner, I am paying huge sums to the Govt thro petrol, fuel oil, electricity, council tax and other invented charges by the council for other spurious services (bin collections car park pass etc) then you get stiffed in car parks where the pass does not work (Horsham is hugely expensive) then there's the tax on my pension and my state pension. If I take anything from mySIPP I get taxed too. Then they tax my small dividends , and its only because interest rates are zero that they don't tax my savings. I then pay inordinate amounts of VAT on things I buy. I am drowning in taxes.
What do they give me? Bins emptied and my lane resurfaced every 25yrs.
I think VAT will go up to 25% That's my guess when we start paying off our borrowings for Covid 19
There is an underlying assumption many aremaking that we will pay off our borrowings for Covid 19. Why would we?
There is a difference between an ongoing structural deficit and one-off borrowing. Our borrowing this year will never be repaid. Never. Not next year, not ten years from now, never ever.
We need to get the economy moving again and seek to eliminate/minimise the deficit but we need to do that on a cyclical manner, you don't eliminate the deficit during a recession you do it afterwards.
If anything a tax cut would make more sense than a tax rise.
Don't tell lenders that we intend to never ever ever repay. They could get a bit spooked.
Actually I think investors are wise to the fact that the government will repay its bonds by issuing new bonds, not via taxation. If investors thought the government would stop issuing new bonds and would instead run hundreds of billion pounds surpluses instead I think that would spook them more.
Deficits need to be closed, there can't be massive deficits forever but government borrowing does not need to be repaid in real net terms - it needs interest paying on it in perpetuity. There is a difference between one-off borrowing during a crisis and ongoing structural deficit spending.
I mean the macro profile not the technicalities of rollover and new issue. If we have enormous debt outstanding AND a massive deficit, and our only serious plan for reducing the second and mitigating the explosion in the first is "from the proceeds of growth", this will not fly.
Tax rises. Spending cuts. Printing money. These are the options. Or plan Z default.
It will fly so long as we tackle the deficit. It is the deficit that matters not the borrowing.
It's the combo. The lower is debt the less worrying is a high deficit. And vice versa.
Of course. Which is why we will need to be careful to not have a high deficit long term but it will be easier to close the deficit than it will be to repay our debt!
You can't even think about reducing debt until you've squashed the deficit right down.
Debt is the lockdown and the deficit is the virus.
Can't help but look at that list and think to my self upper middle class first world problems. Most who post here are well off. The people I am friends with are mostly minimum wage workers. A night out for most is going round a friends with a few cans of beer or ordering a takeaway, not a restaurant or pub as its too expensive. Maybe my friends are exceptional but I doubt it in the previous year I think we went to a pub 3 times for peoples birthdays, restaurants never, foreign holidays don't know anyone that has been on one in the last 5 years in my friends circles. Most manage a gig once or twice a year. Sport is on tv for those that like it.
20 years ago yes that list is things they could afford to do and did. Not so much now. Most have also seen their accomodation degrade over that time as cost has forced them to ever downsize. 20 years ago they were renting a house now they are renting a 1 bed flat, a studio appartment, a room in a house.
Good post. It is people such as these - the bottom quartile in financial terms - who imo must be protected entirely from contributing to the cost of corona in future years. Indeed they should be elevated. All of which means the cost to others - particularly the top quartile - must not be shirked. In the new tradition of national mantras, following yesterday's 'Get Brexit Done' and today's 'Stay Home Protect the NHS, Save Lives' the one for tomorrow, post virus, must be - Can Pay WILL Pay.
But your kind want to put up taxes so they will have even less
I actually read that and think that property prices (especially rent) is too high and solving that will fix a lot of other issues.
It would certainly help average rental price now of a small double room in a shared house in my area is now about 120 a week which is a significant portion of pay for a lot of people. What you do to change that though I have no idea short of increasing housing supply by about 20%
Coronials* As opposed to millennials, this refers to the future generation of babies conceived or born during coronavirus quarantine. They might also become known as “Generation C” or, more spookily, “Children of the Quarn”.
Lockdown lingo - are you fully conversant with the new terminology?
*Coronacoaster* The ups and downs of your mood during the pandemic. You’re loving lockdown one minute but suddenly weepy with anxiety the next. It truly is “an emotional coronacoaster”.
*Quarantinis* Experimental cocktails mixed from whatever random ingredients you have left in the house. The boozy equivalent of a store cupboard supper. Southern Comfort and Ribena quarantini with a glacé cherry garnish, anyone? These are sipped at “locktail hour”, ie. wine o’clock during lockdown, which seems to be creeping earlier with each passing week.
*Le Creuset wrist* It’s the new “avocado hand” - an aching arm after taking one’s best saucepan outside to bang during the weekly ‘Clap For Carers.’ It might be heavy but you’re keen to impress the neighbours with your high-quality kitchenware.
*Coronials* As opposed to millennials, this refers to the future generation of babies conceived or born during coronavirus quarantine. They might also become known as “Generation C” or, more spookily, “Children of the Quarn”.
*Furlough Merlot* Wine consumed in an attempt to relieve the frustration of not working. Also known as “bored-eaux” or “cabernet tedium”.
*Coronadose* An overdose of bad news from consuming too much media during a time of crisis. Can result in a panicdemic.
*The elephant in the Zoom* The glaring issue during a videoconferencing call that nobody feels able to mention. E.g. one participant has dramatically put on weight, suddenly sprouted terrible facial hair or has a worryingly messy house visible in the background.
*Quentin Quarantino* An attention-seeker using their time in lockdown to make amateur films which they’re convinced are funnier and cleverer than they actually are.
*Covidiot* or *Wuhan-ker* One who ignores public health advice or behaves with reckless disregard for the safety of others can be said to display “covidiocy” or be “covidiotic”. Also called a “lockclown” or even a “Wuhan-ker”.
*Goutbreak* The sudden fear that you’ve consumed so much wine, cheese, home-made cake and Easter chocolate in lockdown that your ankles are swelling up like a medieval king’s.
*Antisocial distancing* Using health precautions as an excuse for snubbing neighbours and generally ignoring people you find irritating.
*Coughin’ dodger* Someone so alarmed by an innocuous splutter or throat-clear that they back away in terror.
*Mask-ara* Extra make-up applied to "make one's eyes pop" before venturing out in public wearing a face mask.
*Covid-10* The 10lbs in weight that we’re all gaining from comfort-eating and comfort-drinking. Also known as “fattening the curve”.
Sentiments beautifully expressed and much sympathy for those feeling this way - but IMO overwrought. A vaccine is near certain in 2021. Virus to be controlled until then by living cautiously. In a matter of a year or so back to normal except a bit poorer...
Virus:
My understanding is that a vaccine for any coronavirus has never been achieved. I think you are being overly optimistic.
Even if a virus is found, it will likely not be anywhere near 100% effective. Also, administering it to the global population would be problematic to say the least. From the availability and sheer quantity of the "stuff" that makes the virus, to questions about who delivers it, which nations get it first, and which groups of people within each nation gets it first.
Geopolitically, the Chinese, Russians and Americans (at least) will try to buy up availability en masse. Cold or even hot wars could be fought over this.
My premise has always been that a vaccine is not likely to be our salvation. More likely the virus will naturally die out, or some degree of herd immunity will protect us to some extent. Therefore we mustn`t slip into the coma of trashing our economy and freedoms in the hope that a vaccine will rescue us....
That's not strictly true. A vaccine for the MERS virus, which appeared from early testing to be effective, was produced. It was never taken through clinical trials because the brief epidemic disappeared, and there was no funding for it. A SARS vaccine program was similarly frozen. Along the same lines, we've never had vaccines for the common cold type coronaviruses as there was never a market for them - they are four of them, and they account for only a fraction of common cold infections, so what was the point ?
In contrast, we already have several vaccines to this one which have been given to human volunteers (and well over fifty more in development). The initial antibody responses to the first ones seem encouraging (and at least one vaccine has already been shown to be protective in monkeys).
Having said all that, I don't necessarily disagree with you about the policy choices over what to do in the meantime while we wait for a vaccine. We can't lockdown for a year or more.
I thought that there were at least two vaccines for animal coronaviruses:
avian infectious bronchitis CoV (IBV) porcine respiratory CoV So it is definitely possible.
I'd really like someone to ask at the daily conference what the government strategy is though. Wait for a vaccine or gradually acquire 'herd immunity'?
Indeed there are (I wasn't counting them). But yes, we know it's possible, and it will be the quickest and least costly way to arrive at 'herd immunity'.
I'd also point out that an effective vaccine is quite likely to provide a stronger and longer lasting antibody response than the infection itself. In some mild cases, the antibody response doesn't appear to be particularly strong - and in some severe cases there seems to be a effect of immune exhaustion (which could conceivably affect immune memory).
I agree about a vaccine being the final solution.
But of course the requirements of herd immunity depend on how people are behaving, and I suspect the way this is going to be resolved in the medium term is by a combination of social distancing and acquired immunity in the population.
Given that the lockdown in Germany has supposedly reduced the R number by about 70%, I can imagine by late Summer a third of the UK population may have been infected, and that a milder form of social distancing that reduced R by 40% would be sufficient to suppress further transmission.
What evidence do you have for that estimate of "may have been infected" ? I'm dubious.
If the a vaccine is available as early as September, albeit in relatively small quantities, it would be usable alongside a track and trace program. Ring vaccination in the localities of infection outbreaks would be as effective as local quarantines.
But a bit of a problem for those who don't believe the Chinese to push that line, I'd have thought. Which other country is in a position to know who the hell has been passing the virus to whom?
Here in Australia things feel like they're gradually returning to some form of normality. From tomorrow we're allowed 2 visitors to a house which feels like a genuinely exciting moment! We're also down to a couple of cases a day in NSW and Queensland has gone many days without a new case. Quite an achievement.
Thinking about the broader economic crisis particularly in the the UK outside of London, I cant help thinking it's a reckoning that's been a long time coming.
Entire towns in the UK seem to have largely been kept going in the last 30 years through the transactions of people who work in shops, spending money in other shops. It's just a giant form of cycling money which generates very little productive gain.
What the UK faces is a fundamental balance of payments crisis, which has been brushed over because people decided that the balance of payments didn't matter anymore. I have a strong feeling the next 10 years will bring a return to focus on the idea of 'paying our way in the world'.
Sky reporting Astrazeneca are actually producing the Oxford vaccine even though it is only at stage I testing and they hope by June/July to have a decision on its effectiveness.
They said it is unheard of for a vaccine to go into production at this stage but they want stocks if it gets the approval
Can't help but look at that list and think to my self upper middle class first world problems. Most who post here are well off. The people I am friends with are mostly minimum wage workers. A night out for most is going round a friends with a few cans of beer or ordering a takeaway, not a restaurant or pub as its too expensive. Maybe my friends are exceptional but I doubt it in the previous year I think we went to a pub 3 times for peoples birthdays, restaurants never, foreign holidays don't know anyone that has been on one in the last 5 years in my friends circles. Most manage a gig once or twice a year. Sport is on tv for those that like it.
20 years ago yes that list is things they could afford to do and did. Not so much now. Most have also seen their accomodation degrade over that time as cost has forced them to ever downsize. 20 years ago they were renting a house now they are renting a 1 bed flat, a studio appartment, a room in a house.
Good post. It is people such as these - the bottom quartile in financial terms - who imo must be protected entirely from contributing to the cost of corona in future years. Indeed they should be elevated. All of which means the cost to others - particularly the top quartile - must not be shirked. In the new tradition of national mantras, following yesterday's 'Get Brexit Done' and today's 'Stay Home Protect the NHS, Save Lives' the one for tomorrow, post virus, must be - Can Pay WILL Pay.
But your kind want to put up taxes so they will have even less
I actually read that and think that property prices (especially rent) is too high and solving that will fix a lot of other issues.
It would certainly help average rental price now of a small double room in a shared house in my area is now about 120 a week which is a significant portion of pay for a lot of people. What you do to change that though I have no idea short of increasing housing supply by about 20%
Well the first thing to do is to build a lot more council / housing association property. If the economy is doing badly there should be capacity for existing house builders to help with that work.
Also I suspect you could reduce the Local authority housing allowances as they are acting as a prop keeping rents artificially higher than they would otherwise be.
The latter also has the advantage of reducing the amount the Government ends up paying out in housing benefit.
John Pilger criticises the government both for causing excess deaths and forcing house arrest, just to ensure he can attack the government whatever the outcome
I somewhat agree. Lockdown is longer and more damaging and will we see more deaths because we didn't lock early enough and effectively enough. Compare us with most countries we would want to be compared with.
Like Sweden maybe?
Sweden is a distraction. No-one in their right mind would want to follow the UK example, and they are not likely to want to follow Sweden either, when there are dozens of countries that have done better than both the UK and Sweden.
So what about us poor people in the country that has done almost the worst of anybody? What lessons could we learn from Sweden? Not to have locked down at all and see an exponentially higher death toll? Having made the initial mistakes wouldn't we want to learn now from the successful examples?
Indeed.
Hardly any country has done worse in its response than Britain. We are on course to being the country with the second highest aggregate death rate in the world (behind only the US), and the third highest in terms of per capita deaths (behind Belgium and Spain.) I think we'll get there in both cases sometime in May, once we've overtaken Italy, probably within the week on the first measure.
Spain and Italy at least have the excuse that they were in the first wave of mass infections to hit Europe, so didn't have the opportunity to learn from others and act early. What's the UK's excuse?
Can't help but look at that list and think to my self upper middle class first world problems. Most who post here are well off. The people I am friends with are mostly minimum wage workers. A night out for most is going round a friends with a few cans of beer or ordering a takeaway, not a restaurant or pub as its too expensive. Maybe my friends are exceptional but I doubt it in the previous year I think we went to a pub 3 times for peoples birthdays, restaurants never, foreign holidays don't know anyone that has been on one in the last 5 years in my friends circles. Most manage a gig once or twice a year. Sport is on tv for those that like it.
20 years ago yes that list is things they could afford to do and did. Not so much now. Most have also seen their accomodation degrade over that time as cost has forced them to ever downsize. 20 years ago they were renting a house now they are renting a 1 bed flat, a studio appartment, a room in a house.
Good post. It is people such as these - the bottom quartile in financial terms - who imo must be protected entirely from contributing to the cost of corona in future years. Indeed they should be elevated. All of which means the cost to others - particularly the top quartile - must not be shirked. In the new tradition of national mantras, following yesterday's 'Get Brexit Done' and today's 'Stay Home Protect the NHS, Save Lives' the one for tomorrow, post virus, must be - Can Pay WILL Pay.
But your kind want to put up taxes so they will have even less
No! - or if so I am diverging from "my kind".
I would support a post corona fiscal regime which delivers a net contribution only from those who can afford to make it. The contribution to be higher as one goes up the scale of income and (in particular) wealth. I mean it. I'm not fibbing to you.
Sentiments beautifully expressed and much sympathy for those feeling this way - but IMO overwrought. A vaccine is near certain in 2021. Virus to be controlled until then by living cautiously. In a matter of a year or so back to normal except a bit poorer...
Virus:
My understanding is that a vaccine for any coronavirus has never been achieved. I think you are being overly optimistic.
Even if a virus is found, it will likely not be anywhere near 100% effective. Also, administering it to the global population would be problematic to say the least. From the availability and sheer quantity of the "stuff" that makes the virus, to questions about who delivers it, which nations get it first, and which groups of people within each nation gets it first.
Geopolitically, the Chinese, Russians and Americans (at least) will try to buy up availability en masse. Cold or even hot wars could be fought over this.
My premise has always been that a vaccine is not likely to be our salvation. More likely the virus will naturally die out, or some degree of herd immunity will protect us to some extent. Therefore we mustn`t slip into the coma of trashing our economy and freedoms in the hope that a vaccine will rescue us....
That's not strictly true. A vaccine for the MERS virus, which appeared from early testing to be effective, was produced. It was never taken through clinical trials because the brief epidemic disappeared, and there was no funding for it. A SARS vaccine program was similarly frozen. Along the same lines, we've never had vaccines for the common cold type coronaviruses as there was never a market for them - they are four of them, and they account for only a fraction of common cold infections, so what was the point ?
In contrast, we already have several vaccines to this one which have been given to human volunteers (and well over fifty more in development). The initial antibody responses to the first ones seem encouraging (and at least one vaccine has already been shown to be protective in monkeys).
Having said all that, I don't necessarily disagree with you about the policy choices over what to do in the meantime while we wait for a vaccine. We can't lockdown for a year or more.
I thought that there were at least two vaccines for animal coronaviruses:
avian infectious bronchitis CoV (IBV) porcine respiratory CoV So it is definitely possible.
I'd really like someone to ask at the daily conference what the government strategy is though. Wait for a vaccine or gradually acquire 'herd immunity'?
Indeed there are (I wasn't counting them). But yes, we know it's possible, and it will be the quickest and least costly way to arrive at 'herd immunity'.
I'd also point out that an effective vaccine is quite likely to provide a stronger and longer lasting antibody response than the infection itself. In some mild cases, the antibody response doesn't appear to be particularly strong - and in some severe cases there seems to be a effect of immune exhaustion (which could conceivably affect immune memory).
I agree about a vaccine being the final solution.
But of course the requirements of herd immunity depend on how people are behaving, and I suspect the way this is going to be resolved in the medium term is by a combination of social distancing and acquired immunity in the population.
Given that the lockdown in Germany has supposedly reduced the R number by about 70%, I can imagine by late Summer a third of the UK population may have been infected, and that a milder form of social distancing that reduced R by 40% would be sufficient to suppress further transmission.
What evidence do you have for that estimate of "may have been infected" ? I'm dubious.
Just my own thoughts about the numbers infected so far (perhaps 15-20%), and the expectation that pressure to lift the lockdown is going to mean an appreciable amount of continuing infection over the four months before September.
Here in Australia things feel like they're gradually returning to some form of normality. From tomorrow we're allowed 2 visitors to a house which feels like a genuinely exciting moment! We're also down to a couple of cases a day in NSW and Queensland has gone many days without a new case. Quite an achievement.
Thinking about the broader economic crisis particularly in the the UK outside of London, I cant help thinking it's a reckoning that's been a long time coming.
Entire towns in the UK seem to have largely been kept going in the last 30 years through the transactions of people who work in shops, spending money in other shops. It's just a giant form of cycling money which generates very little productive gain.
What the UK faces is a fundamental balance of payments crisis, which has been brushed over because people decided that the balance of payments didn't matter anymore. I have a strong feeling the next 10 years will bring a return to focus on the idea of 'paying our way in the world'.
Given that the new infection rate is now so low, and Australia was never one of the more affected cases in any case, is there a lot of pressure in Australia to come out of lockdown?
Can't help but look at that list and think to my self upper middle class first world problems. Most who post here are well off. The people I am friends with are mostly minimum wage workers. A night out for most is going round a friends with a few cans of beer or ordering a takeaway, not a restaurant or pub as its too expensive. Maybe my friends are exceptional but I doubt it in the previous year I think we went to a pub 3 times for peoples birthdays, restaurants never, foreign holidays don't know anyone that has been on one in the last 5 years in my friends circles. Most manage a gig once or twice a year. Sport is on tv for those that like it.
20 years ago yes that list is things they could afford to do and did. Not so much now. Most have also seen their accomodation degrade over that time as cost has forced them to ever downsize. 20 years ago they were renting a house now they are renting a 1 bed flat, a studio appartment, a room in a house.
Good post. It is people such as these - the bottom quartile in financial terms - who imo must be protected entirely from contributing to the cost of corona in future years. Indeed they should be elevated. All of which means the cost to others - particularly the top quartile - must not be shirked. In the new tradition of national mantras, following yesterday's 'Get Brexit Done' and today's 'Stay Home Protect the NHS, Save Lives' the one for tomorrow, post virus, must be - Can Pay WILL Pay.
But your kind want to put up taxes so they will have even less
I actually read that and think that property prices (especially rent) is too high and solving that will fix a lot of other issues.
It would certainly help average rental price now of a small double room in a shared house in my area is now about 120 a week which is a significant portion of pay for a lot of people. What you do to change that though I have no idea short of increasing housing supply by about 20%
It is a deliberate policy of government to have a housing supply shortage. One carefully supported from the left and right.
You could, before this crisis, buy agricultural land on the outskirts of Marden in Kent (nice village) for £7000 an acre. So you can buy enough land for a house on a credit card.
Try building on it without permission - you will find that *that* law is is enforced with far more concern than robbery with violence.
Sky reporting Astrazeneca are actually producing the Oxford vaccine even though it is only at stage I testing and they hope by June/July to have a decision on its effectiveness.
They said it is unheard of for a vaccine to go into production at this stage but they want stocks if it gets the approval
Wow so as long as Matt Hancock isn't in charge of distributing it we might get it in the Autumn
Can't help but look at that list and think to my self upper middle class first world problems. Most who post here are well off. The people I am friends with are mostly minimum wage workers. A night out for most is going round a friends with a few cans of beer or ordering a takeaway, not a restaurant or pub as its too expensive. Maybe my friends are exceptional but I doubt it in the previous year I think we went to a pub 3 times for peoples birthdays, restaurants never, foreign holidays don't know anyone that has been on one in the last 5 years in my friends circles. Most manage a gig once or twice a year. Sport is on tv for those that like it.
20 years ago yes that list is things they could afford to do and did. Not so much now. Most have also seen their accomodation degrade over that time as cost has forced them to ever downsize. 20 years ago they were renting a house now they are renting a 1 bed flat, a studio appartment, a room in a house.
Good post. It is people such as these - the bottom quartile in financial terms - who imo must be protected entirely from contributing to the cost of corona in future years. Indeed they should be elevated. All of which means the cost to others - particularly the top quartile - must not be shirked. In the new tradition of national mantras, following yesterday's 'Get Brexit Done' and today's 'Stay Home Protect the NHS, Save Lives' the one for tomorrow, post virus, must be - Can Pay WILL Pay.
But your kind want to put up taxes so they will have even less
I actually read that and think that property prices (especially rent) is too high and solving that will fix a lot of other issues.
It would certainly help average rental price now of a small double room in a shared house in my area is now about 120 a week which is a significant portion of pay for a lot of people. What you do to change that though I have no idea short of increasing housing supply by about 20%
Well the first thing to do is to build a lot more council / housing association property. If the economy is doing badly there should be capacity for existing house builders to help with that work.
Also I suspect you could reduce the Local authority housing allowances as they are acting as a prop keeping rents artificially higher than they would otherwise be.
The latter also has the advantage of reducing the amount the Government ends up paying out in housing benefit.
The blocker is the religion that we must not build more properties. Planning permissions are carefully rationed.
Build enough properties and prices will come down. But we aren't allowed to. By law.
Sky reporting Astrazeneca are actually producing the Oxford vaccine even though it is only at stage I testing and they hope by June/July to have a decision on its effectiveness.
They said it is unheard of for a vaccine to go into production at this stage but they want stocks if it gets the approval
Incoming question from Sky...but why can't you do it faster?
I believe Bill Gates has said he will fund parallel production of the most promising 7 (or might have been 9) vaccine candidates.
Why on earth is Ed Conway saying that it is a shocking collapse in GDP. What did he expect to happen as the Country was in Lockdown for part of it.
It's mildly shocking in that only 2 or 3 weeks of the 13 will have been significantly affected. Q2 is going to be off the charts.
I was speaking to the senior partner of a law firm yesterday who was thankful that they had a very good March which gave them a "fighting fund" that will see them through this and the next month or so. After that it is going to be trickier. My guess is that this was not atypical, our economy was building up a little momentum BC.
Sky reporting Astrazeneca are actually producing the Oxford vaccine even though it is only at stage I testing and they hope by June/July to have a decision on its effectiveness.
They said it is unheard of for a vaccine to go into production at this stage but they want stocks if it gets the approval
Wow so as long as Matt Hancock isn't in charge of distributing it we might get it in the Autumn
Fingers crossed BJO
And it is the only vaccine in the world at present anywhere near
Can't help but look at that list and think to my self upper middle class first world problems. Most who post here are well off. The people I am friends with are mostly minimum wage workers. A night out for most is going round a friends with a few cans of beer or ordering a takeaway, not a restaurant or pub as its too expensive. Maybe my friends are exceptional but I doubt it in the previous year I think we went to a pub 3 times for peoples birthdays, restaurants never, foreign holidays don't know anyone that has been on one in the last 5 years in my friends circles. Most manage a gig once or twice a year. Sport is on tv for those that like it.
20 years ago yes that list is things they could afford to do and did. Not so much now. Most have also seen their accomodation degrade over that time as cost has forced them to ever downsize. 20 years ago they were renting a house now they are renting a 1 bed flat, a studio appartment, a room in a house.
Good post. It is people such as these - the bottom quartile in financial terms - who imo must be protected entirely from contributing to the cost of corona in future years. Indeed they should be elevated. All of which means the cost to others - particularly the top quartile - must not be shirked. In the new tradition of national mantras, following yesterday's 'Get Brexit Done' and today's 'Stay Home Protect the NHS, Save Lives' the one for tomorrow, post virus, must be - Can Pay WILL Pay.
But your kind want to put up taxes so they will have even less
I actually read that and think that property prices (especially rent) is too high and solving that will fix a lot of other issues.
It would certainly help average rental price now of a small double room in a shared house in my area is now about 120 a week which is a significant portion of pay for a lot of people. What you do to change that though I have no idea short of increasing housing supply by about 20%
It is a deliberate policy of government to have a housing supply shortage. One carefully supported from the left and right.
You could, before this crisis, buy agricultural land on the outskirts of Marden in Kent (nice village) for £7000 an acre. So you can buy enough land for a house on a credit card.
Try building on it without permission - you will find that *that* law is is enforced with far more concern than robbery with violence.
Don't doubt it for a minute. Something however has to give as we are fast approaching a point where we will be back to victorian times where whole families will live in a single room as a common place thing. This is why I tend to get cross with people here that go on about "just putting a penny or two on basic tax". They are generally not people who are living hand to mouth and trying to stretch the money to the end of the month and seem to blithely assume that as it wouldn't affect them badly everyone would cope.
Here in Australia things feel like they're gradually returning to some form of normality. From tomorrow we're allowed 2 visitors to a house which feels like a genuinely exciting moment! We're also down to a couple of cases a day in NSW and Queensland has gone many days without a new case. Quite an achievement.
Thinking about the broader economic crisis particularly in the the UK outside of London, I cant help thinking it's a reckoning that's been a long time coming.
Entire towns in the UK seem to have largely been kept going in the last 30 years through the transactions of people who work in shops, spending money in other shops. It's just a giant form of cycling money which generates very little productive gain.
What the UK faces is a fundamental balance of payments crisis, which has been brushed over because people decided that the balance of payments didn't matter anymore. I have a strong feeling the next 10 years will bring a return to focus on the idea of 'paying our way in the world'.
Given that the new infection rate is now so low, and Australia was never one of the more affected cases in any case, is there a lot of pressure in Australia to come out of lockdown?
People have been generally very supportive of both the state and federal response tbh. ScMo after an inept response to the bushfires earlier in the year has proved a solid leader much to many peoples surprise (he's known as Scotty from Marketing jokingly).
I think everyone's acutely aware of the risk of a 2nd wave, but given the numbers this seems unlikely.
The lockdown was also much more light touch than that of New Zealand, with many shops remaining open and the local beach open to Surf and Swim, and yet we've matched NZ in terms of effectiveness, proving perhaps that the harder is not always the better when it comes to restrictions.
A spitfire and hurricane doing a triple pass over Colonel Tom evokes so many memories for me
He and they are an utter inspiration
To think, we could have charged the Duke of Westminster a 0.3% wealth tax and raised just as much for the NHS.
There can be no doubt that the wealthy are going to have to pay much more tax
Define wealthy.
Pensioners currently living mortgage free? Families with salaries over 80k? People with more than one property?
All of the above?
Yes, that`s the problem isn`t it. I suspect that BigG meant much more wealthy than the three examples that you cite.
To answer your question
Many mortgage free pensioners are living on their pension and not wealthy
Any family with £100,000 plus are doing very well but may not be wealthy
Anyone owning two homes may well be wealty
But my target are celebrities, footballers and highly paid CEO and others
Trouble is there aren't quite enough celebs, CEOs and footballers to dent the national finances.
If you are serious about this black hole, you will probably need to tax both the comfortable income and the mortgage free pensioner.
I am a mortgage free pensioner, I am paying huge sums to the Govt thro petrol, fuel oil, electricity, council tax and other invented charges by the council for other spurious services (bin collections car park pass etc) then you get stiffed in car parks where the pass does not work (Horsham is hugely expensive) then there's the tax on my pension and my state pension. If I take anything from mySIPP I get taxed too. Then they tax my small dividends , and its only because interest rates are zero that they don't tax my savings. I then pay inordinate amounts of VAT on things I buy. I am drowning in taxes.
What do they give me? Bins emptied and my lane resurfaced every 25yrs.
I think VAT will go up to 25% That's my guess when we start paying off our borrowings for Covid 19
There is an underlying assumption many aremaking that we will pay off our borrowings for Covid 19. Why would we?
There is a difference between an ongoing structural deficit and one-off borrowing. Our borrowing this year will never be repaid. Never. Not next year, not ten years from now, never ever.
We need to get the economy moving again and seek to eliminate/minimise the deficit but we need to do that on a cyclical manner, you don't eliminate the deficit during a recession you do it afterwards.
If anything a tax cut would make more sense than a tax rise.
Don't tell lenders that we intend to never ever ever repay. They could get a bit spooked.
Actually I think investors are wise to the fact that the government will repay its bonds by issuing new bonds, not via taxation. If investors thought the government would stop issuing new bonds and would instead run hundreds of billion pounds surpluses instead I think that would spook them more.
Deficits need to be closed, there can't be massive deficits forever but government borrowing does not need to be repaid in real net terms - it needs interest paying on it in perpetuity. There is a difference between one-off borrowing during a crisis and ongoing structural deficit spending.
I mean the macro profile not the technicalities of rollover and new issue. If we have enormous debt outstanding AND a massive deficit, and our only serious plan for reducing the second and mitigating the explosion in the first is "from the proceeds of growth", this will not fly.
Tax rises. Spending cuts. Printing money. These are the options. Or plan Z default.
It will fly so long as we tackle the deficit. It is the deficit that matters not the borrowing.
It's the combo. The lower is debt the less worrying is a high deficit. And vice versa.
Of course. Which is why we will need to be careful to not have a high deficit long term but it will be easier to close the deficit than it will be to repay our debt!
You can't even think about reducing debt until you've squashed the deficit right down.
Debt is the lockdown and the deficit is the virus.
Well precisely. And once you've squashed the deficit then you can manage the debt via growth and interest payments and paying a keen eye on the deficit in future.
Can't help but look at that list and think to my self upper middle class first world problems. Most who post here are well off. The people I am friends with are mostly minimum wage workers. A night out for most is going round a friends with a few cans of beer or ordering a takeaway, not a restaurant or pub as its too expensive. Maybe my friends are exceptional but I doubt it in the previous year I think we went to a pub 3 times for peoples birthdays, restaurants never, foreign holidays don't know anyone that has been on one in the last 5 years in my friends circles. Most manage a gig once or twice a year. Sport is on tv for those that like it.
20 years ago yes that list is things they could afford to do and did. Not so much now. Most have also seen their accomodation degrade over that time as cost has forced them to ever downsize. 20 years ago they were renting a house now they are renting a 1 bed flat, a studio appartment, a room in a house.
Good post. It is people such as these - the bottom quartile in financial terms - who imo must be protected entirely from contributing to the cost of corona in future years. Indeed they should be elevated. All of which means the cost to others - particularly the top quartile - must not be shirked. In the new tradition of national mantras, following yesterday's 'Get Brexit Done' and today's 'Stay Home Protect the NHS, Save Lives' the one for tomorrow, post virus, must be - Can Pay WILL Pay.
But your kind want to put up taxes so they will have even less
I actually read that and think that property prices (especially rent) is too high and solving that will fix a lot of other issues.
It would certainly help average rental price now of a small double room in a shared house in my area is now about 120 a week which is a significant portion of pay for a lot of people. What you do to change that though I have no idea short of increasing housing supply by about 20%
Well the first thing to do is to build a lot more council / housing association property. If the economy is doing badly there should be capacity for existing house builders to help with that work.
Also I suspect you could reduce the Local authority housing allowances as they are acting as a prop keeping rents artificially higher than they would otherwise be.
The latter also has the advantage of reducing the amount the Government ends up paying out in housing benefit.
The blocker is the religion that we must not build more properties. Planning permissions are carefully rationed.
Build enough properties and prices will come down. But we aren't allowed to. By law.
That depends where you live. Up north, where I live, hundreds of houses have been built over the past 15 years as the empty fields that led from my house to the motorway are built on (until in 5 years or so time they will meet the motorway).
Of course that means my house is worth exactly the same as it was in 2004 as supply has kept up with demand.
The right policy now (or soon) is to ease lock down in line with a national, scaled up trace and test capability. Let’s see if the govt is in a position to deliver that in May. Omens so early have not been fantastic.
With regards to the economy, we will need to pump it back into life. Personally I would be advising tax cuts, and measures to support investment.
Longer term, the only way to go is asset wealth. 5% of housing wealth, payable on death, would raise a significant amount over time.
The government has committed to spend £lots (and through intransigence / incompetence have actually spent £less) and that will have to be funded somehow. And that was cash through to the end of June. We will need a lot more funding for a lot longer than that. Because "ah fuck it reopen the hospitality sector" won't actually make enough people resume status quo ante. "Stay home save lives" becomes ingrained.
Either the government parachutes cash and incentives to bring the hamsters from their cages to start consuming again, or large swathes of the economy and with it our way of life will close down. Which will cost even more in having to keep people from starving and rioting.
I note with bemusement the pronouncements from HYUFD who seems barely able to see beyond the end of his nose never mind see beyond what he very narrowly believes to be the interests of the Conservative Party. Does he think that the voters who gave Boris his big majority will turn out and vote Tory again if their town is destroyed by mass unemployment, shuttered businesses and rampant crime? "We can't tax the rich Tory voters won't stand for it" is a profoundly stupid read of politics - YOU might not stand for it. Normal punters care for themselves not Tory donors, they WILL stand for it if thats the difference between keeping a job and shops and bars and having uncaring gits close them so that they can keep their wealth.
Higher taxes are far more likely to slow growth and hit the economy and lead to job losses.
If you want higher taxes then vote Labour, that has always been the case. The Tory Party is the party of lower taxes
You seem to be ignoring the fact that we are not living in normal timers. I think you are due a re-boot from Central Office.
The Tory coalition at the last general election was built on rich voters in the South with expensive houses and working class Leave voters in the North and Wales and Midlands who wanted to deliver Brexit and cut immigration.
If you were a class war voter who wanted to hammer the rich with higher taxes primarily you were already voting Labour
The working class voters in the north and Midlands didn't just vote for Brexit to be done because they thought it was a nice idea, they voted for it because they believed that stopping immigration and leaving the EU (£350m a week for the NHS) was going to make them materially better off.
How is that going o be achieved by the next GE without increasing taxation on the better off?
Can't help but look at that list and think to my self upper middle class first world problems. Most who post here are well off. The people I am friends with are mostly minimum wage workers. A night out for most is going round a friends with a few cans of beer or ordering a takeaway, not a restaurant or pub as its too expensive. Maybe my friends are exceptional but I doubt it in the previous year I think we went to a pub 3 times for peoples birthdays, restaurants never, foreign holidays don't know anyone that has been on one in the last 5 years in my friends circles. Most manage a gig once or twice a year. Sport is on tv for those that like it.
20 years ago yes that list is things they could afford to do and did. Not so much now. Most have also seen their accomodation degrade over that time as cost has forced them to ever downsize. 20 years ago they were renting a house now they are renting a 1 bed flat, a studio appartment, a room in a house.
Good post. It is people such as these - the bottom quartile in financial terms - who imo must be protected entirely from contributing to the cost of corona in future years. Indeed they should be elevated. All of which means the cost to others - particularly the top quartile - must not be shirked. In the new tradition of national mantras, following yesterday's 'Get Brexit Done' and today's 'Stay Home Protect the NHS, Save Lives' the one for tomorrow, post virus, must be - Can Pay WILL Pay.
But your kind want to put up taxes so they will have even less
I actually read that and think that property prices (especially rent) is too high and solving that will fix a lot of other issues.
It would certainly help average rental price now of a small double room in a shared house in my area is now about 120 a week which is a significant portion of pay for a lot of people. What you do to change that though I have no idea short of increasing housing supply by about 20%
It is a deliberate policy of government to have a housing supply shortage. One carefully supported from the left and right.
You could, before this crisis, buy agricultural land on the outskirts of Marden in Kent (nice village) for £7000 an acre. So you can buy enough land for a house on a credit card.
Try building on it without permission - you will find that *that* law is is enforced with far more concern than robbery with violence.
Don't doubt it for a minute. Something however has to give as we are fast approaching a point where we will be back to victorian times where whole families will live in a single room as a common place thing. This is why I tend to get cross with people here that go on about "just putting a penny or two on basic tax". They are generally not people who are living hand to mouth and trying to stretch the money to the end of the month and seem to blithely assume that as it wouldn't affect them badly everyone would cope.
The options seems to be something like -
1) Mass immigration and increasing property prices 2) Static population and static property prices. 3) Mass immigration, mass house building and static or decreasing property prices.
The interesting bit is that no-one wants to say they are in favour of (3)
For comedy value - you can prove that the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 is Institutional Racism....
Can't help but look at that list and think to my self upper middle class first world problems. Most who post here are well off. The people I am friends with are mostly minimum wage workers. A night out for most is going round a friends with a few cans of beer or ordering a takeaway, not a restaurant or pub as its too expensive. Maybe my friends are exceptional but I doubt it in the previous year I think we went to a pub 3 times for peoples birthdays, restaurants never, foreign holidays don't know anyone that has been on one in the last 5 years in my friends circles. Most manage a gig once or twice a year. Sport is on tv for those that like it.
20 years ago yes that list is things they could afford to do and did. Not so much now. Most have also seen their accomodation degrade over that time as cost has forced them to ever downsize. 20 years ago they were renting a house now they are renting a 1 bed flat, a studio appartment, a room in a house.
Good post. It is people such as these - the bottom quartile in financial terms - who imo must be protected entirely from contributing to the cost of corona in future years. Indeed they should be elevated. All of which means the cost to others - particularly the top quartile - must not be shirked. In the new tradition of national mantras, following yesterday's 'Get Brexit Done' and today's 'Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives' the one for tomorrow, post virus, must be - Can Pay WILL Pay.
Agreed. We're all going to be poorer, almost inevitably. Those least well off don't have the same capacity to take the hit.
Fascinating to see how this government go about it once the panic is over. It will be a big "tell" of how serious the rhetoric about leveling up was. My use of "rhetoric" there being a bit of a "tell" of what I suspect.
PS: People are being too gloomy on a vaccine, aren't they? It's coming.
It depends whether you measure in real or nominal terms. The UK as well as suffering a major economic collapse in 1920 also had major deflation following it which cushioned the fall. Deflation isn't normally something we expect but could be coming soon if we follow a similar trend.
1920 UK GDP £6,063.0 million 1921 UK GDP £4,799.5 million
In nominal terms it took until WWII to reach the 1920 threshold. While normally only real terms matter, in a deflationary environment nominal terms matter just as much as our debt is in nominal terms - if we have major deflation it will see our interest rates shoot up and in the 1920s over 40% of national expenditure was on interest payments and remained the primary expenditure of the government until WWII was about to break at which point rearmament saw military expenditure overtake it and debt shot up further still.
The UK economy did quite well in the mid to latter 30's with expansionary policies which encouraged a huge amount of housebuilding. The hungry 30s were very much a US rather than a UK phenomenon. I don't think nominal income tells us much tbh.
It is very hard to see deflation in the context of extensive QE and huge deficits. Inflation is more likely which is how those WW2 debts were eventually repaid.
We need tax increases - lots of them - to re-balance the books.
Obviously they should be targeted on unearned wealth and sectors not paying their fair share at the moment, but everyone is going to have to contribute. So: - income tax all rates up 2% - NI up to 13%/3%, and self employed pay on the same basis as PAYE - so highest marginal rate of tax + NI is 47% + 3% = 50%, I would set it higher but we know receipts will fall if we do that - VAT up 2.5%, it will raise a lot of money - IHT significantly increased, I like the idea of a straight 10% tax on all estates to the government then the remainder taxed as income at the recipient's marginal rate of tax, no reliefs, no allowances, no exemptions, let's tax this unearned wealth properly - apply similar rules to lifetime transfers as for IHT (ok maybe with a small exempt allowance), we need to stop the distortion in the London property market in particular caused by children having their houses and flats paid for by mummy and daddy thus locking working class out of the property market - Corp Tax up to 25% (to start) - no indexation to state pension or welfare or tax allowances until 2025/2026 - 5% capital tax per year on second and subsequent properties - capital gains taxed as income, no allowance
That shouldn't take too long to clear the deficit and some of the increase can be used to set up a proper social care regime going forward.
By far the most useful statistic we get is the weekly death count. A body is a body, and you're not reliant on anyone's view about whether Covid-19 is or is not involved.
Looking at different countries' "excess death" counts would be my preferred measure. We don't yet have enough international data to do this, however.
Can't help but look at that list and think to my self upper middle class first world problems. Most who post here are well off. The people I am friends with are mostly minimum wage workers. A night out for most is going round a friends with a few cans of beer or ordering a takeaway, not a restaurant or pub as its too expensive. Maybe my friends are exceptional but I doubt it in the previous year I think we went to a pub 3 times for peoples birthdays, restaurants never, foreign holidays don't know anyone that has been on one in the last 5 years in my friends circles. Most manage a gig once or twice a year. Sport is on tv for those that like it.
20 years ago yes that list is things they could afford to do and did. Not so much now. Most have also seen their accomodation degrade over that time as cost has forced them to ever downsize. 20 years ago they were renting a house now they are renting a 1 bed flat, a studio appartment, a room in a house.
Good post. It is people such as these - the bottom quartile in financial terms - who imo must be protected entirely from contributing to the cost of corona in future years. Indeed they should be elevated. All of which means the cost to others - particularly the top quartile - must not be shirked. In the new tradition of national mantras, following yesterday's 'Get Brexit Done' and today's 'Stay Home Protect the NHS, Save Lives' the one for tomorrow, post virus, must be - Can Pay WILL Pay.
But your kind want to put up taxes so they will have even less
I actually read that and think that property prices (especially rent) is too high and solving that will fix a lot of other issues.
It would certainly help average rental price now of a small double room in a shared house in my area is now about 120 a week which is a significant portion of pay for a lot of people. What you do to change that though I have no idea short of increasing housing supply by about 20%
Well the first thing to do is to build a lot more council / housing association property. If the economy is doing badly there should be capacity for existing house builders to help with that work.
Also I suspect you could reduce the Local authority housing allowances as they are acting as a prop keeping rents artificially higher than they would otherwise be.
The latter also has the advantage of reducing the amount the Government ends up paying out in housing benefit.
The blocker is the religion that we must not build more properties. Planning permissions are carefully rationed.
Build enough properties and prices will come down. But we aren't allowed to. By law.
That depends where you live. Up north, where I live, hundreds of houses have been built over the past 15 years as the empty fields that led from my house to the motorway are built on (until in 5 years or so time they will meet the motorway).
Of course that means my house is worth exactly the same as it was in 2004 as supply has kept up with demand.
Yes, there are some island of sanity.
The look on people's faces from London, when they see abandoned cottages in the corner of fields, in parts of Northumberland, is interesting.
Sky reporting Astrazeneca are actually producing the Oxford vaccine even though it is only at stage I testing and they hope by June/July to have a decision on its effectiveness.
They said it is unheard of for a vaccine to go into production at this stage but they want stocks if it gets the approval
"Mr Poonawalla's firm has also partnered to mass produce a vaccine being developed by the University of Oxford and backed by the UK government. A genetically engineered chimpanzee virus would form the basis for the new vaccine. Human clinical trials began in Oxford on Thursday. If all goes well, scientists hope to make at least a million doses by September." https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-52363791
Can't help but look at that list and think to my self upper middle class first world problems. Most who post here are well off. The people I am friends with are mostly minimum wage workers. A night out for most is going round a friends with a few cans of beer or ordering a takeaway, not a restaurant or pub as its too expensive. Maybe my friends are exceptional but I doubt it in the previous year I think we went to a pub 3 times for peoples birthdays, restaurants never, foreign holidays don't know anyone that has been on one in the last 5 years in my friends circles. Most manage a gig once or twice a year. Sport is on tv for those that like it.
20 years ago yes that list is things they could afford to do and did. Not so much now. Most have also seen their accomodation degrade over that time as cost has forced them to ever downsize. 20 years ago they were renting a house now they are renting a 1 bed flat, a studio appartment, a room in a house.
Good post. It is people such as these - the bottom quartile in financial terms - who imo must be protected entirely from contributing to the cost of corona in future years. Indeed they should be elevated. All of which means the cost to others - particularly the top quartile - must not be shirked. In the new tradition of national mantras, following yesterday's 'Get Brexit Done' and today's 'Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives' the one for tomorrow, post virus, must be - Can Pay WILL Pay.
Agreed. We're all going to be poorer, almost inevitably. Those least well off don't have the same capacity to take the hit.
Fascinating to see how this government go about it once the panic is over. It will be a big "tell" of how serious the rhetoric about leveling up was. My use of "rhetoric" there being a bit of a "tell" of what I suspect.
PS: People are being too gloomy on a vaccine, aren't they? It's coming.
Can't help but look at that list and think to my self upper middle class first world problems. Most who post here are well off. The people I am friends with are mostly minimum wage workers. A night out for most is going round a friends with a few cans of beer or ordering a takeaway, not a restaurant or pub as its too expensive. Maybe my friends are exceptional but I doubt it in the previous year I think we went to a pub 3 times for peoples birthdays, restaurants never, foreign holidays don't know anyone that has been on one in the last 5 years in my friends circles. Most manage a gig once or twice a year. Sport is on tv for those that like it.
20 years ago yes that list is things they could afford to do and did. Not so much now. Most have also seen their accomodation degrade over that time as cost has forced them to ever downsize. 20 years ago they were renting a house now they are renting a 1 bed flat, a studio appartment, a room in a house.
Good post. It is people such as these - the bottom quartile in financial terms - who imo must be protected entirely from contributing to the cost of corona in future years. Indeed they should be elevated. All of which means the cost to others - particularly the top quartile - must not be shirked. In the new tradition of national mantras, following yesterday's 'Get Brexit Done' and today's 'Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives' the one for tomorrow, post virus, must be - Can Pay WILL Pay.
Agreed. We're all going to be poorer, almost inevitably. Those least well off don't have the same capacity to take the hit.
Fascinating to see how this government go about it once the panic is over. It will be a big "tell" of how serious the rhetoric about leveling up was. My use of "rhetoric" there being a bit of a "tell" of what I suspect.
PS: People are being too gloomy on a vaccine, aren't they? It's coming.
SKY just said AstraZeneca say their vaccine will be ready in "June/July".
"May Day demonstrations planned for German cities on Friday pose a dilemma for police as officers face conflicting advice on whether they should ask protesters to put on face masks or pull them off.
Wearing masks in shops and on public transport was made mandatory in most German states this week, as the country relaxed some of the lockdown measures introduced to curb the spread of Covid-19.
German law makes it illegal to cover your face while participating in a public gathering, such as a strike or a political demonstration, so as to prevent identification by the police."
Can't help but look at that list and think to my self upper middle class first world problems. Most who post here are well off. The people I am friends with are mostly minimum wage workers. A night out for most is going round a friends with a few cans of beer or ordering a takeaway, not a restaurant or pub as its too expensive. Maybe my friends are exceptional but I doubt it in the previous year I think we went to a pub 3 times for peoples birthdays, restaurants never, foreign holidays don't know anyone that has been on one in the last 5 years in my friends circles. Most manage a gig once or twice a year. Sport is on tv for those that like it.
20 years ago yes that list is things they could afford to do and did. Not so much now. Most have also seen their accomodation degrade over that time as cost has forced them to ever downsize. 20 years ago they were renting a house now they are renting a 1 bed flat, a studio appartment, a room in a house.
Good post. It is people such as these - the bottom quartile in financial terms - who imo must be protected entirely from contributing to the cost of corona in future years. Indeed they should be elevated. All of which means the cost to others - particularly the top quartile - must not be shirked. In the new tradition of national mantras, following yesterday's 'Get Brexit Done' and today's 'Stay Home, Protect the NHS, Save Lives' the one for tomorrow, post virus, must be - Can Pay WILL Pay.
Agreed. We're all going to be poorer, almost inevitably. Those least well off don't have the same capacity to take the hit.
They already are taking the hit. All those jobs disappearing and about to disappear when the furlough scheme ends and/or when shops and bars and restaurants and offices etc don’t reopen because they are no longer profitable or necessary: who do you think does those jobs?
Also, unpopular as this will make me, I think it delusional to think that anyone will be - or arguably ought to be - shielded from the cuts and / or tax rises that will inevitably follow from the sort of recession/slump we are likely facing. There simply is no pot of gold belonging to the rich which can be raided while leaving the poor untouched.
Can't help but look at that list and think to my self upper middle class first world problems. Most who post here are well off. The people I am friends with are mostly minimum wage workers. A night out for most is going round a friends with a few cans of beer or ordering a takeaway, not a restaurant or pub as its too expensive. Maybe my friends are exceptional but I doubt it in the previous year I think we went to a pub 3 times for peoples birthdays, restaurants never, foreign holidays don't know anyone that has been on one in the last 5 years in my friends circles. Most manage a gig once or twice a year. Sport is on tv for those that like it.
20 years ago yes that list is things they could afford to do and did. Not so much now. Most have also seen their accomodation degrade over that time as cost has forced them to ever downsize. 20 years ago they were renting a house now they are renting a 1 bed flat, a studio appartment, a room in a house.
Good post. It is people such as these - the bottom quartile in financial terms - who imo must be protected entirely from contributing to the cost of corona in future years. Indeed they should be elevated. All of which means the cost to others - particularly the top quartile - must not be shirked. In the new tradition of national mantras, following yesterday's 'Get Brexit Done' and today's 'Stay Home Protect the NHS, Save Lives' the one for tomorrow, post virus, must be - Can Pay WILL Pay.
But your kind want to put up taxes so they will have even less
I actually read that and think that property prices (especially rent) is too high and solving that will fix a lot of other issues.
It would certainly help average rental price now of a small double room in a shared house in my area is now about 120 a week which is a significant portion of pay for a lot of people. What you do to change that though I have no idea short of increasing housing supply by about 20%
It is a deliberate policy of government to have a housing supply shortage. One carefully supported from the left and right.
You could, before this crisis, buy agricultural land on the outskirts of Marden in Kent (nice village) for £7000 an acre. So you can buy enough land for a house on a credit card.
Try building on it without permission - you will find that *that* law is is enforced with far more concern than robbery with violence.
Don't doubt it for a minute. Something however has to give as we are fast approaching a point where we will be back to victorian times where whole families will live in a single room as a common place thing. This is why I tend to get cross with people here that go on about "just putting a penny or two on basic tax". They are generally not people who are living hand to mouth and trying to stretch the money to the end of the month and seem to blithely assume that as it wouldn't affect them badly everyone would cope.
The options seems to be something like -
1) Mass immigration and increasing property prices 2) Static population and static property prices. 3) Mass immigration, mass house building and static or decreasing property prices.
The interesting bit is that no-one wants to say they are in favour of (3)
For comedy value - you can prove that the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 is Institutional Racism....
Not sure why anyone should be in favour of 3. Why not have a static or declining population and mass house building with decreasing property prices. Immigration is a dead end, it is merely a ponzi scheme with people. The more you get to come the more you need to come in the future to pay for their pensions etc unless you do a singapore and deport them when they retire. While a percentage do only stay a few years a percentage also stay and settle and increase the worker pensioner deficit and thus increase the need of future immigration
We need tax increases - lots of them - to re-balance the books.
Obviously they should be targeted on unearned wealth and sectors not paying their fair share at the moment, but everyone is going to have to contribute. So: - income tax all rates up 2% - NI up to 13%/3%, and self employed pay on the same basis as PAYE - so highest marginal rate of tax + NI is 47% + 3% = 50%, I would set it higher but we know receipts will fall if we do that - VAT up 2.5%, it will raise a lot of money - IHT significantly increased, I like the idea of a straight 10% tax on all estates to the government then the remainder taxed as income at the recipient's marginal rate of tax, no reliefs, no allowances, no exemptions, let's tax this unearned wealth properly - apply similar rules to lifetime transfers as for IHT (ok maybe with a small exempt allowance), we need to stop the distortion in the London property market in particular caused by children having their houses and flats paid for by mummy and daddy thus locking working class out of the property market - Corp Tax up to 25% (to start) - no indexation to state pension or welfare or tax allowances until 2025/2026 - 5% capital tax per year on second and subsequent properties - capital gains taxed as income, no allowance
That shouldn't take too long to clear the deficit and some of the increase can be used to set up a proper social care regime going forward.
Sentiments beautifully expressed and much sympathy for those feeling this way - but IMO overwrought. A vaccine is near certain in 2021. Virus to be controlled until then by living cautiously. In a matter of a year or so back to normal except a bit poorer. Still a first world prosperous country. Mine's a pint.
"Boris":
I gather he's fronting up the presser today, explaining R0 to the nation, and his lockdown thinking, and taking questions. If true, this implies I was wrong in my series of posts yesterday where I pretty much called him a skiver. So I take that back. Feel a touch sheepish.
Lockdown:
I urge people not to get their hopes up about an imminent relaxation. I have analyzed the balance of political risk in the decision and it steers very heavily to keeping the current regime in place until R0 is down towards the 0.5 mark - and such is known by SAGE with confidence. A realistic target IMO is 28th May.
I do wonder if Tim Martin's comments yesterday about reopening in June were the results of an off the record discussion with government. So I am thinking we will get another three weeks lockdown followed by a bigger liberalisation than expected
Also the PL talks about a June Charlie Rich restart. But I'm not sure about this or about what Martin was up to there. 28 May for some changes, yes, but pubs? I would expect them to be towards the back of the queue, more like Sept. July at the absolute earliest. But it would be great to be wrong about this. I'm gasping.
Wetherspoons are large premises so social distancing will be easier, and he already offers table service ordered through an app. He may also think that with little competition from others not benefiting from those advantages, he can put his prices up. He also owns most of his premises freehold so is not paying much rent and may feel that any income is better than no income. I do wonder however that a recently filled pint glass handled by a bar person might be a risk, after all it goes straight in your mouth.
If the bartender is holding the glass by the rim that goes in your mouth that bartender needs better hygiene.
You're quite right of course, you should hold the glass by the bottom half. Still a bit close for comfort and in the past I have never really paid close attention to how the bar staff are holding the glass. In the future we probably will.
One issue is beer festivals where glasses are reused. At the moment you are allowed to do this as long as the tap doesn't go in the beer. Of course sometimes it does.. I think in future we will all be using those horrible floppy plastic disposable ones
I know we have a few commercially-minded people on here. What do you think of marketing a few plague-doctor bird masks? I've even thought of a strap-line. "Remember that feeling you had as a child? When you woke in the night and saw a dark shadow in the bedroom? Bring it back to life with a plague-doctor bird mask. Dispel the miasma. Only (insert excessive sum) pounds."
Sky reporting Astrazeneca are actually producing the Oxford vaccine even though it is only at stage I testing and they hope by June/July to have a decision on its effectiveness.
They said it is unheard of for a vaccine to go into production at this stage but they want stocks if it gets the approval
Is that not what Bill Gates is doing with about 7 possible vaccines?
Most sensible thing Boris should announce today is that they are moving to a weekly review - 3 weeks is too long now.
Boris deserves some credit for not taking his paternity leave now. I do hope though that he is taking good care of his health. I would not have begrudged him another week recovering TBH.
Sky reporting Astrazeneca are actually producing the Oxford vaccine even though it is only at stage I testing and they hope by June/July to have a decision on its effectiveness.
They said it is unheard of for a vaccine to go into production at this stage but they want stocks if it gets the approval
Is that not what Bill Gates is doing with about 7 possible vaccines?
Can't help but look at that list and think to my self upper middle class first world problems. Most who post here are well off. The people I am friends with are mostly minimum wage workers. A night out for most is going round a friends with a few cans of beer or ordering a takeaway, not a restaurant or pub as its too expensive. Maybe my friends are exceptional but I doubt it in the previous year I think we went to a pub 3 times for peoples birthdays, restaurants never, foreign holidays don't know anyone that has been on one in the last 5 years in my friends circles. Most manage a gig once or twice a year. Sport is on tv for those that like it.
20 years ago yes that list is things they could afford to do and did. Not so much now. Most have also seen their accomodation degrade over that time as cost has forced them to ever downsize. 20 years ago they were renting a house now they are renting a 1 bed flat, a studio appartment, a room in a house.
Good post. It is people such as these - the bottom quartile in financial terms - who imo must be protected entirely from contributing to the cost of corona in future years. Indeed they should be elevated. All of which means the cost to others - particularly the top quartile - must not be shirked. In the new tradition of national mantras, following yesterday's 'Get Brexit Done' and today's 'Stay Home Protect the NHS, Save Lives' the one for tomorrow, post virus, must be - Can Pay WILL Pay.
But your kind want to put up taxes so they will have even less
I actually read that and think that property prices (especially rent) is too high and solving that will fix a lot of other issues.
It would certainly help average rental price now of a small double room in a shared house in my area is now about 120 a week which is a significant portion of pay for a lot of people. What you do to change that though I have no idea short of increasing housing supply by about 20%
It is a deliberate policy of government to have a housing supply shortage. One carefully supported from the left and right.
You could, before this crisis, buy agricultural land on the outskirts of Marden in Kent (nice village) for £7000 an acre. So you can buy enough land for a house on a credit card.
Try building on it without permission - you will find that *that* law is is enforced with far more concern than robbery with violence.
Don't doubt it for a minute. Something however has to give as we are fast approaching a point where we will be back to victorian times where whole families will live in a single room as a common place thing. This is why I tend to get cross with people here that go on about "just putting a penny or two on basic tax". They are generally not people who are living hand to mouth and trying to stretch the money to the end of the month and seem to blithely assume that as it wouldn't affect them badly everyone would cope.
The options seems to be something like -
1) Mass immigration and increasing property prices 2) Static population and static property prices. 3) Mass immigration, mass house building and static or decreasing property prices.
The interesting bit is that no-one wants to say they are in favour of (3)
For comedy value - you can prove that the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 is Institutional Racism....
Not sure why anyone should be in favour of 3. Why not have a static or declining population and mass house building with decreasing property prices. Immigration is a dead end, it is merely a ponzi scheme with people. The more you get to come the more you need to come in the future to pay for their pensions etc unless you do a singapore and deport them when they retire. While a percentage do only stay a few years a percentage also stay and settle and increase the worker pensioner deficit and thus increase the need of future immigration
Here in Australia things feel like they're gradually returning to some form of normality. From tomorrow we're allowed 2 visitors to a house which feels like a genuinely exciting moment! We're also down to a couple of cases a day in NSW and Queensland has gone many days without a new case. Quite an achievement.
Thinking about the broader economic crisis particularly in the the UK outside of London, I cant help thinking it's a reckoning that's been a long time coming.
Entire towns in the UK seem to have largely been kept going in the last 30 years through the transactions of people who work in shops, spending money in other shops. It's just a giant form of cycling money which generates very little productive gain.
What the UK faces is a fundamental balance of payments crisis, which has been brushed over because people decided that the balance of payments didn't matter anymore. I have a strong feeling the next 10 years will bring a return to focus on the idea of 'paying our way in the world'.
Given that the new infection rate is now so low, and Australia was never one of the more affected cases in any case, is there a lot of pressure in Australia to come out of lockdown?
People have been generally very supportive of both the state and federal response tbh. ScMo after an inept response to the bushfires earlier in the year has proved a solid leader much to many peoples surprise (he's known as Scotty from Marketing jokingly).
I think everyone's acutely aware of the risk of a 2nd wave, but given the numbers this seems unlikely.
The lockdown was also much more light touch than that of New Zealand, with many shops remaining open and the local beach open to Surf and Swim, and yet we've matched NZ in terms of effectiveness, proving perhaps that the harder is not always the better when it comes to restrictions.
Thanks for that - please keep posting. Very interesting perspective. You`ve taken a battering what with the fires and then the virus, to be sure.
A spitfire and hurricane doing a triple pass over Colonel Tom evokes so many memories for me
He and they are an utter inspiration
To think, we could have charged the Duke of Westminster a 0.3% wealth tax and raised just as much for the NHS.
There can be no doubt that the wealthy are going to have to pay much more tax
If you are so desperate to raise tax BigG you may as well join Starmer's Labour Party as he will certainly impose a wealth tax, Boris won't
The Conservatives are happily to jettison a great many principles for power - but the hill they'll die on is making rich people pay a bit more tax. But with Boris... who knows I guess.
Boris does not want to lose marginal seats like Kensington, Esher and Walton or Cheltenham as wealthy Tory voters stay home on election day so he won't
He is far more likely to lose the red wall if he protects the rich
I agree - but that might happen anyway on account of Corbyn having disappeared and Brexit no longer being a major issue.
Astra Zeneca must have a strong steer that the vaccine will be at least somewhat effective. If it works on macaques it ought to work on us. I'd have thought side effects were perhaps the biggest concern in the trial rather than the entire thing not working - given the need for the vaccine perhaps a larger rate of side effects than normal could be tolerated too if the side effects themselves aren't overly serious.
On the TfL mailing list - they say Heathrow Terminal 4 station is to close on Saturday week, because all flights will be operating from Terminals 2 or 5 from that date.
"May Day demonstrations planned for German cities on Friday pose a dilemma for police as officers face conflicting advice on whether they should ask protesters to put on face masks or pull them off.
Wearing masks in shops and on public transport was made mandatory in most German states this week, as the country relaxed some of the lockdown measures introduced to curb the spread of Covid-19.
German law makes it illegal to cover your face while participating in a public gathering, such as a strike or a political demonstration, so as to prevent identification by the police."
Most sensible thing Boris should announce today is that they are moving to a weekly review - 3 weeks is too long now.
It's not necessarily the case. One of the key take aways of "Thinking in Systems" is that attempting to act fast on data coming out of a slow system is a sure fire way of introducing massive instability to the feedback loop.
We need tax increases - lots of them - to re-balance the books.
Obviously they should be targeted on unearned wealth and sectors not paying their fair share at the moment, but everyone is going to have to contribute. So: - income tax all rates up 2% - NI up to 13%/3%, and self employed pay on the same basis as PAYE - so highest marginal rate of tax + NI is 47% + 3% = 50%, I would set it higher but we know receipts will fall if we do that - VAT up 2.5%, it will raise a lot of money - IHT significantly increased, I like the idea of a straight 10% tax on all estates to the government then the remainder taxed as income at the recipient's marginal rate of tax, no reliefs, no allowances, no exemptions, let's tax this unearned wealth properly - apply similar rules to lifetime transfers as for IHT (ok maybe with a small exempt allowance), we need to stop the distortion in the London property market in particular caused by children having their houses and flats paid for by mummy and daddy thus locking working class out of the property market - Corp Tax up to 25% (to start) - no indexation to state pension or welfare or tax allowances until 2025/2026 - 5% capital tax per year on second and subsequent properties - capital gains taxed as income, no allowance
That shouldn't take too long to clear the deficit and some of the increase can be used to set up a proper social care regime going forward.
A very fair assessment
Congratulations you have just cost the government more money. Now instead of the only chance of getting an owned property from inheritance people like me will be forced to sell it to pay the tax bill and still be renting when they retire. Enjoy paying my housing benefit at that point.
We need tax increases - lots of them - to re-balance the books.
Obviously they should be targeted on unearned wealth and sectors not paying their fair share at the moment, but everyone is going to have to contribute. So: - income tax all rates up 2% - NI up to 13%/3%, and self employed pay on the same basis as PAYE - so highest marginal rate of tax + NI is 47% + 3% = 50%, I would set it higher but we know receipts will fall if we do that - VAT up 2.5%, it will raise a lot of money - IHT significantly increased, I like the idea of a straight 10% tax on all estates to the government then the remainder taxed as income at the recipient's marginal rate of tax, no reliefs, no allowances, no exemptions, let's tax this unearned wealth properly - apply similar rules to lifetime transfers as for IHT (ok maybe with a small exempt allowance), we need to stop the distortion in the London property market in particular caused by children having their houses and flats paid for by mummy and daddy thus locking working class out of the property market - Corp Tax up to 25% (to start) - no indexation to state pension or welfare or tax allowances until 2025/2026 - 5% capital tax per year on second and subsequent properties - capital gains taxed as income, no allowance
That shouldn't take too long to clear the deficit and some of the increase can be used to set up a proper social care regime going forward.
A very fair assessment
Congratulations you have just cost the government more money. Now instead of the only chance of getting an owned property from inheritance people like me will be forced to sell it to pay the tax bill and still be renting when they retire. Enjoy paying my housing benefit at that point.
Or you could work a bit harder and pay for a property yourself - like I had to do?!
I was very heartened by listening to the talk by Prof Farzan last week. He calmly explained how CV has a number of weaknesses which can be attacked by a whole range of different approaches, many of which are already well understood tools in the toolbox.
He has spent something like 20 years working HIV / AIDs and said CV is nowhere near as difficult a problem.
And I presume this is why a number of the people making vaccines are for scientists being a lot more optimistic than they would normally ever like to sound at this stage.
By far the most useful statistic we get is the weekly death count. A body is a body, and you're not reliant on anyone's view about whether Covid-19 is or is not involved.
Looking at different countries' "excess death" counts would be my preferred measure. We don't yet have enough international data to do this, however.
That fellow is actually a mate of a mate. Runs pubs in Essex and used to own Nubar in Loughton. He got into a twitterrow with Peter Hitchens the other day!
We need tax increases - lots of them - to re-balance the books.
Obviously they should be targeted on unearned wealth and sectors not paying their fair share at the moment, but everyone is going to have to contribute. So: - income tax all rates up 2% - NI up to 13%/3%, and self employed pay on the same basis as PAYE - so highest marginal rate of tax + NI is 47% + 3% = 50%, I would set it higher but we know receipts will fall if we do that - VAT up 2.5%, it will raise a lot of money - IHT significantly increased, I like the idea of a straight 10% tax on all estates to the government then the remainder taxed as income at the recipient's marginal rate of tax, no reliefs, no allowances, no exemptions, let's tax this unearned wealth properly - apply similar rules to lifetime transfers as for IHT (ok maybe with a small exempt allowance), we need to stop the distortion in the London property market in particular caused by children having their houses and flats paid for by mummy and daddy thus locking working class out of the property market - Corp Tax up to 25% (to start) - no indexation to state pension or welfare or tax allowances until 2025/2026 - 5% capital tax per year on second and subsequent properties - capital gains taxed as income, no allowance
That shouldn't take too long to clear the deficit and some of the increase can be used to set up a proper social care regime going forward.
A very fair assessment
Congratulations you have just cost the government more money. Now instead of the only chance of getting an owned property from inheritance people like me will be forced to sell it to pay the tax bill and still be renting when they retire. Enjoy paying my housing benefit at that point.
It is a judgment call on which taxes are to rise but the menu does not mean all options are exercised in one go, and indeed some will not see the light of day
We need tax increases - lots of them - to re-balance the books.
Obviously they should be targeted on unearned wealth and sectors not paying their fair share at the moment, but everyone is going to have to contribute. So: - income tax all rates up 2% - NI up to 13%/3%, and self employed pay on the same basis as PAYE - so highest marginal rate of tax + NI is 47% + 3% = 50%, I would set it higher but we know receipts will fall if we do that - VAT up 2.5%, it will raise a lot of money - IHT significantly increased, I like the idea of a straight 10% tax on all estates to the government then the remainder taxed as income at the recipient's marginal rate of tax, no reliefs, no allowances, no exemptions, let's tax this unearned wealth properly - apply similar rules to lifetime transfers as for IHT (ok maybe with a small exempt allowance), we need to stop the distortion in the London property market in particular caused by children having their houses and flats paid for by mummy and daddy thus locking working class out of the property market - Corp Tax up to 25% (to start) - no indexation to state pension or welfare or tax allowances until 2025/2026 - 5% capital tax per year on second and subsequent properties - capital gains taxed as income, no allowance
That shouldn't take too long to clear the deficit and some of the increase can be used to set up a proper social care regime going forward.
A very fair assessment
Congratulations you have just cost the government more money. Now instead of the only chance of getting an owned property from inheritance people like me will be forced to sell it to pay the tax bill and still be renting when they retire. Enjoy paying my housing benefit at that point.
Or you could work a bit harder and pay for a property yourself - like I had to do?!
Not if you can't afford it and a bedroom in a HMO costs £6k after tax...
Sky reporting Astrazeneca are actually producing the Oxford vaccine even though it is only at stage I testing and they hope by June/July to have a decision on its effectiveness.
They said it is unheard of for a vaccine to go into production at this stage but they want stocks if it gets the approval
Is that not what Bill Gates is doing with about 7 possible vaccines?
Sky did not mention Bill Gates to be fair
It's a brave upfront investment to mass produce an untested possible vaccine but the potential upsides if you happen to pick a winner are almost incalculable.
We need tax increases - lots of them - to re-balance the books.
Obviously they should be targeted on unearned wealth and sectors not paying their fair share at the moment, but everyone is going to have to contribute. So: - income tax all rates up 2% - NI up to 13%/3%, and self employed pay on the same basis as PAYE - so highest marginal rate of tax + NI is 47% + 3% = 50%, I would set it higher but we know receipts will fall if we do that - VAT up 2.5%, it will raise a lot of money - IHT significantly increased, I like the idea of a straight 10% tax on all estates to the government then the remainder taxed as income at the recipient's marginal rate of tax, no reliefs, no allowances, no exemptions, let's tax this unearned wealth properly - apply similar rules to lifetime transfers as for IHT (ok maybe with a small exempt allowance), we need to stop the distortion in the London property market in particular caused by children having their houses and flats paid for by mummy and daddy thus locking working class out of the property market - Corp Tax up to 25% (to start) - no indexation to state pension or welfare or tax allowances until 2025/2026 - 5% capital tax per year on second and subsequent properties - capital gains taxed as income, no allowance
That shouldn't take too long to clear the deficit and some of the increase can be used to set up a proper social care regime going forward.
A very fair assessment
Congratulations you have just cost the government more money. Now instead of the only chance of getting an owned property from inheritance people like me will be forced to sell it to pay the tax bill and still be renting when they retire. Enjoy paying my housing benefit at that point.
Or you could work a bit harder and pay for a property yourself - like I had to do?!
Ah yes because everyone in the south east can just walk into a job paying around the 80k a year you need to get a mortgage round here. I earn well and am in the top 20% of earners in the country, my chance of getting a mortgage for a cheap property here is nil unless I can somehow put together about 100k as a deposit. Should only take me 50 years or so to do
By far the most useful statistic we get is the weekly death count. A body is a body, and you're not reliant on anyone's view about whether Covid-19 is or is not involved.
Looking at different countries' "excess death" counts would be my preferred measure. We don't yet have enough international data to do this, however.
The problem might be that people are dying from other things because of the covid crisis
We need tax increases - lots of them - to re-balance the books.
Obviously they should be targeted on unearned wealth and sectors not paying their fair share at the moment, but everyone is going to have to contribute. So: - income tax all rates up 2% - NI up to 13%/3%, and self employed pay on the same basis as PAYE - so highest marginal rate of tax + NI is 47% + 3% = 50%, I would set it higher but we know receipts will fall if we do that - VAT up 2.5%, it will raise a lot of money - IHT significantly increased, I like the idea of a straight 10% tax on all estates to the government then the remainder taxed as income at the recipient's marginal rate of tax, no reliefs, no allowances, no exemptions, let's tax this unearned wealth properly - apply similar rules to lifetime transfers as for IHT (ok maybe with a small exempt allowance), we need to stop the distortion in the London property market in particular caused by children having their houses and flats paid for by mummy and daddy thus locking working class out of the property market - Corp Tax up to 25% (to start) - no indexation to state pension or welfare or tax allowances until 2025/2026 - 5% capital tax per year on second and subsequent properties - capital gains taxed as income, no allowance
That shouldn't take too long to clear the deficit and some of the increase can be used to set up a proper social care regime going forward.
A very fair assessment
Congratulations you have just cost the government more money. Now instead of the only chance of getting an owned property from inheritance people like me will be forced to sell it to pay the tax bill and still be renting when they retire. Enjoy paying my housing benefit at that point.
Or you could work a bit harder and pay for a property yourself - like I had to do?!
Not if you can't afford it and a bedroom in a HMO costs £6k after tax...
Put it bluntly people need to take more responsibility - I have worked for what I have got and had paid of a mortgage on a 3 bedroomed detached in a nice part of London at 41.
A spitfire and hurricane doing a triple pass over Colonel Tom evokes so many memories for me
He and they are an utter inspiration
To think, we could have charged the Duke of Westminster a 0.3% wealth tax and raised just as much for the NHS.
There can be no doubt that the wealthy are going to have to pay much more tax
Define wealthy.
Pensioners currently living mortgage free? Families with salaries over 80k? People with more than one property?
All of the above?
Yes, that`s the problem isn`t it. I suspect that BigG meant much more wealthy than the three examples that you cite.
To answer your question
Many mortgage free pensioners are living on their pension and not wealthy
Any family with £100,000 plus are doing very well but may not be wealthy
Anyone owning two homes may well be wealty
But my target are celebrities, footballers and highly paid CEO and others
Trouble is there aren't quite enough celebs, CEOs and footballers to dent the national finances.
If you are serious about this black hole, you will probably need to tax both the comfortable income and the mortgage free pensioner.
I am a mortgage free pensioner, I am paying huge sums to the Govt thro petrol, fuel oil, electricity, council tax and other invented charges by the council for other spurious services (bin collections car park pass etc) then you get stiffed in car parks where the pass does not work (Horsham is hugely expensive) then there's the tax on my pension and my state pension. If I take anything from mySIPP I get taxed too. Then they tax my small dividends , and its only because interest rates are zero that they don't tax my savings. I then pay inordinate amounts of VAT on things I buy. I am drowning in taxes.
What do they give me? Bins emptied and my lane resurfaced every 25yrs.
I think VAT will go up to 25% That's my guess when we start paying off our borrowings for Covid 19
There is an underlying assumption many aremaking that we will pay off our borrowings for Covid 19. Why would we?
There is a difference between an ongoing structural deficit and one-off borrowing. Our borrowing this year will never be repaid. Never. Not next year, not ten years from now, never ever.
We need to get the economy moving again and seek to eliminate/minimise the deficit but we need to do that on a cyclical manner, you don't eliminate the deficit during a recession you do it afterwards.
If anything a tax cut would make more sense than a tax rise.
Don't tell lenders that we intend to never ever ever repay. They could get a bit spooked.
Actually I think investors are wise to the fact that the government will repay its bonds by issuing new bonds, not via taxation. If investors thought the government would stop issuing new bonds and would instead run hundreds of billion pounds surpluses instead I think that would spook them more.
Deficits need to be closed, there can't be massive deficits forever but government borrowing does not need to be repaid in real net terms - it needs interest paying on it in perpetuity. There is a difference between one-off borrowing during a crisis and ongoing structural deficit spending.
It cannot reasonably argued that any deficit arising from the Covid response is cyclical - rather than strucural. I rather agree that - just like World War 2 - it should be treated as 'one-off' - but would extend that to the effect of the GFC back in 2008/2009 too. Osborne's austerity was ,therefore, a political choice rather than an economic necessity..
We need tax increases - lots of them - to re-balance the books.
Obviously they should be targeted on unearned wealth and sectors not paying their fair share at the moment, but everyone is going to have to contribute. So: - income tax all rates up 2% - NI up to 13%/3%, and self employed pay on the same basis as PAYE - so highest marginal rate of tax + NI is 47% + 3% = 50%, I would set it higher but we know receipts will fall if we do that - VAT up 2.5%, it will raise a lot of money - IHT significantly increased, I like the idea of a straight 10% tax on all estates to the government then the remainder taxed as income at the recipient's marginal rate of tax, no reliefs, no allowances, no exemptions, let's tax this unearned wealth properly - apply similar rules to lifetime transfers as for IHT (ok maybe with a small exempt allowance), we need to stop the distortion in the London property market in particular caused by children having their houses and flats paid for by mummy and daddy thus locking working class out of the property market - Corp Tax up to 25% (to start) - no indexation to state pension or welfare or tax allowances until 2025/2026 - 5% capital tax per year on second and subsequent properties - capital gains taxed as income, no allowance
That shouldn't take too long to clear the deficit and some of the increase can be used to set up a proper social care regime going forward.
A very fair assessment
Congratulations you have just cost the government more money. Now instead of the only chance of getting an owned property from inheritance people like me will be forced to sell it to pay the tax bill and still be renting when they retire. Enjoy paying my housing benefit at that point.
Or you could work a bit harder and pay for a property yourself - like I had to do?!
Not if you can't afford it and a bedroom in a HMO costs £6k after tax...
Put it bluntly people need to take more responsibility - I have worked for what I have got and had paid of a mortgage on a 3 bedroomed detached in a nice part of London at 41.
And you clearly don't understand how the other half live given your Marie Antoinette solution to problems.
We need tax increases - lots of them - to re-balance the books.
Obviously they should be targeted on unearned wealth and sectors not paying their fair share at the moment, but everyone is going to have to contribute. So: - income tax all rates up 2% - NI up to 13%/3%, and self employed pay on the same basis as PAYE - so highest marginal rate of tax + NI is 47% + 3% = 50%, I would set it higher but we know receipts will fall if we do that - VAT up 2.5%, it will raise a lot of money - IHT significantly increased, I like the idea of a straight 10% tax on all estates to the government then the remainder taxed as income at the recipient's marginal rate of tax, no reliefs, no allowances, no exemptions, let's tax this unearned wealth properly - apply similar rules to lifetime transfers as for IHT (ok maybe with a small exempt allowance), we need to stop the distortion in the London property market in particular caused by children having their houses and flats paid for by mummy and daddy thus locking working class out of the property market - Corp Tax up to 25% (to start) - no indexation to state pension or welfare or tax allowances until 2025/2026 - 5% capital tax per year on second and subsequent properties - capital gains taxed as income, no allowance
That shouldn't take too long to clear the deficit and some of the increase can be used to set up a proper social care regime going forward.
A very fair assessment
Congratulations you have just cost the government more money. Now instead of the only chance of getting an owned property from inheritance people like me will be forced to sell it to pay the tax bill and still be renting when they retire. Enjoy paying my housing benefit at that point.
Or you could work a bit harder and pay for a property yourself - like I had to do?!
Not if you can't afford it and a bedroom in a HMO costs £6k after tax...
Put it bluntly people need to take more responsibility - I have worked for what I have got and had paid of a mortgage on a 3 bedroomed detached in a nice part of London at 41.
You really are a dribbling idiot though, do you really assume just because you got lucky with the job you got that everyone can. You think the 90% of the country that earns less than 50k a year does so because they want to? Probably a lot of those people also work a damn sight harder than you as well and longer hours.
By far the most useful statistic we get is the weekly death count. A body is a body, and you're not reliant on anyone's view about whether Covid-19 is or is not involved.
Looking at different countries' "excess death" counts would be my preferred measure. We don't yet have enough international data to do this, however.
The problem might be that people are dying from other things because of the covid crisis
That's true. But:
1) there will be lives saved by lockdown too. There must be far fewer road traffic accidents, for starters.
2) those extraneous causes of death are likely to be fairly constant worldwide, meaning that we can make reasonable rough and ready comparisons.
3) nothing is perfect but the approach I suggest is reliant on less human judgement (or chicanery) than anything that requires people to decide that Covid-19 was involved.
We need tax increases - lots of them - to re-balance the books.
Obviously they should be targeted on unearned wealth and sectors not paying their fair share at the moment, but everyone is going to have to contribute. So: - income tax all rates up 2% - NI up to 13%/3%, and self employed pay on the same basis as PAYE - so highest marginal rate of tax + NI is 47% + 3% = 50%, I would set it higher but we know receipts will fall if we do that - VAT up 2.5%, it will raise a lot of money - IHT significantly increased, I like the idea of a straight 10% tax on all estates to the government then the remainder taxed as income at the recipient's marginal rate of tax, no reliefs, no allowances, no exemptions, let's tax this unearned wealth properly - apply similar rules to lifetime transfers as for IHT (ok maybe with a small exempt allowance), we need to stop the distortion in the London property market in particular caused by children having their houses and flats paid for by mummy and daddy thus locking working class out of the property market - Corp Tax up to 25% (to start) - no indexation to state pension or welfare or tax allowances until 2025/2026 - 5% capital tax per year on second and subsequent properties - capital gains taxed as income, no allowance
That shouldn't take too long to clear the deficit and some of the increase can be used to set up a proper social care regime going forward.
A very fair assessment
Congratulations you have just cost the government more money. Now instead of the only chance of getting an owned property from inheritance people like me will be forced to sell it to pay the tax bill and still be renting when they retire. Enjoy paying my housing benefit at that point.
Or you could work a bit harder and pay for a property yourself - like I had to do?!
Not if you can't afford it and a bedroom in a HMO costs £6k after tax...
Put it bluntly people need to take more responsibility - I have worked for what I have got and had paid of a mortgage on a 3 bedroomed detached in a nice part of London at 41.
And you clearly don't understand how the other half live given your Marie Antoinette solution to problems.
Yes most of end up paying off someone elses mortgage because even though the mortgage on a house would often be less a month than the rent we have to pay according to the bank we couldn't afford to pay it
Sentiments beautifully expressed and much sympathy for those feeling this way - but IMO overwrought. A vaccine is near certain in 2021. Virus to be controlled until then by living cautiously. In a matter of a year or so back to normal except a bit poorer. Still a first world prosperous country. Mine's a pint.
"Boris":
I gather he's fronting up the presser today, explaining R0 to the nation, and his lockdown thinking, and taking questions. If true, this implies I was wrong in my series of posts yesterday where I pretty much called him a skiver. So I take that back. Feel a touch sheepish.
Lockdown:
I urge people not to get their hopes up about an imminent relaxation. I have analyzed the balance of political risk in the decision and it steers very heavily to keeping the current regime in place until R0 is down towards the 0.5 mark - and such is known by SAGE with confidence. A realistic target IMO is 28th May.
I do wonder if Tim Martin's comments yesterday about reopening in June were the results of an off the record discussion with government. So I am thinking we will get another three weeks lockdown followed by a bigger liberalisation than expected
Also the PL talks about a June Charlie Rich restart. But I'm not sure about this or about what Martin was up to there. 28 May for some changes, yes, but pubs? I would expect them to be towards the back of the queue, more like Sept. July at the absolute earliest. But it would be great to be wrong about this. I'm gasping.
Wetherspoons are large premises so social distancing will be easier, and he already offers table service ordered through an app. He may also think that with little competition from others not benefiting from those advantages, he can put his prices up. He also owns most of his premises freehold so is not paying much rent and may feel that any income is better than no income. I do wonder however that a recently filled pint glass handled by a bar person might be a risk, after all it goes straight in your mouth.
If the bartender is holding the glass by the rim that goes in your mouth that bartender needs better hygiene.
You're quite right of course, you should hold the glass by the bottom half. Still a bit close for comfort and in the past I have never really paid close attention to how the bar staff are holding the glass. In the future we probably will.
One issue is beer festivals where glasses are reused. At the moment you are allowed to do this as long as the tap doesn't go in the beer. Of course sometimes it does.. I think in future we will all be using those horrible floppy plastic disposable ones
Personal Pint Equipment
The irony of the world moving to get rid of single use plastics, but then discovering they might be needed...
By far the most useful statistic we get is the weekly death count. A body is a body, and you're not reliant on anyone's view about whether Covid-19 is or is not involved.
Looking at different countries' "excess death" counts would be my preferred measure. We don't yet have enough international data to do this, however.
The problem might be that people are dying from other things because of the covid crisis
That's true. But:
I thought this whole point had been ended once and for all by the Excess Mortality stats?
We need tax increases - lots of them - to re-balance the books.
Obviously they should be targeted on unearned wealth and sectors not paying their fair share at the moment, but everyone is going to have to contribute. So: - income tax all rates up 2% - NI up to 13%/3%, and self employed pay on the same basis as PAYE - so highest marginal rate of tax + NI is 47% + 3% = 50%, I would set it higher but we know receipts will fall if we do that - VAT up 2.5%, it will raise a lot of money - IHT significantly increased, I like the idea of a straight 10% tax on all estates to the government then the remainder taxed as income at the recipient's marginal rate of tax, no reliefs, no allowances, no exemptions, let's tax this unearned wealth properly - apply similar rules to lifetime transfers as for IHT (ok maybe with a small exempt allowance), we need to stop the distortion in the London property market in particular caused by children having their houses and flats paid for by mummy and daddy thus locking working class out of the property market - Corp Tax up to 25% (to start) - no indexation to state pension or welfare or tax allowances until 2025/2026 - 5% capital tax per year on second and subsequent properties - capital gains taxed as income, no allowance
That shouldn't take too long to clear the deficit and some of the increase can be used to set up a proper social care regime going forward.
A very fair assessment
Congratulations you have just cost the government more money. Now instead of the only chance of getting an owned property from inheritance people like me will be forced to sell it to pay the tax bill and still be renting when they retire. Enjoy paying my housing benefit at that point.
Or you could work a bit harder and pay for a property yourself - like I had to do?!
Not if you can't afford it and a bedroom in a HMO costs £6k after tax...
Put it bluntly people need to take more responsibility - I have worked for what I have got and had paid of a mortgage on a 3 bedroomed detached in a nice part of London at 41.
You really are a dribbling idiot though, do you really assume just because you got lucky with the job you got that everyone can. You think the 90% of the country that earns less than 50k a year does so because they want to? Probably a lot of those people also work a damn sight harder than you as well and longer hours.
'Got lucky'? Ha ha ha. I had to work * hard to get where I got to and what I have achieved in life - I hardly came from an advantaged background.
So stop whinging
PS I was able to give up work last year at 52 so yes you are probably right on your last sentence
A spitfire and hurricane doing a triple pass over Colonel Tom evokes so many memories for me
He and they are an utter inspiration
To think, we could have charged the Duke of Westminster a 0.3% wealth tax and raised just as much for the NHS.
There can be no doubt that the wealthy are going to have to pay much more tax
If you are so desperate to raise tax BigG you may as well join Starmer's Labour Party as he will certainly impose a wealth tax, Boris won't
The Conservatives are happily to jettison a great many principles for power - but the hill they'll die on is making rich people pay a bit more tax. But with Boris... who knows I guess.
Boris does not want to lose marginal seats like Kensington, Esher and Walton or Cheltenham as wealthy Tory voters stay home on election day so he won't
He is far more likely to lose the red wall if he protects the rich
Everyone is going to have to pay more and services are going to get worse all round. This is shaping up to be Britain's worst immiseration in living memory.
Genuine question - why not just print our way out of debt?
It has the added benefit of stealth taxing assets.
That is in practice a policy choice that I expect to be taken. There are consequences of such a decision, however: it is not cost-free.
Its a more logical response to the economy grinding to a halt and needing to kick start it again afterwards than ramping up taxation. When a body suffers cardiac arrest you give it a jolt and epinephrine you don't tax it more.
A temporary VAT cut or other tax cuts should be in the next budget.
A spitfire and hurricane doing a triple pass over Colonel Tom evokes so many memories for me
He and they are an utter inspiration
To think, we could have charged the Duke of Westminster a 0.3% wealth tax and raised just as much for the NHS.
There can be no doubt that the wealthy are going to have to pay much more tax
If you are so desperate to raise tax BigG you may as well join Starmer's Labour Party as he will certainly impose a wealth tax, Boris won't
The Conservatives are happily to jettison a great many principles for power - but the hill they'll die on is making rich people pay a bit more tax. But with Boris... who knows I guess.
Boris does not want to lose marginal seats like Kensington, Esher and Walton or Cheltenham as wealthy Tory voters stay home on election day so he won't
He is far more likely to lose the red wall if he protects the rich
Everyone is going to have to pay more and services are going to get worse all round. This is shaping up to be Britain's worst immiseration in living memory.
Genuine question - why not just print our way out of debt?
It has the added benefit of stealth taxing assets.
That is in practice a policy choice that I expect to be taken. There are consequences of such a decision, however: it is not cost-free.
Its a more logical response to the economy grinding to a halt and needing to kick start it again afterwards than ramping up taxation. When a body suffers cardiac arrest you give it a jolt and epinephrine you don't tax it more.
A temporary VAT cut or other tax cuts should be in the next budget.
Vat cut?? I would be amazed. Vat increase morelike
Alastair Darling did cut VAT for a limited period in 2009.
We need tax increases - lots of them - to re-balance the books.
Obviously they should be targeted on unearned wealth and sectors not paying their fair share at the moment, but everyone is going to have to contribute. So: - income tax all rates up 2% - NI up to 13%/3%, and self employed pay on the same basis as PAYE - so highest marginal rate of tax + NI is 47% + 3% = 50%, I would set it higher but we know receipts will fall if we do that - VAT up 2.5%, it will raise a lot of money - IHT significantly increased, I like the idea of a straight 10% tax on all estates to the government then the remainder taxed as income at the recipient's marginal rate of tax, no reliefs, no allowances, no exemptions, let's tax this unearned wealth properly - apply similar rules to lifetime transfers as for IHT (ok maybe with a small exempt allowance), we need to stop the distortion in the London property market in particular caused by children having their houses and flats paid for by mummy and daddy thus locking working class out of the property market - Corp Tax up to 25% (to start) - no indexation to state pension or welfare or tax allowances until 2025/2026 - 5% capital tax per year on second and subsequent properties - capital gains taxed as income, no allowance
That shouldn't take too long to clear the deficit and some of the increase can be used to set up a proper social care regime going forward.
A very fair assessment
Congratulations you have just cost the government more money. Now instead of the only chance of getting an owned property from inheritance people like me will be forced to sell it to pay the tax bill and still be renting when they retire. Enjoy paying my housing benefit at that point.
Or you could work a bit harder and pay for a property yourself - like I had to do?!
Not if you can't afford it and a bedroom in a HMO costs £6k after tax...
Put it bluntly people need to take more responsibility - I have worked for what I have got and had paid of a mortgage on a 3 bedroomed detached in a nice part of London at 41.
You really are a dribbling idiot though, do you really assume just because you got lucky with the job you got that everyone can. You think the 90% of the country that earns less than 50k a year does so because they want to? Probably a lot of those people also work a damn sight harder than you as well and longer hours.
'Got lucky'? Ha ha ha. I had to work * hard to get where I got to and what I have achieved in life - I hardly came from an advantaged background.
So stop whinging
PS I was able to give up work last year at 52 so yes you are probably right on your last sentence
So did most people and I certainly didn't come from a privileged background either. Sadly working hard doesn't count for anything there just aren't enough high paying jobs to go around so yes you got lucky to get that high paying job. For everyone of you there are a 100 people who worked just as hard but didn't get selected for that job not because they didn't work hard enough but because they didn't hit the selection lottery when someone chose who to give the job to.
We need tax increases - lots of them - to re-balance the books.
Obviously they should be targeted on unearned wealth and sectors not paying their fair share at the moment, but everyone is going to have to contribute. So: - income tax all rates up 2% - NI up to 13%/3%, and self employed pay on the same basis as PAYE - so highest marginal rate of tax + NI is 47% + 3% = 50%, I would set it higher but we know receipts will fall if we do that - VAT up 2.5%, it will raise a lot of money - IHT significantly increased, I like the idea of a straight 10% tax on all estates to the government then the remainder taxed as income at the recipient's marginal rate of tax, no reliefs, no allowances, no exemptions, let's tax this unearned wealth properly - apply similar rules to lifetime transfers as for IHT (ok maybe with a small exempt allowance), we need to stop the distortion in the London property market in particular caused by children having their houses and flats paid for by mummy and daddy thus locking working class out of the property market - Corp Tax up to 25% (to start) - no indexation to state pension or welfare or tax allowances until 2025/2026 - 5% capital tax per year on second and subsequent properties - capital gains taxed as income, no allowance
That shouldn't take too long to clear the deficit and some of the increase can be used to set up a proper social care regime going forward.
Those taxes will cause an even bigger recession than what we have at the moment. It will also lower the trend growth rate from ~2% per year to ~1.5% per year which is extremely damaging.
We're better off growing our way out of this and running a surplus to reduce the national debt. The medicine will be worse than the disease.
We need tax increases - lots of them - to re-balance the books.
Obviously they should be targeted on unearned wealth and sectors not paying their fair share at the moment, but everyone is going to have to contribute. So: - income tax all rates up 2% - NI up to 13%/3%, and self employed pay on the same basis as PAYE - so highest marginal rate of tax + NI is 47% + 3% = 50%, I would set it higher but we know receipts will fall if we do that - VAT up 2.5%, it will raise a lot of money - IHT significantly increased, I like the idea of a straight 10% tax on all estates to the government then the remainder taxed as income at the recipient's marginal rate of tax, no reliefs, no allowances, no exemptions, let's tax this unearned wealth properly - apply similar rules to lifetime transfers as for IHT (ok maybe with a small exempt allowance), we need to stop the distortion in the London property market in particular caused by children having their houses and flats paid for by mummy and daddy thus locking working class out of the property market - Corp Tax up to 25% (to start) - no indexation to state pension or welfare or tax allowances until 2025/2026 - 5% capital tax per year on second and subsequent properties - capital gains taxed as income, no allowance
That shouldn't take too long to clear the deficit and some of the increase can be used to set up a proper social care regime going forward.
A very fair assessment
Congratulations you have just cost the government more money. Now instead of the only chance of getting an owned property from inheritance people like me will be forced to sell it to pay the tax bill and still be renting when they retire. Enjoy paying my housing benefit at that point.
Or you could work a bit harder and pay for a property yourself - like I had to do?!
Not if you can't afford it and a bedroom in a HMO costs £6k after tax...
Put it bluntly people need to take more responsibility - I have worked for what I have got and had paid of a mortgage on a 3 bedroomed detached in a nice part of London at 41.
You really are a dribbling idiot though, do you really assume just because you got lucky with the job you got that everyone can. You think the 90% of the country that earns less than 50k a year does so because they want to? Probably a lot of those people also work a damn sight harder than you as well and longer hours.
I think you just need to try a bit harder to imagine Ave_It's utopia where everyone is an engineer or management consultant and minimum wage jobs are all done by... er...
A spitfire and hurricane doing a triple pass over Colonel Tom evokes so many memories for me
He and they are an utter inspiration
To think, we could have charged the Duke of Westminster a 0.3% wealth tax and raised just as much for the NHS.
There can be no doubt that the wealthy are going to have to pay much more tax
Define wealthy.
Pensioners currently living mortgage free? Families with salaries over 80k? People with more than one property?
All of the above?
Yes, that`s the problem isn`t it. I suspect that BigG meant much more wealthy than the three examples that you cite.
To answer your question
Many mortgage free pensioners are living on their pension and not wealthy
Any family with £100,000 plus are doing very well but may not be wealthy
Anyone owning two homes may well be wealty
But my target are celebrities, footballers and highly paid CEO and others
Trouble is there aren't quite enough celebs, CEOs and footballers to dent the national finances.
If you are serious about this black hole, you will probably need to tax both the comfortable income and the mortgage free pensioner.
I am a mortgage free pensioner, I am paying huge sums to the Govt thro petrol, fuel oil, electricity, council tax and other invented charges by the council for other spurious services (bin collections car park pass etc) then you get stiffed in car parks where the pass does not work (Horsham is hugely expensive) then there's the tax on my pension and my state pension. If I take anything from mySIPP I get taxed too. Then they tax my small dividends , and its only because interest rates are zero that they don't tax my savings. I then pay inordinate amounts of VAT on things I buy. I am drowning in taxes.
What do they give me? Bins emptied and my lane resurfaced every 25yrs.
I think VAT will go up to 25% That's my guess when we start paying off our borrowings for Covid 19
There is an underlying assumption many aremaking that we will pay off our borrowings for Covid 19. Why would we?
There is a difference between an ongoing structural deficit and one-off borrowing. Our borrowing this year will never be repaid. Never. Not next year, not ten years from now, never ever.
We need to get the economy moving again and seek to eliminate/minimise the deficit but we need to do that on a cyclical manner, you don't eliminate the deficit during a recession you do it afterwards.
If anything a tax cut would make more sense than a tax rise.
Don't tell lenders that we intend to never ever ever repay. They could get a bit spooked.
Actually I think investors are wise to the fact that the government will repay its bonds by issuing new bonds, not via taxation. If investors thought the government would stop issuing new bonds and would instead run hundreds of billion pounds surpluses instead I think that would spook them more.
Deficits need to be closed, there can't be massive deficits forever but government borrowing does not need to be repaid in real net terms - it needs interest paying on it in perpetuity. There is a difference between one-off borrowing during a crisis and ongoing structural deficit spending.
It cannot reasonably argued that any deficit arising from the Covid response is cyclical - rather than strucural. I rather agree that - just like World War 2 - it should be treated as 'one-off' - but would extend that to the effect of the GFC back in 2008/2009 too. Osborne's austerity was ,therefore, a political choice rather than an economic necessity..
This very much depends on the nature of the recession. If we quickly bounce back and the massive deficits are short term then it is reasonable to treat this as a one off shock such as a major war which can be paid off/inflated away over a long period. If it creates a structural deficit which is going to roll on year after year then reducing that deficit becomes absolutely essential. 2008 created a huge structural deficit built around the collapse of taxes from the Financial Services/banking sector. It was necessary to reduce that deficit or it would have continued at over £100bn a year until the last asset in the UK had been sold.
It is too early to say what the effect of CV will be. The OBR are currently forecasting a rapid bounce back, others, such as E&Y are more cautious. If the latter camp is right deficit reduction will be essential.
By far the most useful statistic we get is the weekly death count. A body is a body, and you're not reliant on anyone's view about whether Covid-19 is or is not involved.
Looking at different countries' "excess death" counts would be my preferred measure. We don't yet have enough international data to do this, however.
The problem might be that people are dying from other things because of the covid crisis
That's true. But:
I thought this whole point had been ended once and for all by the Excess Mortality stats?
John Pilger criticises the government both for causing excess deaths and forcing house arrest, just to ensure he can attack the government whatever the outcome
I somewhat agree. Lockdown is longer and more damaging and will we see more deaths because we didn't lock early enough and effectively enough. Compare us with most countries we would want to be compared with.
John Pilger criticises the government both for causing excess deaths and forcing house arrest, just to ensure he can attack the government whatever the outcome
I somewhat agree. Lockdown is longer and more damaging and will we see more deaths because we didn't lock early enough and effectively enough. Compare us with most countries we would want to be compared with.
On 7th April Johnson was surely in Intensive Care - I doubt that he was making any such statements!
By far the most useful statistic we get is the weekly death count. A body is a body, and you're not reliant on anyone's view about whether Covid-19 is or is not involved.
Looking at different countries' "excess death" counts would be my preferred measure. We don't yet have enough international data to do this, however.
The problem might be that people are dying from other things because of the covid crisis
That's true. But:
I thought this whole point had been ended once and for all by the Excess Mortality stats?
Sentiments beautifully expressed and much sympathy for those feeling this way - but IMO overwrought. A vaccine is near certain in 2021. Virus to be controlled until then by living cautiously. In a matter of a year or so back to normal except a bit poorer. Still a first world prosperous country. Mine's a pint.
"Boris":
I gather he's fronting up the presser today, explaining R0 to the nation, and his lockdown thinking, and taking questions. If true, this implies I was wrong in my series of posts yesterday where I pretty much called him a skiver. So I take that back. Feel a touch sheepish.
Lockdown:
I urge people not to get their hopes up about an imminent relaxation. I have analyzed the balance of political risk in the decision and it steers very heavily to keeping the current regime in place until R0 is down towards the 0.5 mark - and such is known by SAGE with confidence. A realistic target IMO is 28th May.
I do wonder if Tim Martin's comments yesterday about reopening in June were the results of an off the record discussion with government. So I am thinking we will get another three weeks lockdown followed by a bigger liberalisation than expected
Also the PL talks about a June Charlie Rich restart. But I'm not sure about this or about what Martin was up to there. 28 May for some changes, yes, but pubs? I would expect them to be towards the back of the queue, more like Sept. July at the absolute earliest. But it would be great to be wrong about this. I'm gasping.
Wetherspoons are large premises so social distancing will be easier, and he already offers table service ordered through an app. He may also think that with little competition from others not benefiting from those advantages, he can put his prices up. He also owns most of his premises freehold so is not paying much rent and may feel that any income is better than no income. I do wonder however that a recently filled pint glass handled by a bar person might be a risk, after all it goes straight in your mouth.
If the bartender is holding the glass by the rim that goes in your mouth that bartender needs better hygiene.
You're quite right of course, you should hold the glass by the bottom half. Still a bit close for comfort and in the past I have never really paid close attention to how the bar staff are holding the glass. In the future we probably will.
Back to feed the snake? Oh good.
One issue is beer festivals where glasses are reused. At the moment you are allowed to do this as long as the tap doesn't go in the beer. Of course sometimes it does.. I think in future we will all be using those horrible floppy plastic disposable ones
Personal Pint Equipment
The irony of the world moving to get rid of single use plastics, but then discovering they might be needed...
Astra Zeneca must have a strong steer that the vaccine will be at least somewhat effective. If it works on macaques it ought to work on us. I'd have thought side effects were perhaps the biggest concern in the trial rather than the entire thing not working - given the need for the vaccine perhaps a larger rate of side effects than normal could be tolerated too if the side effects themselves aren't overly serious.
We need tax increases - lots of them - to re-balance the books.
Obviously they should be targeted on unearned wealth and sectors not paying their fair share at the moment, but everyone is going to have to contribute. So: - income tax all rates up 2% - NI up to 13%/3%, and self employed pay on the same basis as PAYE - so highest marginal rate of tax + NI is 47% + 3% = 50%, I would set it higher but we know receipts will fall if we do that - VAT up 2.5%, it will raise a lot of money - IHT significantly increased, I like the idea of a straight 10% tax on all estates to the government then the remainder taxed as income at the recipient's marginal rate of tax, no reliefs, no allowances, no exemptions, let's tax this unearned wealth properly - apply similar rules to lifetime transfers as for IHT (ok maybe with a small exempt allowance), we need to stop the distortion in the London property market in particular caused by children having their houses and flats paid for by mummy and daddy thus locking working class out of the property market - Corp Tax up to 25% (to start) - no indexation to state pension or welfare or tax allowances until 2025/2026 - 5% capital tax per year on second and subsequent properties - capital gains taxed as income, no allowance
That shouldn't take too long to clear the deficit and some of the increase can be used to set up a proper social care regime going forward.
A very fair assessment
Congratulations you have just cost the government more money. Now instead of the only chance of getting an owned property from inheritance people like me will be forced to sell it to pay the tax bill and still be renting when they retire. Enjoy paying my housing benefit at that point.
Or you could work a bit harder and pay for a property yourself - like I had to do?!
Not if you can't afford it and a bedroom in a HMO costs £6k after tax...
Put it bluntly people need to take more responsibility - I have worked for what I have got and had paid of a mortgage on a 3 bedroomed detached in a nice part of London at 41.
And you clearly don't understand how the other half live given your Marie Antoinette solution to problems.
A spitfire and hurricane doing a triple pass over Colonel Tom evokes so many memories for me
He and they are an utter inspiration
To think, we could have charged the Duke of Westminster a 0.3% wealth tax and raised just as much for the NHS.
There can be no doubt that the wealthy are going to have to pay much more tax
Define wealthy.
Pensioners currently living mortgage free? Families with salaries over 80k? People with more than one property?
All of the above?
Yes, that`s the problem isn`t it. I suspect that BigG meant much more wealthy than the three examples that you cite.
To answer your question
Many mortgage free pensioners are living on their pension and not wealthy
Any family with £100,000 plus are doing very well but may not be wealthy
Anyone owning two homes may well be wealty
But my target are celebrities, footballers and highly paid CEO and others
Trouble is there aren't quite enough celebs, CEOs and footballers to dent the national finances.
If you are serious about this black hole, you will probably need to tax both the comfortable income and the mortgage free pensioner.
I am a mortgage free pensioner, I am paying huge sums to the Govt thro petrol, fuel oil, electricity, council tax and other invented charges by the council for other spurious services (bin collections car park pass etc) then you get stiffed in car parks where the pass does not work (Horsham is hugely expensive) then there's the tax on my pension and my state pension. If I take anything from mySIPP I get taxed too. Then they tax my small dividends , and its only because interest rates are zero that they don't tax my savings. I then pay inordinate amounts of VAT on things I buy. I am drowning in taxes.
What do they give me? Bins emptied and my lane resurfaced every 25yrs.
I think VAT will go up to 25% That's my guess when we start paying off our borrowings for Covid 19
There is an underlying assumption many aremaking that we will pay off our borrowings for Covid 19. Why would we?
There is a difference between an ongoing structural deficit and one-off borrowing. Our borrowing this year will never be repaid. Never. Not next year, not ten years from now, never ever.
We need to get the economy moving again and seek to eliminate/minimise the deficit but we need to do that on a cyclical manner, you don't eliminate the deficit during a recession you do it afterwards.
If anything a tax cut would make more sense than a tax rise.
Don't tell lenders that we intend to never ever ever repay. They could get a bit spooked.
Actually I think investors are wise to the fact that the government will repay its bonds by issuing new bonds, not via taxation. If investors thought the government would stop issuing new bonds and would instead run hundreds of billion pounds surpluses instead I think that would spook them more.
Deficits need to be closed, there can't be massive deficits forever but government borrowing does not need to be repaid in real net terms - it needs interest paying on it in perpetuity. There is a difference between one-off borrowing during a crisis and ongoing structural deficit spending.
It cannot reasonably argued that any deficit arising from the Covid response is cyclical - rather than strucural. I rather agree that - just like World War 2 - it should be treated as 'one-off' - but would extend that to the effect of the GFC back in 2008/2009 too. Osborne's austerity was ,therefore, a political choice rather than an economic necessity..
This very much depends on the nature of the recession. If we quickly bounce back and the massive deficits are short term then it is reasonable to treat this as a one off shock such as a major war which can be paid off/inflated away over a long period. If it creates a structural deficit which is going to roll on year after year then reducing that deficit becomes absolutely essential. 2008 created a huge structural deficit built around the collapse of taxes from the Financial Services/banking sector. It was necessary to reduce that deficit or it would have continued at over £100bn a year until the last asset in the UK had been sold.
It is too early to say what the effect of CV will be. The OBR are currently forecasting a rapid bounce back, others, such as E&Y are more cautious. If the latter camp is right deficit reduction will be essential.
A spitfire and hurricane doing a triple pass over Colonel Tom evokes so many memories for me
He and they are an utter inspiration
To think, we could have charged the Duke of Westminster a 0.3% wealth tax and raised just as much for the NHS.
There can be no doubt that the wealthy are going to have to pay much more tax
Define wealthy.
Pensioners currently living mortgage free? Families with salaries over 80k? People with more than one property?
All of the above?
Yes, that`s the problem isn`t it. I suspect that BigG meant much more wealthy than the three examples that you cite.
To answer your question
Many mortgage free pensioners are living on their pension and not wealthy
Any family with £100,000 plus are doing very well but may not be wealthy
Anyone owning two homes may well be wealty
But my target are celebrities, footballers and highly paid CEO and others
Trouble is there aren't quite enough celebs, CEOs and footballers to dent the national finances.
If you are serious about this black hole, you will probably need to tax both the comfortable income and the mortgage free pensioner.
I am a mortgage free pensioner, I am paying huge sums to the Govt thro petrol, fuel oil, electricity, council tax and other invented charges by the council for other spurious services (bin collections car park pass etc) then you get stiffed in car parks where the pass does not work (Horsham is hugely expensive) then there's the tax on my pension and my state pension. If I take anything from mySIPP I get taxed too. Then they tax my small dividends , and its only because interest rates are zero that they don't tax my savings. I then pay inordinate amounts of VAT on things I buy. I am drowning in taxes.
What do they give me? Bins emptied and my lane resurfaced every 25yrs.
I think VAT will go up to 25% That's my guess when we start paying off our borrowings for Covid 19
There is an underlying assumption many aremaking that we will pay off our borrowings for Covid 19. Why would we?
There is a difference between an ongoing structural deficit and one-off borrowing. Our borrowing this year will never be repaid. Never. Not next year, not ten years from now, never ever.
We need to get the economy moving again and seek to eliminate/minimise the deficit but we need to do that on a cyclical manner, you don't eliminate the deficit during a recession you do it afterwards.
If anything a tax cut would make more sense than a tax rise.
Don't tell lenders that we intend to never ever ever repay. They could get a bit spooked.
Actually I think investors are wise to the fact that the government will repay its bonds by issuing new bonds, not via taxation. If investors thought the government would stop issuing new bonds and would instead run hundreds of billion pounds surpluses instead I think that would spook them more.
Deficits need to be closed, there can't be massive deficits forever but government borrowing does not need to be repaid in real net terms - it needs interest paying on it in perpetuity. There is a difference between one-off borrowing during a crisis and ongoing structural deficit spending.
It cannot reasonably argued that any deficit arising from the Covid response is cyclical - rather than strucural. I rather agree that - just like World War 2 - it should be treated as 'one-off' - but would extend that to the effect of the GFC back in 2008/2009 too. Osborne's austerity was ,therefore, a political choice rather than an economic necessity..
This very much depends on the nature of the recession. If we quickly bounce back and the massive deficits are short term then it is reasonable to treat this as a one off shock such as a major war which can be paid off/inflated away over a long period. If it creates a structural deficit which is going to roll on year after year then reducing that deficit becomes absolutely essential. 2008 created a huge structural deficit built around the collapse of taxes from the Financial Services/banking sector. It was necessary to reduce that deficit or it would have continued at over £100bn a year until the last asset in the UK had been sold.
It is too early to say what the effect of CV will be. The OBR are currently forecasting a rapid bounce back, others, such as E&Y are more cautious. If the latter camp is right deficit reduction will be essential.
But the 2008 GFC did largely come 'out of the blue' - and was caused by external events in the US. The UK economy was not exactly overheating with any urgent need to curb inflation etc. The deflationary austerity policies followed by Osborne were far from inevitable , and many economists view them as having been counter productive in that the lower resulting growth delayed the recovery in tax revenues etc. Beyond that , the very low interest rates made it a good time to boost spending on infrastructure - similar to what is being currently being proposed. The repeated failure of Osborne to meet his fiscal targets did not lead to the financial markets 'taking fright'.
Comments
Set against that, this is an unusual situation in that we've probably got much more tolerance than normal for a vaccine that's only partially effective.
We're all going to be poorer, almost inevitably. Those least well off don't have the same capacity to take the hit.
But of course the requirements of herd immunity depend on how people are behaving, and I suspect the way this is going to be resolved in the medium term is by a combination of social distancing and acquired immunity in the population.
Given that the lockdown in Germany has supposedly reduced the R number by about 70%, I can imagine by late Summer a third of the UK population may have been infected, and that a milder form of social distancing that reduced R by 40% would be sufficient to suppress further transmission.
*Coronacoaster*
The ups and downs of your mood during the pandemic. You’re loving lockdown one minute but suddenly weepy with anxiety the next. It truly is “an emotional coronacoaster”.
*Quarantinis*
Experimental cocktails mixed from whatever random ingredients you have left in the house. The boozy equivalent of a store cupboard supper. Southern Comfort and Ribena quarantini with a glacé cherry garnish, anyone? These are sipped at “locktail hour”, ie. wine o’clock during lockdown, which seems to be creeping earlier with each passing week.
*Le Creuset wrist*
It’s the new “avocado hand” - an aching arm after taking one’s best saucepan outside to bang during the weekly ‘Clap For Carers.’ It might be heavy but you’re keen to impress the neighbours with your high-quality kitchenware.
*Coronials*
As opposed to millennials, this refers to the future generation of babies conceived or born during coronavirus quarantine. They might also become known as “Generation C” or, more spookily, “Children of the Quarn”.
*Furlough Merlot*
Wine consumed in an attempt to relieve the frustration of not working. Also known as “bored-eaux” or “cabernet tedium”.
*Coronadose*
An overdose of bad news from consuming too much media during a time of crisis. Can result in a panicdemic.
*The elephant in the Zoom*
The glaring issue during a videoconferencing call that nobody feels able to mention. E.g. one participant has dramatically put on weight, suddenly sprouted terrible facial hair or has a worryingly messy house visible in the background.
*Quentin Quarantino*
An attention-seeker using their time in lockdown to make amateur films which they’re convinced are funnier and cleverer than they actually are.
*Covidiot* or *Wuhan-ker*
One who ignores public health advice or behaves with reckless disregard for the safety of others can be said to display “covidiocy” or be “covidiotic”. Also called a “lockclown” or even a “Wuhan-ker”.
*Goutbreak*
The sudden fear that you’ve consumed so much wine, cheese, home-made cake and Easter chocolate in lockdown that your ankles are swelling up like a medieval king’s.
*Antisocial distancing*
Using health precautions as an excuse for snubbing neighbours and generally ignoring people you find irritating.
*Coughin’ dodger*
Someone so alarmed by an innocuous splutter or throat-clear that they back away in terror.
*Mask-ara*
Extra make-up applied to "make one's eyes pop" before venturing out in public wearing a face mask.
*Covid-10*
The 10lbs in weight that we’re all gaining from comfort-eating and comfort-drinking. Also known as “fattening the curve”.
Debt is the lockdown and the deficit is the virus.
It seems various countries have higher death tolls per million.
Comparisons are difficult because there seem to be drastically different counting methods in various countries.
https://twitter.com/EssexPR/status/1255491883155050496
If the a vaccine is available as early as September, albeit in relatively small quantities, it would be usable alongside a track and trace program. Ring vaccination in the localities of infection outbreaks would be as effective as local quarantines.
But a bit of a problem for those who don't believe the Chinese to push that line, I'd have thought. Which other country is in a position to know who the hell has been passing the virus to whom?
'Why didn't anyone get this really funny joke, of course I'm not a narcissistic, neurotic hypochondriac who's useless about the house.'
Also
'Why doesn't anyone like me'
Part 417
https://twitter.com/Milo_Edwards/status/1255811201713557505?s=20
Thinking about the broader economic crisis particularly in the the UK outside of London, I cant help thinking it's a reckoning that's been a long time coming.
Entire towns in the UK seem to have largely been kept going in the last 30 years through the transactions of people who work in shops, spending money in other shops. It's just a giant form of cycling money which generates very little productive gain.
What the UK faces is a fundamental balance of payments crisis, which has been brushed over because people decided that the balance of payments didn't matter anymore. I have a strong feeling the next 10 years will bring a return to focus on the idea of 'paying our way in the world'.
They said it is unheard of for a vaccine to go into production at this stage but they want stocks if it gets the approval
Also I suspect you could reduce the Local authority housing allowances as they are acting as a prop keeping rents artificially higher than they would otherwise be.
The latter also has the advantage of reducing the amount the Government ends up paying out in housing benefit.
Hardly any country has done worse in its response than Britain. We are on course to being the country with the second highest aggregate death rate in the world (behind only the US), and the third highest in terms of per capita deaths (behind Belgium and Spain.) I think we'll get there in both cases sometime in May, once we've overtaken Italy, probably within the week on the first measure.
Spain and Italy at least have the excuse that they were in the first wave of mass infections to hit Europe, so didn't have the opportunity to learn from others and act early. What's the UK's excuse?
I would support a post corona fiscal regime which delivers a net contribution only from those who can afford to make it. The contribution to be higher as one goes up the scale of income and (in particular) wealth. I mean it. I'm not fibbing to you.
You could, before this crisis, buy agricultural land on the outskirts of Marden in Kent (nice village) for £7000 an acre. So you can buy enough land for a house on a credit card.
Try building on it without permission - you will find that *that* law is is enforced with far more concern than robbery with violence.
Build enough properties and prices will come down. But we aren't allowed to. By law.
I believe Bill Gates has said he will fund parallel production of the most promising 7 (or might have been 9) vaccine candidates.
I was speaking to the senior partner of a law firm yesterday who was thankful that they had a very good March which gave them a "fighting fund" that will see them through this and the next month or so. After that it is going to be trickier. My guess is that this was not atypical, our economy was building up a little momentum BC.
And it is the only vaccine in the world at present anywhere near
I think everyone's acutely aware of the risk of a 2nd wave, but given the numbers this seems unlikely.
The lockdown was also much more light touch than that of New Zealand, with many shops remaining open and the local beach open to Surf and Swim, and yet we've matched NZ in terms of effectiveness, proving perhaps that the harder is not always the better when it comes to restrictions.
Of course that means my house is worth exactly the same as it was in 2004 as supply has kept up with demand.
How is that going o be achieved by the next GE without increasing taxation on the better off?
1) Mass immigration and increasing property prices
2) Static population and static property prices.
3) Mass immigration, mass house building and static or decreasing property prices.
The interesting bit is that no-one wants to say they are in favour of (3)
For comedy value - you can prove that the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 is Institutional Racism....
PS: People are being too gloomy on a vaccine, aren't they? It's coming.
It is very hard to see deflation in the context of extensive QE and huge deficits. Inflation is more likely which is how those WW2 debts were eventually repaid.
Obviously they should be targeted on unearned wealth and sectors not paying their fair share at the moment, but everyone is going to have to contribute. So:
- income tax all rates up 2%
- NI up to 13%/3%, and self employed pay on the same basis as PAYE
- so highest marginal rate of tax + NI is 47% + 3% = 50%, I would set it higher but we know receipts will fall if we do that
- VAT up 2.5%, it will raise a lot of money
- IHT significantly increased, I like the idea of a straight 10% tax on all estates to the government then the remainder taxed as income at the recipient's marginal rate of tax, no reliefs, no allowances, no exemptions, let's tax this unearned wealth properly
- apply similar rules to lifetime transfers as for IHT (ok maybe with a small exempt allowance), we need to stop the distortion in the London property market in particular caused by children having their houses and flats paid for by mummy and daddy thus locking working class out of the property market
- Corp Tax up to 25% (to start)
- no indexation to state pension or welfare or tax allowances until 2025/2026
- 5% capital tax per year on second and subsequent properties
- capital gains taxed as income, no allowance
That shouldn't take too long to clear the deficit and some of the increase can be used to set up a proper social care regime going forward.
Looking at different countries' "excess death" counts would be my preferred measure. We don't yet have enough international data to do this, however.
The look on people's faces from London, when they see abandoned cottages in the corner of fields, in parts of Northumberland, is interesting.
Daily pestering about when the lockdown will end isn't helpful.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-52363791
Wearing masks in shops and on public transport was made mandatory in most German states this week, as the country relaxed some of the lockdown measures introduced to curb the spread of Covid-19.
German law makes it illegal to cover your face while participating in a public gathering, such as a strike or a political demonstration, so as to prevent identification by the police."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/29/mask-dilemma-for-police-in-germany-as-may-day-activists-cover-up
Also, unpopular as this will make me, I think it delusional to think that anyone will be - or arguably ought to be - shielded from the cuts and / or tax rises that will inevitably follow from the sort of recession/slump we are likely facing. There simply is no pot of gold belonging to the rich which can be raided while leaving the poor untouched.
https://mctreeleth.tumblr.com/post/615290993946820608/here-it-is-the-instructions-to-make-a-pieced-and
I can`t bear the NZ PM, what are your thoughts?
I'd have thought side effects were perhaps the biggest concern in the trial rather than the entire thing not working - given the need for the vaccine perhaps a larger rate of side effects than normal could be tolerated too if the side effects themselves aren't overly serious.
Fear fnar
An old joke about John Barnes joining Liverpool from Watford springs to mind!
He has spent something like 20 years working HIV / AIDs and said CV is nowhere near as difficult a problem.
And I presume this is why a number of the people making vaccines are for scientists being a lot more optimistic than they would normally ever like to sound at this stage.
But to think taxes will not rise is just naive
1) there will be lives saved by lockdown too. There must be far fewer road traffic accidents, for starters.
2) those extraneous causes of death are likely to be fairly constant worldwide, meaning that we can make reasonable rough and ready comparisons.
3) nothing is perfect but the approach I suggest is reliant on less human judgement (or chicanery) than anything that requires people to decide that Covid-19 was involved.
As near-perfect a way of measuring it as it gets.
So, for example, here:
https://twitter.com/EdConwaySky/status/1255147479466565636?s=20
So stop whinging
PS I was able to give up work last year at 52 so yes you are probably right on your last sentence
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/28/us/coronavirus-death-toll-total.html
We're better off growing our way out of this and running a surplus to reduce the national debt. The medicine will be worse than the disease.
It is too early to say what the effect of CV will be. The OBR are currently forecasting a rapid bounce back, others, such as E&Y are more cautious. If the latter camp is right deficit reduction will be essential.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1255832117583495169