Clearly he misses out the fact - cheap food = full of sugar and other crap to keep costs down.
The only difference between now and the 19th century is that then cheap food was poor quality and often featured things that weren't food (so you were under weight). Now it contains calories that aren't easy to burn off.
If you were a one parent family with say two kids and struggling financially this would seem a cheap way to feed the family for three or four dinners
500g of pasta, one tin of tomatoes and 1kg of chicken is not going to provide 12 dinners, unless they are all for Tiny Tim. What planet are you on?
Two tins of tomatoes.
I am on planet normal - that could easily make one adult and two kids half a weeks dinners
It works out at about 300 calories per meal for 12 meals. An adult needs 2000-2500 calories per day and a child aged 6-12 needs 1600-2200. So 300 for your main meal of the day looks pretty inadequate. I shop and cook for a family of five and I can tell you that your meal would do us for about one dinner, maybe with a bit left over. Our kids are far from fat (in fact most clothes don't fit them because they are too skinny) so we are definitely not overfeeding them.
Fair enough, let them buy double what I suggested - three or four meals for less than £12
I think there is general agreement that people can just about afford to eat a decent diet on benefits as long as they don't buy anything else. Unfortunately people also need to pay for clothes, transport, heating, etc. Some people compound their difficulties by not knowing how to cook (a widespread problem not only affecting the poor; not helped by schools no longer teaching home economics). Some people working long hours and shifts don't have time to cook. Some people don't have the equipment. I just find all this smug wisdom being dispensed by well off people a bit too Marie Antoinette* for my liking. (*I know she was misquoted).
How much do you think is required to feed a family of four 2 children 2 adults per week? As a pound figure?
About £150. Less if the kids are on free school meals. The Food Standards Agency have a report on the cost of a healthy food basket in Northern Ireland in 2018, they have it as £159 for a family of 4 with 2 school age kids. Presumably it is higher in 2020 with inflation, but NI may have higher costs than GB. I think we probably spend about £200/week on food for a family of 5. We don't shop at the cheapest supermarket and get organic meat and milk, but we cook everything from scratch which saves money and don't normally buy any alcohol.
And on uc the least that family would get per week is 229£ the most 253£
Add in 100£ per month for gas and electric 25£ per month for internet two sim only deals for the adults 10£ a month comes to another 33£ a week
So using your figure we come to 183£ leaving them between 46£ a week and 70£ a week
Aha you say they may need to pay some towards rent well lets add in another 100£ a month for rent and 60 for council tax thats another 34£ a week
Still leaves a net of 12£ a week to 36£ a week
Clothes and bus fares. Car needs a repair. Haircuts. Furniture and appliances need to be replaced. School trips. Curtains and bedding. This all assumes your benefits are paid on time, you don't get sanctioned unfairly, you're not subject to the bedroom tax etc.
The last sentence brings us back to UBI...
I'd like to see fair minimum determined by focus group and explicit listing of what, on average, should be covered as basic (what speed of broadband etc etc) year by year. And I'd mandate from government that contract exits are made available for discretionary services for change of circumstances (e.g. get sacked, you may bin Sky Sports: when you so wish)
That I would expect it to almost always work out at pretty much the 60% of median relative poverty line that the right love to whinge about is besides the point. The fact the right like to whinge about it is reason enough to sink government money into making an explicit calculation.
And UBI, plus a restructuring of tax to make good the difference (e.g. if you take UBI, you go on higher tax rates for a period of time, your call. And 'something, something' for the self employed), yes please. And btw, state pension, child benefit, student financing - yes, ultimately, they're going to be UBI too.
The contract exits seem a good idea or for that matter contract breaks. However what did I not list that you consider necessary?
Both adults have a mobile, they have internet access, they have gas and electric,they have food a roof some money left over for discretionary spending on clothes etc. That is by its very definition a safety net. The purpose of benefits is to provide support when you fall on hard times not to provide a living.
UBI is a pipedream that will never happen because it would cost too much. Merely giving every adult in britain 1000£ a month ubi would cost in the region of 480 billion and 1000 a month would not be enough to live on it would probably need to be double that assuming housing benefit and other benefits would be axed. Add in the NHS, defence,schools etc and you are pretty much looking at the entirety of GDP going to the government coffers. When that happens no one is getting enough extra from working to bother. Why would a surgeon do a hugely stressful job when he is not getting a lot more than the ubi recipient
Your maths is completely flawed because you're assuming that it would be new money.
If the UBI replaces the tax-free threshold then it is effectively cost-neutral for anyone over the tax-free threshold. Or is not much extra cash for those above the tax-free threshold.
For anyone on benefits it would replace or supplement the benefits they were getting previously - so again not much extra cash up front.
It should lead to major cost reductions. You could essentially abolish Job Centre Plus and streamline much of HMRC. Job centres should be about helping people find work because they want to rather than because they need to pretend they want to and need to attend meetings or they'll get sanctioned.
Done properly people should actually want to work anyway as the poverty trap the current benefits system creates would be abolished.
A surgeon would be earning well more than the UBI, that is ridiculous. In fact done properly every single person who works would be earning more than the UBI, the UBI would be the floor not the ceiling that benefits currently create.
It is your maths that is flawed I am afraid. The tax free threshold is 12500 or so about a 1000 a month. That saves you paying tax of 200£ a month so giving someone a 1000 a month is a net loss of 800£.
Yes if you abolished housing benefit and uc that would be a saving but lets face it that won't happen and if it did the howls of protest would be huge as people would be getting even less than they are now.
Going back to that family of four they currently get
1100 a month uc 1000 a month housing benefit about 150£ a month reduction on council tax
That is before we add in free school meals, prescriptions etc.
You plan to replace this with 2X1000 ubi leaving them 250£ less well off
In addition you are giving every basic rate tax payer a boost to their pay of 1000£ a month in pay while charging them 200£ more tax
In the case of the employed, the UBI would be *entirely* taxed off their wages and given back to them by the government.
At this point, people then say, why bother?
The point is to make the system utterly dependable. You get your UBI each month, no matter what. Lose your job, UBI etc etc
No forms to fill out, no claims to be made.
This has the important effect of reducing the obstacles to getting a job from unemployment - at the moment, there is a whole dance about signing off benefits etc.
In a UBI system, get some work, get some money, pay some tax. Your UBI cannot be effected.
Well see there is the issue you then have, if for example UBI is 1000 a month and if you work it all gets clawed back....
Working a 37.5 hour week full time means you are working 1950 hours a year. A person working currently and earning 18000 a year loses 12000 automatically to claw back ubi plus the tax to cover the rest of govenment expenditure is probably working 1950 hours a year for 3 to 4000 pounds. A mere 70 to 80 pounds extra in their pocket a week. How many will just say not worth it?
Which is the old, old argument against benefits.....
Yet people do jobs where they get *less* than benefits - rare, but it does happen
Very common are jobs which only make marginally more than benefits. Tons of those. No shortage of applicants...
Go through the numbers I posted and point out where I was mistaken about the extra costs. I already pointed out your error in thinking the tax free allowance gives you a reduction of tax of that amount when it actually equates to saving you paying basic rate tax on the first 1042 a month you earn which at 20% is about 200 a month not a thousand
The tax free rate has a knock-on effect on the higher tax rate take too, although I doubt it's a massive amount.
Yes it does however he is still failing to get the basic point that a tax free allowance of 1000 a month does not give you 1000 in your pocket automatically it just saves you 200 in tax you would of otherwise paid
Did I blink and miss National Insurance getting abolished?
If you do this properly you merge everything into one. You have just a single UBI (possibly supplemented per child and any other supplementaries getting added to the base figure, like how your tax-free allowance can be adjusted today) and just a single tax rate on any earnings that you have. So it isn't just the tax on Income Tax you need to account for but the tax on National Insurance too.
If someone is earning £12,500 then they should get the UBI plus be taxed on the entire £12,500 with whatever their appropriate tax rate is. If we were to have a 33% tax rate (for Income Tax and NI combined) then that individual would be paying £4,125 in tax.
Currently that individual pays £360 in National Insurance, £0 in Income Tax per annum.
So you could make a UBI of £3,765 without affecting tax rates, giving any extra income to anyone, having any savings, having any growth or anything else. The rest would need to be funded.
Of course by doing this as well anything currently exempt from paying NI (like the elderly that get away without paying it) would now get caught up in NI. As they should.
Which is all well and good but if you want to have ubi that replaces all benefits then it must be enough to live on, 1000 a month per adult is already less than they would get on uc. What tax rate would that be combined....pretty close to 100 when you consider it will go to all adults whether working or not.
Feel free to point out the error in my calculations of what the required tax take would be in the previous thread. Yes I left out ni in calculating but that would only make a difference of 0.12*12500*51,000,000 so subtract another 76 billion of the almost trillion tax take the government would need taking it down to about 880 billion and reducing the extra tax needed to be raised on people to 290 billion on top of the 194 billion it currently takes off them
UBI (not a bad idea but it has to be done right and across the board and be simple) should be funded by wealth and inheritance tax rather than income tax. I believe that all humans today shoudl have some natural inheritance from past society but many do not and it is random depending on wishes of (now) dead people . So increase inheritance or related taxes like wealth and gift tax and say the UBI bit is the universal inheritance
I am not against the idea of UBI itself. What I am against is this idea that we can have ubi that is reasonable and not have to raise taxation to pay for it
How would the numbers look with a UBI of £1000/month (untaxed) plus a flat rate of 50% on all additional income?
50% is a lower marginal rate than most people on benefits end up with.
At £40k earnings, you've have an income of £32k, roughly what you'd get now. Below that you'd do slightly better than now, above that slightly worse. It wouldn't be far off parity, but without the pitfalls.
and get rid of the resentment of others getting benefits (as you get them as well!) which does neither current recipients or current thinkers of this any good . So win win
It would also eliminate the poverty trap that gets people into vicious debt spirals. Let us say that someone gets a bill of £100 they need to pay (or wants to save that towards an expenditure or holiday). With a minimum wage of £10 per hour (which it will be soon so use that as a clean number) and a 50% tax rate someone on minimum wage would need to pick up 20 extra hours of minimum wage overtime in a month to earn that much extra
Someone on welfare at £10 per hour currently would need to pick up over 55 hours of overtime to earn £100 extra.
You are assuming though that the income tax would only be 50%. It will need to be much higher as I showed around 221 billion extra in tax flowing into government coffers.
To give an example of being revenue neutral.
Someone earning 30k a year currently pays 3498 tax and 2460 national insurance. for a total of 5958£ a year
To pay the same he would therefore have to pay 12000 (for ubi) +5938 for a total of 17938.
(17938/30000)*100 is a tax rate of 62% now add in extra for the 221 billion extra we need to find
My old mum (75-79 group, no underlying conditions) got a call today to be vaccinated at a new local vaccination centre, first appointment offered was in 2 working days.
Impressive.
That's interesting, I didn't know they'd moved on to the under 80s age category.
Two people including my Mum in the 75-80 age bracket vaccinated in our area since Tuesday and council reports "almost all" over 80's now vaccinated. Seems to be going smoothly in our neck of the woods.
Just seen that Toby Young is defending himself with the claim that ACTUALLY the IFR is only 0.25% and this is PROVEN!
Can't he do basic arithmetic?
If the IFR is 0.25%, then over half the country have had it.
In the North West, we've apparently passed 70% infected without seeing any increase in herd immunity, which is a bit disconcerting. And, burrowing down, out of the quarter-million people in Barnsley (which is large enough to be a statistical sample), 99.8% have had covid. So, under 500 people in Barnsley have apparently avoided covid to date. And the herd immunity threshold is pretty damn high, I guess.
(I've just noticed that 604 people had it in the w/e 9th January, so that's pretty much all of them, with a handful of reinfections...)
The most "nationalist" (i.e. vote for vaccine from their own country) are in China (+83), India (+68) Singapore (+61) and Australia (+57)*. Germany (+44) and the UK (+40) are ahead of vaccine sceptics USA & France (+36).
*Ironic - Australian vaccine was a "bust" - as it was based on inactivated HIV, the vaccinated starting returning positive HIV tests!
For real those people actually now have HIV? Shit.
No they don't, but it must have been a massive shock for them. Inactive HIV just seems like a poor choice anyway, especially when cold viruses are available.
It was only a fragment of the HIV virus that they were using, and when development started, they thought it would be very unlikely to trigger such an immune response:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/dec/11/university-of-queensland-covid-vaccine-the-governments-pulled-the-plug-so-what-happens-now ...The Covid-19 spike protein has been the focus of UQ and other vaccines because it is the part of the virus that enables it to enter human cells, where it replicates. However, when synthetic versions of these spike proteins are used in vaccines, they become unstable and can change. This means that the immune system may not recognise the protein as Covid-19, and the correct immune response to protect against it won’t be triggered.
This is where the UQ’s molecular clamp comes in. It locks the “spike” protein into a shape, stabilising it, and this allows the immune system to be able to recognise and then neutralise the Covid-19 virus. The clamp chosen by UQ researchers comprises two fragments of the glycoprotein 41 protein found in HIV, as those fragments provided the greatest stability to the spike protein.
Researchers thought the risk of these fragments triggering an HIV immune response was low, but ultimately found during the trial that those who received the vaccine did produce a very low-level antibody response...
Worth pointing out that the AZN vaccine does not use anything to stabilise the spike protein in a similar manner (unlike the both the mRNA vaccines and the Johnson & Johnson one, which all do), and it has been suggested that might be a reason for its somewhat lower efficacy.
Federal prosecutors offered the most chilling description yet of rioters who seized the Capitol last week, writing in a new court filing that the intention was "to capture and assassinate elected officials."
The view was included in a memo seeking to keep Jacob Anthony Chansley, who rallied people inside the Capitol using a bullhorn, in detention. According to Capitol Police information included in the filing, Chansley was notable for his headdress, face paint and carrying of a six-foot spear.
"Strong evidence, including Chansley's own words and actions at the Capitol, supports that the intent of the Capitol rioters was to capture and assassinate elected officials in the United States government," government prosecutors wrote.
The allegations, written by Justice Department lawyers in Arizona, come as the government have begun describing in more alarming terms what transpired.
My old mum (75-79 group, no underlying conditions) got a call today to be vaccinated at a new local vaccination centre, first appointment offered was in 2 working days.
Impressive.
This is the first time in my adult life that I have ever wished I was older. I want that jab.
Think I might try a cheeky call. If I make the effort to go the centre - Lords cricket ground - would they fit me in?
You can take the boy out of the City...
The only other person I have heard saying just this is very wedged up hedgie.
My old mum (75-79 group, no underlying conditions) got a call today to be vaccinated at a new local vaccination centre, first appointment offered was in 2 working days.
Impressive.
That's interesting, I didn't know they'd moved on to the under 80s age category.
Two people including my Mum in the 75-80 age bracket vaccinated in our area since Tuesday and council reports "almost all" over 80's now vaccinated. Seems to be going smoothly in our neck of the woods.
Press release from local commissioning group here saying that all 80+ will have been sent a letter by Tuesday next week.
My old mum (75-79 group, no underlying conditions) got a call today to be vaccinated at a new local vaccination centre, first appointment offered was in 2 working days.
Impressive.
This is the first time in my adult life that I have ever wished I was older. I want that jab.
Think I might try a cheeky call. If I make the effort to go the centre - Lords cricket ground - would they fit me in?
You can take the boy out of the City...
The only other person I have heard saying just this is very wedged up hedgie.
Don't worry we can always ask Europol for their copy...oh wait.
I haven't read the story - but surely they back up their records
They do, but they deleted it from the PNC and the servers it was connected to.
I fear, genuinely, that this was a cock up caused by the 40,000 alerts relating to European criminals have already been deleted from the PNC after Britain’s deal with the EU in the last few days.
Brexit you say? That is plausible: a new, possibly ad-hoc procedure created at short notice and implemented (we can say, with the benefit of hindsight) without adequate testing in response to a last-minute agreement.
Just seen that Toby Young is defending himself with the claim that ACTUALLY the IFR is only 0.25% and this is PROVEN!
Can't he do basic arithmetic?
If the IFR is 0.25%, then over half the country have had it.
In the North West, we've apparently passed 70% infected without seeing any increase in herd immunity, which is a bit disconcerting. And, burrowing down, out of the quarter-million people in Barnsley (which is large enough to be a statistical sample), 99.8% have had covid. So, under 500 people in Barnsley have apparently avoided covid to date. And the herd immunity threshold is pretty damn high, I guess.
(I've just noticed that 604 people had it in the w/e 9th January, so that's pretty much all of them, with a handful of reinfections...)
Bloody denialists can't even do arithmetic.
there were some absurd IFR claims though on the lockdowners side as well early on (even including official stats) - 3-4% quoted in all seriousness and he is a lot closer with his calc to the true IFR than they were
Don't worry we can always ask Europol for their copy...oh wait.
I haven't read the story - but surely they back up their records
They do, but they deleted it from the PNC and the servers it was connected to.
I fear, genuinely, that this was a cock up caused by the 40,000 alerts relating to European criminals have already been deleted from the PNC after Britain’s deal with the EU in the last few days.
Brexit you say? That is plausible: a new, possibly ad-hoc procedure created at short notice and implemented (we can say, with the benefit of hindsight) without adequate testing in response to a last-minute agreement.
It seems the plausible reason why they had to quickly mass delete tens of thousands of records.
Just seen that Toby Young is defending himself with the claim that ACTUALLY the IFR is only 0.25% and this is PROVEN!
Can't he do basic arithmetic?
If the IFR is 0.25%, then over half the country have had it.
In the North West, we've apparently passed 70% infected without seeing any increase in herd immunity, which is a bit disconcerting. And, burrowing down, out of the quarter-million people in Barnsley (which is large enough to be a statistical sample), 99.8% have had covid. So, under 500 people in Barnsley have apparently avoided covid to date. And the herd immunity threshold is pretty damn high, I guess.
(I've just noticed that 604 people had it in the w/e 9th January, so that's pretty much all of them, with a handful of reinfections...)
Bloody denialists can't even do arithmetic.
Can't we just accept that he's an innumerate twat and never discuss him again ?
Don't worry we can always ask Europol for their copy...oh wait.
I haven't read the story - but surely they back up their records
They do, but they deleted it from the PNC and the servers it was connected to.
I fear, genuinely, that this was a cock up caused by the 40,000 alerts relating to European criminals have already been deleted from the PNC after Britain’s deal with the EU in the last few days.
Brexit you say? That is plausible: a new, possibly ad-hoc procedure created at short notice and implemented (we can say, with the benefit of hindsight) without adequate testing in response to a last-minute agreement.
It seems the plausible reason why they had to quickly mass delete tens of thousands of records.
My old mum (75-79 group, no underlying conditions) got a call today to be vaccinated at a new local vaccination centre, first appointment offered was in 2 working days.
Impressive.
This is the first time in my adult life that I have ever wished I was older. I want that jab.
Think I might try a cheeky call. If I make the effort to go the centre - Lords cricket ground - would they fit me in?
You can take the boy out of the City...
The only other person I have heard saying just this is very wedged up hedgie.
What is it with you City types and entitlement?
If it's going to waste, why not?
Possibly cos they could do without a queue of entitled traffic clogging up the roads? Essential journeys only. Turning up at a vaccine site on spec doesn't seem helpful at all.
Just seen that Toby Young is defending himself with the claim that ACTUALLY the IFR is only 0.25% and this is PROVEN!
Can't he do basic arithmetic?
If the IFR is 0.25%, then over half the country have had it.
In the North West, we've apparently passed 70% infected without seeing any increase in herd immunity, which is a bit disconcerting. And, burrowing down, out of the quarter-million people in Barnsley (which is large enough to be a statistical sample), 99.8% have had covid. So, under 500 people in Barnsley have apparently avoided covid to date. And the herd immunity threshold is pretty damn high, I guess.
(I've just noticed that 604 people had it in the w/e 9th January, so that's pretty much all of them, with a handful of reinfections...)
Bloody denialists can't even do arithmetic.
Can't we just accept that he's an innumerate twat and never discuss him again ?
Sadly the terminally stupid occasionally post on here and cite him as an example that Covid-19 is a hoax.
Hopefully he'll go the way of Alistair Hames and never cited as a seer for several months and counting.
Clearly he misses out the fact - cheap food = full of sugar and other crap to keep costs down.
The only difference between now and the 19th century is that then cheap food was poor quality and often featured things that weren't food (so you were under weight). Now it contains calories that aren't easy to burn off.
If you were a one parent family with say two kids and struggling financially this would seem a cheap way to feed the family for three or four dinners
500g of pasta, one tin of tomatoes and 1kg of chicken is not going to provide 12 dinners, unless they are all for Tiny Tim. What planet are you on?
Two tins of tomatoes.
I am on planet normal - that could easily make one adult and two kids half a weeks dinners
It works out at about 300 calories per meal for 12 meals. An adult needs 2000-2500 calories per day and a child aged 6-12 needs 1600-2200. So 300 for your main meal of the day looks pretty inadequate. I shop and cook for a family of five and I can tell you that your meal would do us for about one dinner, maybe with a bit left over. Our kids are far from fat (in fact most clothes don't fit them because they are too skinny) so we are definitely not overfeeding them.
Fair enough, let them buy double what I suggested - three or four meals for less than £12
I think there is general agreement that people can just about afford to eat a decent diet on benefits as long as they don't buy anything else. Unfortunately people also need to pay for clothes, transport, heating, etc. Some people compound their difficulties by not knowing how to cook (a widespread problem not only affecting the poor; not helped by schools no longer teaching home economics). Some people working long hours and shifts don't have time to cook. Some people don't have the equipment. I just find all this smug wisdom being dispensed by well off people a bit too Marie Antoinette* for my liking. (*I know she was misquoted).
How much do you think is required to feed a family of four 2 children 2 adults per week? As a pound figure?
About £150. Less if the kids are on free school meals. The Food Standards Agency have a report on the cost of a healthy food basket in Northern Ireland in 2018, they have it as £159 for a family of 4 with 2 school age kids. Presumably it is higher in 2020 with inflation, but NI may have higher costs than GB. I think we probably spend about £200/week on food for a family of 5. We don't shop at the cheapest supermarket and get organic meat and milk, but we cook everything from scratch which saves money and don't normally buy any alcohol.
And on uc the least that family would get per week is 229£ the most 253£
Add in 100£ per month for gas and electric 25£ per month for internet two sim only deals for the adults 10£ a month comes to another 33£ a week
So using your figure we come to 183£ leaving them between 46£ a week and 70£ a week
Aha you say they may need to pay some towards rent well lets add in another 100£ a month for rent and 60 for council tax thats another 34£ a week
Still leaves a net of 12£ a week to 36£ a week
Clothes and bus fares. Car needs a repair. Haircuts. Furniture and appliances need to be replaced. School trips. Curtains and bedding. This all assumes your benefits are paid on time, you don't get sanctioned unfairly, you're not subject to the bedroom tax etc.
The last sentence brings us back to UBI...
I'd like to see fair minimum determined by focus group and explicit listing of what, on average, should be covered as basic (what speed of broadband etc etc) year by year. And I'd mandate from government that contract exits are made available for discretionary services for change of circumstances (e.g. get sacked, you may bin Sky Sports: when you so wish)
That I would expect it to almost always work out at pretty much the 60% of median relative poverty line that the right love to whinge about is besides the point. The fact the right like to whinge about it is reason enough to sink government money into making an explicit calculation.
And UBI, plus a restructuring of tax to make good the difference (e.g. if you take UBI, you go on higher tax rates for a period of time, your call. And 'something, something' for the self employed), yes please. And btw, state pension, child benefit, student financing - yes, ultimately, they're going to be UBI too.
The contract exits seem a good idea or for that matter contract breaks. However what did I not list that you consider necessary?
Both adults have a mobile, they have internet access, they have gas and electric,they have food a roof some money left over for discretionary spending on clothes etc. That is by its very definition a safety net. The purpose of benefits is to provide support when you fall on hard times not to provide a living.
UBI is a pipedream that will never happen because it would cost too much. Merely giving every adult in britain 1000£ a month ubi would cost in the region of 480 billion and 1000 a month would not be enough to live on it would probably need to be double that assuming housing benefit and other benefits would be axed. Add in the NHS, defence,schools etc and you are pretty much looking at the entirety of GDP going to the government coffers. When that happens no one is getting enough extra from working to bother. Why would a surgeon do a hugely stressful job when he is not getting a lot more than the ubi recipient
Your maths is completely flawed because you're assuming that it would be new money.
If the UBI replaces the tax-free threshold then it is effectively cost-neutral for anyone over the tax-free threshold. Or is not much extra cash for those above the tax-free threshold.
For anyone on benefits it would replace or supplement the benefits they were getting previously - so again not much extra cash up front.
It should lead to major cost reductions. You could essentially abolish Job Centre Plus and streamline much of HMRC. Job centres should be about helping people find work because they want to rather than because they need to pretend they want to and need to attend meetings or they'll get sanctioned.
Done properly people should actually want to work anyway as the poverty trap the current benefits system creates would be abolished.
A surgeon would be earning well more than the UBI, that is ridiculous. In fact done properly every single person who works would be earning more than the UBI, the UBI would be the floor not the ceiling that benefits currently create.
It is your maths that is flawed I am afraid. The tax free threshold is 12500 or so about a 1000 a month. That saves you paying tax of 200£ a month so giving someone a 1000 a month is a net loss of 800£.
Yes if you abolished housing benefit and uc that would be a saving but lets face it that won't happen and if it did the howls of protest would be huge as people would be getting even less than they are now.
Going back to that family of four they currently get
1100 a month uc 1000 a month housing benefit about 150£ a month reduction on council tax
That is before we add in free school meals, prescriptions etc.
You plan to replace this with 2X1000 ubi leaving them 250£ less well off
In addition you are giving every basic rate tax payer a boost to their pay of 1000£ a month in pay while charging them 200£ more tax
In the case of the employed, the UBI would be *entirely* taxed off their wages and given back to them by the government.
At this point, people then say, why bother?
The point is to make the system utterly dependable. You get your UBI each month, no matter what. Lose your job, UBI etc etc
No forms to fill out, no claims to be made.
This has the important effect of reducing the obstacles to getting a job from unemployment - at the moment, there is a whole dance about signing off benefits etc.
In a UBI system, get some work, get some money, pay some tax. Your UBI cannot be effected.
Well see there is the issue you then have, if for example UBI is 1000 a month and if you work it all gets clawed back....
Working a 37.5 hour week full time means you are working 1950 hours a year. A person working currently and earning 18000 a year loses 12000 automatically to claw back ubi plus the tax to cover the rest of govenment expenditure is probably working 1950 hours a year for 3 to 4000 pounds. A mere 70 to 80 pounds extra in their pocket a week. How many will just say not worth it?
Which is the old, old argument against benefits.....
Yet people do jobs where they get *less* than benefits - rare, but it does happen
Very common are jobs which only make marginally more than benefits. Tons of those. No shortage of applicants...
Go through the numbers I posted and point out where I was mistaken about the extra costs. I already pointed out your error in thinking the tax free allowance gives you a reduction of tax of that amount when it actually equates to saving you paying basic rate tax on the first 1042 a month you earn which at 20% is about 200 a month not a thousand
The tax free rate has a knock-on effect on the higher tax rate take too, although I doubt it's a massive amount.
Yes it does however he is still failing to get the basic point that a tax free allowance of 1000 a month does not give you 1000 in your pocket automatically it just saves you 200 in tax you would of otherwise paid
Did I blink and miss National Insurance getting abolished?
If you do this properly you merge everything into one. You have just a single UBI (possibly supplemented per child and any other supplementaries getting added to the base figure, like how your tax-free allowance can be adjusted today) and just a single tax rate on any earnings that you have. So it isn't just the tax on Income Tax you need to account for but the tax on National Insurance too.
If someone is earning £12,500 then they should get the UBI plus be taxed on the entire £12,500 with whatever their appropriate tax rate is. If we were to have a 33% tax rate (for Income Tax and NI combined) then that individual would be paying £4,125 in tax.
Currently that individual pays £360 in National Insurance, £0 in Income Tax per annum.
So you could make a UBI of £3,765 without affecting tax rates, giving any extra income to anyone, having any savings, having any growth or anything else. The rest would need to be funded.
Of course by doing this as well anything currently exempt from paying NI (like the elderly that get away without paying it) would now get caught up in NI. As they should.
Which is all well and good but if you want to have ubi that replaces all benefits then it must be enough to live on, 1000 a month per adult is already less than they would get on uc. What tax rate would that be combined....pretty close to 100 when you consider it will go to all adults whether working or not.
Feel free to point out the error in my calculations of what the required tax take would be in the previous thread. Yes I left out ni in calculating but that would only make a difference of 0.12*12500*51,000,000 so subtract another 76 billion of the almost trillion tax take the government would need taking it down to about 880 billion and reducing the extra tax needed to be raised on people to 290 billion on top of the 194 billion it currently takes off them
UBI (not a bad idea but it has to be done right and across the board and be simple) should be funded by wealth and inheritance tax rather than income tax. I believe that all humans today shoudl have some natural inheritance from past society but many do not and it is random depending on wishes of (now) dead people . So increase inheritance or related taxes like wealth and gift tax and say the UBI bit is the universal inheritance
I am not against the idea of UBI itself. What I am against is this idea that we can have ubi that is reasonable and not have to raise taxation to pay for it
How would the numbers look with a UBI of £1000/month (untaxed) plus a flat rate of 50% on all additional income?
50% is a lower marginal rate than most people on benefits end up with.
At £40k earnings, you've have an income of £32k, roughly what you'd get now. Below that you'd do slightly better than now, above that slightly worse. It wouldn't be far off parity, but without the pitfalls.
and get rid of the resentment of others getting benefits (as you get them as well!) which does neither current recipients or current thinkers of this any good . So win win
It would also eliminate the poverty trap that gets people into vicious debt spirals. Let us say that someone gets a bill of £100 they need to pay (or wants to save that towards an expenditure or holiday). With a minimum wage of £10 per hour (which it will be soon so use that as a clean number) and a 50% tax rate someone on minimum wage would need to pick up 20 extra hours of minimum wage overtime in a month to earn that much extra
Someone on welfare at £10 per hour currently would need to pick up over 55 hours of overtime to earn £100 extra.
You are assuming though that the income tax would only be 50%. It will need to be much higher as I showed around 221 billion extra in tax flowing into government coffers.
To give an example of being revenue neutral.
Someone earning 30k a year currently pays 3498 tax and 2460 national insurance. for a total of 5958£ a year
To pay the same he would therefore have to pay 12000 (for ubi) +5938 for a total of 17938.
(17938/30000)*100 is a tax rate of 62% now add in extra for the 221 billion extra we need to find
You're double-counting. If you had 62% then you would not have to find any extra for anyone earning £30k you've already found it (since you've 'paid' both the UBI and the existing £5958). You've covered both. Plus then for anyone earning more than £30k (who of course is most income tax already) you're now taking more off them than you were before, while taking less from anyone earning less.
Hence why a flat-rate 50%, once you take into account all multipliers and other factors, would probably be about break even - while leaving the country in a healthier position without anyone getting taxed over 80% at the moment.
Furthermore even if there is extra money to be raised why shouldn't it be raised differently? Why should the burden of 80% marginal tax be levied on anyone, let alone those least able to pay it?
My old mum (75-79 group, no underlying conditions) got a call today to be vaccinated at a new local vaccination centre, first appointment offered was in 2 working days.
Impressive.
This is the first time in my adult life that I have ever wished I was older. I want that jab.
Think I might try a cheeky call. If I make the effort to go the centre - Lords cricket ground - would they fit me in?
You can take the boy out of the City...
The only other person I have heard saying just this is very wedged up hedgie.
What is it with you City types and entitlement?
If it's going to waste, why not?
Well at the hospital vaccination centres there isn't waste. Not sure about the independent vaccination centres but I'm not 100% sure a fit and able (if politically-challenged) man coming coming to them to ask about overflow is the way ahead.
But absolutely, we don't want waste so maybe there should be a "returns/standby" system.
I have also to say from my experience that very few people are cancelling/no showing.
Last three words largely unnecessary, I suggest. Would be great to see us build in enough capacity to give second doses to these people without halting the rollout of first doses to more people
Interesting. Just received a fund-raising email from Nikki Haley, asking for donation to HER PAC, aimed at supporting GOP candidates in the 2022 mid-terms. No mention of a certain Donald Trump anywhere in the ask.
Clearly a prelude to a Presidential run in 2024 - planning to build up the IOU chits from Congressional candidates.
Clearly he misses out the fact - cheap food = full of sugar and other crap to keep costs down.
The only difference between now and the 19th century is that then cheap food was poor quality and often featured things that weren't food (so you were under weight). Now it contains calories that aren't easy to burn off.
If you were a one parent family with say two kids and struggling financially this would seem a cheap way to feed the family for three or four dinners
500g of pasta, one tin of tomatoes and 1kg of chicken is not going to provide 12 dinners, unless they are all for Tiny Tim. What planet are you on?
Two tins of tomatoes.
I am on planet normal - that could easily make one adult and two kids half a weeks dinners
It works out at about 300 calories per meal for 12 meals. An adult needs 2000-2500 calories per day and a child aged 6-12 needs 1600-2200. So 300 for your main meal of the day looks pretty inadequate. I shop and cook for a family of five and I can tell you that your meal would do us for about one dinner, maybe with a bit left over. Our kids are far from fat (in fact most clothes don't fit them because they are too skinny) so we are definitely not overfeeding them.
Fair enough, let them buy double what I suggested - three or four meals for less than £12
I think there is general agreement that people can just about afford to eat a decent diet on benefits as long as they don't buy anything else. Unfortunately people also need to pay for clothes, transport, heating, etc. Some people compound their difficulties by not knowing how to cook (a widespread problem not only affecting the poor; not helped by schools no longer teaching home economics). Some people working long hours and shifts don't have time to cook. Some people don't have the equipment. I just find all this smug wisdom being dispensed by well off people a bit too Marie Antoinette* for my liking. (*I know she was misquoted).
How much do you think is required to feed a family of four 2 children 2 adults per week? As a pound figure?
About £150. Less if the kids are on free school meals. The Food Standards Agency have a report on the cost of a healthy food basket in Northern Ireland in 2018, they have it as £159 for a family of 4 with 2 school age kids. Presumably it is higher in 2020 with inflation, but NI may have higher costs than GB. I think we probably spend about £200/week on food for a family of 5. We don't shop at the cheapest supermarket and get organic meat and milk, but we cook everything from scratch which saves money and don't normally buy any alcohol.
And on uc the least that family would get per week is 229£ the most 253£
Add in 100£ per month for gas and electric 25£ per month for internet two sim only deals for the adults 10£ a month comes to another 33£ a week
So using your figure we come to 183£ leaving them between 46£ a week and 70£ a week
Aha you say they may need to pay some towards rent well lets add in another 100£ a month for rent and 60 for council tax thats another 34£ a week
Still leaves a net of 12£ a week to 36£ a week
Clothes and bus fares. Car needs a repair. Haircuts. Furniture and appliances need to be replaced. School trips. Curtains and bedding. This all assumes your benefits are paid on time, you don't get sanctioned unfairly, you're not subject to the bedroom tax etc.
The last sentence brings us back to UBI...
I'd like to see fair minimum determined by focus group and explicit listing of what, on average, should be covered as basic (what speed of broadband etc etc) year by year. And I'd mandate from government that contract exits are made available for discretionary services for change of circumstances (e.g. get sacked, you may bin Sky Sports: when you so wish)
That I would expect it to almost always work out at pretty much the 60% of median relative poverty line that the right love to whinge about is besides the point. The fact the right like to whinge about it is reason enough to sink government money into making an explicit calculation.
And UBI, plus a restructuring of tax to make good the difference (e.g. if you take UBI, you go on higher tax rates for a period of time, your call. And 'something, something' for the self employed), yes please. And btw, state pension, child benefit, student financing - yes, ultimately, they're going to be UBI too.
The contract exits seem a good idea or for that matter contract breaks. However what did I not list that you consider necessary?
Both adults have a mobile, they have internet access, they have gas and electric,they have food a roof some money left over for discretionary spending on clothes etc. That is by its very definition a safety net. The purpose of benefits is to provide support when you fall on hard times not to provide a living.
UBI is a pipedream that will never happen because it would cost too much. Merely giving every adult in britain 1000£ a month ubi would cost in the region of 480 billion and 1000 a month would not be enough to live on it would probably need to be double that assuming housing benefit and other benefits would be axed. Add in the NHS, defence,schools etc and you are pretty much looking at the entirety of GDP going to the government coffers. When that happens no one is getting enough extra from working to bother. Why would a surgeon do a hugely stressful job when he is not getting a lot more than the ubi recipient
Your maths is completely flawed because you're assuming that it would be new money.
If the UBI replaces the tax-free threshold then it is effectively cost-neutral for anyone over the tax-free threshold. Or is not much extra cash for those above the tax-free threshold.
For anyone on benefits it would replace or supplement the benefits they were getting previously - so again not much extra cash up front.
It should lead to major cost reductions. You could essentially abolish Job Centre Plus and streamline much of HMRC. Job centres should be about helping people find work because they want to rather than because they need to pretend they want to and need to attend meetings or they'll get sanctioned.
Done properly people should actually want to work anyway as the poverty trap the current benefits system creates would be abolished.
A surgeon would be earning well more than the UBI, that is ridiculous. In fact done properly every single person who works would be earning more than the UBI, the UBI would be the floor not the ceiling that benefits currently create.
It is your maths that is flawed I am afraid. The tax free threshold is 12500 or so about a 1000 a month. That saves you paying tax of 200£ a month so giving someone a 1000 a month is a net loss of 800£.
Yes if you abolished housing benefit and uc that would be a saving but lets face it that won't happen and if it did the howls of protest would be huge as people would be getting even less than they are now.
Going back to that family of four they currently get
1100 a month uc 1000 a month housing benefit about 150£ a month reduction on council tax
That is before we add in free school meals, prescriptions etc.
You plan to replace this with 2X1000 ubi leaving them 250£ less well off
In addition you are giving every basic rate tax payer a boost to their pay of 1000£ a month in pay while charging them 200£ more tax
In the case of the employed, the UBI would be *entirely* taxed off their wages and given back to them by the government.
At this point, people then say, why bother?
The point is to make the system utterly dependable. You get your UBI each month, no matter what. Lose your job, UBI etc etc
No forms to fill out, no claims to be made.
This has the important effect of reducing the obstacles to getting a job from unemployment - at the moment, there is a whole dance about signing off benefits etc.
In a UBI system, get some work, get some money, pay some tax. Your UBI cannot be effected.
Well see there is the issue you then have, if for example UBI is 1000 a month and if you work it all gets clawed back....
Working a 37.5 hour week full time means you are working 1950 hours a year. A person working currently and earning 18000 a year loses 12000 automatically to claw back ubi plus the tax to cover the rest of govenment expenditure is probably working 1950 hours a year for 3 to 4000 pounds. A mere 70 to 80 pounds extra in their pocket a week. How many will just say not worth it?
Which is the old, old argument against benefits.....
Yet people do jobs where they get *less* than benefits - rare, but it does happen
Very common are jobs which only make marginally more than benefits. Tons of those. No shortage of applicants...
Go through the numbers I posted and point out where I was mistaken about the extra costs. I already pointed out your error in thinking the tax free allowance gives you a reduction of tax of that amount when it actually equates to saving you paying basic rate tax on the first 1042 a month you earn which at 20% is about 200 a month not a thousand
The tax free rate has a knock-on effect on the higher tax rate take too, although I doubt it's a massive amount.
Yes it does however he is still failing to get the basic point that a tax free allowance of 1000 a month does not give you 1000 in your pocket automatically it just saves you 200 in tax you would of otherwise paid
Did I blink and miss National Insurance getting abolished?
If you do this properly you merge everything into one. You have just a single UBI (possibly supplemented per child and any other supplementaries getting added to the base figure, like how your tax-free allowance can be adjusted today) and just a single tax rate on any earnings that you have. So it isn't just the tax on Income Tax you need to account for but the tax on National Insurance too.
If someone is earning £12,500 then they should get the UBI plus be taxed on the entire £12,500 with whatever their appropriate tax rate is. If we were to have a 33% tax rate (for Income Tax and NI combined) then that individual would be paying £4,125 in tax.
Currently that individual pays £360 in National Insurance, £0 in Income Tax per annum.
So you could make a UBI of £3,765 without affecting tax rates, giving any extra income to anyone, having any savings, having any growth or anything else. The rest would need to be funded.
Of course by doing this as well anything currently exempt from paying NI (like the elderly that get away without paying it) would now get caught up in NI. As they should.
Which is all well and good but if you want to have ubi that replaces all benefits then it must be enough to live on, 1000 a month per adult is already less than they would get on uc. What tax rate would that be combined....pretty close to 100 when you consider it will go to all adults whether working or not.
Feel free to point out the error in my calculations of what the required tax take would be in the previous thread. Yes I left out ni in calculating but that would only make a difference of 0.12*12500*51,000,000 so subtract another 76 billion of the almost trillion tax take the government would need taking it down to about 880 billion and reducing the extra tax needed to be raised on people to 290 billion on top of the 194 billion it currently takes off them
UBI (not a bad idea but it has to be done right and across the board and be simple) should be funded by wealth and inheritance tax rather than income tax. I believe that all humans today shoudl have some natural inheritance from past society but many do not and it is random depending on wishes of (now) dead people . So increase inheritance or related taxes like wealth and gift tax and say the UBI bit is the universal inheritance
I am not against the idea of UBI itself. What I am against is this idea that we can have ubi that is reasonable and not have to raise taxation to pay for it
How would the numbers look with a UBI of £1000/month (untaxed) plus a flat rate of 50% on all additional income?
50% is a lower marginal rate than most people on benefits end up with.
At £40k earnings, you've have an income of £32k, roughly what you'd get now. Below that you'd do slightly better than now, above that slightly worse. It wouldn't be far off parity, but without the pitfalls.
and get rid of the resentment of others getting benefits (as you get them as well!) which does neither current recipients or current thinkers of this any good . So win win
It would also eliminate the poverty trap that gets people into vicious debt spirals. Let us say that someone gets a bill of £100 they need to pay (or wants to save that towards an expenditure or holiday). With a minimum wage of £10 per hour (which it will be soon so use that as a clean number) and a 50% tax rate someone on minimum wage would need to pick up 20 extra hours of minimum wage overtime in a month to earn that much extra
Someone on welfare at £10 per hour currently would need to pick up over 55 hours of overtime to earn £100 extra.
You are assuming though that the income tax would only be 50%. It will need to be much higher as I showed around 221 billion extra in tax flowing into government coffers.
To give an example of being revenue neutral.
Someone earning 30k a year currently pays 3498 tax and 2460 national insurance. for a total of 5958£ a year
To pay the same he would therefore have to pay 12000 (for ubi) +5938 for a total of 17938.
(17938/30000)*100 is a tax rate of 62% now add in extra for the 221 billion extra we need to find
You're double-counting. If you had 62% then you would have to find any extra for anyone earning £30k you've already found it (since you've 'paid' both the UBI and the existing £5958). You've covered both. Plus then for anyone earning more than £30k (who of course is most income tax already) you're now taking more off them than you were before, while taking less from anyone earning less.
Hence why a flat-rate 50%, once you take into account all multipliers and other factors, would probably be about break even - while leaving the country in a healthier position without anyone getting taxed over 80% at the moment.
Furthermore even if there is extra money to be raised why shouldn't it be raised differently? Why should the burden of 80% marginal tax be levied on anyone, let alone those least able to pay it?
That only pays for his own it doesnt account for all the people which ubi will give extra income to which is where the extra money comes in.
For example all students will be getting UBI of 1000 where they currently get nothing
Stay at home parents, carers, pensioners that own their own home but only get a state pension, adults that live at home to name but a few
Don't worry we can always ask Europol for their copy...oh wait.
I haven't read the story - but surely they back up their records
They do, but they deleted it from the PNC and the servers it was connected to.
I fear, genuinely, that this was a cock up caused by the 40,000 alerts relating to European criminals have already been deleted from the PNC after Britain’s deal with the EU in the last few days.
Brexit you say? That is plausible: a new, possibly ad-hoc procedure created at short notice and implemented (we can say, with the benefit of hindsight) without adequate testing in response to a last-minute agreement.
It seems the plausible reason why they had to quickly mass delete tens of thousands of records.
Clearly he misses out the fact - cheap food = full of sugar and other crap to keep costs down.
The only difference between now and the 19th century is that then cheap food was poor quality and often featured things that weren't food (so you were under weight). Now it contains calories that aren't easy to burn off.
If you were a one parent family with say two kids and struggling financially this would seem a cheap way to feed the family for three or four dinners
500g of pasta, one tin of tomatoes and 1kg of chicken is not going to provide 12 dinners, unless they are all for Tiny Tim. What planet are you on?
Two tins of tomatoes.
I am on planet normal - that could easily make one adult and two kids half a weeks dinners
It works out at about 300 calories per meal for 12 meals. An adult needs 2000-2500 calories per day and a child aged 6-12 needs 1600-2200. So 300 for your main meal of the day looks pretty inadequate. I shop and cook for a family of five and I can tell you that your meal would do us for about one dinner, maybe with a bit left over. Our kids are far from fat (in fact most clothes don't fit them because they are too skinny) so we are definitely not overfeeding them.
Fair enough, let them buy double what I suggested - three or four meals for less than £12
I think there is general agreement that people can just about afford to eat a decent diet on benefits as long as they don't buy anything else. Unfortunately people also need to pay for clothes, transport, heating, etc. Some people compound their difficulties by not knowing how to cook (a widespread problem not only affecting the poor; not helped by schools no longer teaching home economics). Some people working long hours and shifts don't have time to cook. Some people don't have the equipment. I just find all this smug wisdom being dispensed by well off people a bit too Marie Antoinette* for my liking. (*I know she was misquoted).
How much do you think is required to feed a family of four 2 children 2 adults per week? As a pound figure?
About £150. Less if the kids are on free school meals. The Food Standards Agency have a report on the cost of a healthy food basket in Northern Ireland in 2018, they have it as £159 for a family of 4 with 2 school age kids. Presumably it is higher in 2020 with inflation, but NI may have higher costs than GB. I think we probably spend about £200/week on food for a family of 5. We don't shop at the cheapest supermarket and get organic meat and milk, but we cook everything from scratch which saves money and don't normally buy any alcohol.
And on uc the least that family would get per week is 229£ the most 253£
Add in 100£ per month for gas and electric 25£ per month for internet two sim only deals for the adults 10£ a month comes to another 33£ a week
So using your figure we come to 183£ leaving them between 46£ a week and 70£ a week
Aha you say they may need to pay some towards rent well lets add in another 100£ a month for rent and 60 for council tax thats another 34£ a week
Still leaves a net of 12£ a week to 36£ a week
Clothes and bus fares. Car needs a repair. Haircuts. Furniture and appliances need to be replaced. School trips. Curtains and bedding. This all assumes your benefits are paid on time, you don't get sanctioned unfairly, you're not subject to the bedroom tax etc.
The last sentence brings us back to UBI...
I'd like to see fair minimum determined by focus group and explicit listing of what, on average, should be covered as basic (what speed of broadband etc etc) year by year. And I'd mandate from government that contract exits are made available for discretionary services for change of circumstances (e.g. get sacked, you may bin Sky Sports: when you so wish)
That I would expect it to almost always work out at pretty much the 60% of median relative poverty line that the right love to whinge about is besides the point. The fact the right like to whinge about it is reason enough to sink government money into making an explicit calculation.
And UBI, plus a restructuring of tax to make good the difference (e.g. if you take UBI, you go on higher tax rates for a period of time, your call. And 'something, something' for the self employed), yes please. And btw, state pension, child benefit, student financing - yes, ultimately, they're going to be UBI too.
The contract exits seem a good idea or for that matter contract breaks. However what did I not list that you consider necessary?
Both adults have a mobile, they have internet access, they have gas and electric,they have food a roof some money left over for discretionary spending on clothes etc. That is by its very definition a safety net. The purpose of benefits is to provide support when you fall on hard times not to provide a living.
UBI is a pipedream that will never happen because it would cost too much. Merely giving every adult in britain 1000£ a month ubi would cost in the region of 480 billion and 1000 a month would not be enough to live on it would probably need to be double that assuming housing benefit and other benefits would be axed. Add in the NHS, defence,schools etc and you are pretty much looking at the entirety of GDP going to the government coffers. When that happens no one is getting enough extra from working to bother. Why would a surgeon do a hugely stressful job when he is not getting a lot more than the ubi recipient
Your maths is completely flawed because you're assuming that it would be new money.
If the UBI replaces the tax-free threshold then it is effectively cost-neutral for anyone over the tax-free threshold. Or is not much extra cash for those above the tax-free threshold.
For anyone on benefits it would replace or supplement the benefits they were getting previously - so again not much extra cash up front.
It should lead to major cost reductions. You could essentially abolish Job Centre Plus and streamline much of HMRC. Job centres should be about helping people find work because they want to rather than because they need to pretend they want to and need to attend meetings or they'll get sanctioned.
Done properly people should actually want to work anyway as the poverty trap the current benefits system creates would be abolished.
A surgeon would be earning well more than the UBI, that is ridiculous. In fact done properly every single person who works would be earning more than the UBI, the UBI would be the floor not the ceiling that benefits currently create.
It is your maths that is flawed I am afraid. The tax free threshold is 12500 or so about a 1000 a month. That saves you paying tax of 200£ a month so giving someone a 1000 a month is a net loss of 800£.
Yes if you abolished housing benefit and uc that would be a saving but lets face it that won't happen and if it did the howls of protest would be huge as people would be getting even less than they are now.
Going back to that family of four they currently get
1100 a month uc 1000 a month housing benefit about 150£ a month reduction on council tax
That is before we add in free school meals, prescriptions etc.
You plan to replace this with 2X1000 ubi leaving them 250£ less well off
In addition you are giving every basic rate tax payer a boost to their pay of 1000£ a month in pay while charging them 200£ more tax
In the case of the employed, the UBI would be *entirely* taxed off their wages and given back to them by the government.
At this point, people then say, why bother?
The point is to make the system utterly dependable. You get your UBI each month, no matter what. Lose your job, UBI etc etc
No forms to fill out, no claims to be made.
This has the important effect of reducing the obstacles to getting a job from unemployment - at the moment, there is a whole dance about signing off benefits etc.
In a UBI system, get some work, get some money, pay some tax. Your UBI cannot be effected.
Well see there is the issue you then have, if for example UBI is 1000 a month and if you work it all gets clawed back....
Working a 37.5 hour week full time means you are working 1950 hours a year. A person working currently and earning 18000 a year loses 12000 automatically to claw back ubi plus the tax to cover the rest of govenment expenditure is probably working 1950 hours a year for 3 to 4000 pounds. A mere 70 to 80 pounds extra in their pocket a week. How many will just say not worth it?
Which is the old, old argument against benefits.....
Yet people do jobs where they get *less* than benefits - rare, but it does happen
Very common are jobs which only make marginally more than benefits. Tons of those. No shortage of applicants...
Go through the numbers I posted and point out where I was mistaken about the extra costs. I already pointed out your error in thinking the tax free allowance gives you a reduction of tax of that amount when it actually equates to saving you paying basic rate tax on the first 1042 a month you earn which at 20% is about 200 a month not a thousand
The tax free rate has a knock-on effect on the higher tax rate take too, although I doubt it's a massive amount.
Yes it does however he is still failing to get the basic point that a tax free allowance of 1000 a month does not give you 1000 in your pocket automatically it just saves you 200 in tax you would of otherwise paid
Did I blink and miss National Insurance getting abolished?
If you do this properly you merge everything into one. You have just a single UBI (possibly supplemented per child and any other supplementaries getting added to the base figure, like how your tax-free allowance can be adjusted today) and just a single tax rate on any earnings that you have. So it isn't just the tax on Income Tax you need to account for but the tax on National Insurance too.
If someone is earning £12,500 then they should get the UBI plus be taxed on the entire £12,500 with whatever their appropriate tax rate is. If we were to have a 33% tax rate (for Income Tax and NI combined) then that individual would be paying £4,125 in tax.
Currently that individual pays £360 in National Insurance, £0 in Income Tax per annum.
So you could make a UBI of £3,765 without affecting tax rates, giving any extra income to anyone, having any savings, having any growth or anything else. The rest would need to be funded.
Of course by doing this as well anything currently exempt from paying NI (like the elderly that get away without paying it) would now get caught up in NI. As they should.
Which is all well and good but if you want to have ubi that replaces all benefits then it must be enough to live on, 1000 a month per adult is already less than they would get on uc. What tax rate would that be combined....pretty close to 100 when you consider it will go to all adults whether working or not.
Feel free to point out the error in my calculations of what the required tax take would be in the previous thread. Yes I left out ni in calculating but that would only make a difference of 0.12*12500*51,000,000 so subtract another 76 billion of the almost trillion tax take the government would need taking it down to about 880 billion and reducing the extra tax needed to be raised on people to 290 billion on top of the 194 billion it currently takes off them
UBI (not a bad idea but it has to be done right and across the board and be simple) should be funded by wealth and inheritance tax rather than income tax. I believe that all humans today shoudl have some natural inheritance from past society but many do not and it is random depending on wishes of (now) dead people . So increase inheritance or related taxes like wealth and gift tax and say the UBI bit is the universal inheritance
I am not against the idea of UBI itself. What I am against is this idea that we can have ubi that is reasonable and not have to raise taxation to pay for it
How would the numbers look with a UBI of £1000/month (untaxed) plus a flat rate of 50% on all additional income?
50% is a lower marginal rate than most people on benefits end up with.
At £40k earnings, you've have an income of £32k, roughly what you'd get now. Below that you'd do slightly better than now, above that slightly worse. It wouldn't be far off parity, but without the pitfalls.
and get rid of the resentment of others getting benefits (as you get them as well!) which does neither current recipients or current thinkers of this any good . So win win
It would also eliminate the poverty trap that gets people into vicious debt spirals. Let us say that someone gets a bill of £100 they need to pay (or wants to save that towards an expenditure or holiday). With a minimum wage of £10 per hour (which it will be soon so use that as a clean number) and a 50% tax rate someone on minimum wage would need to pick up 20 extra hours of minimum wage overtime in a month to earn that much extra
Someone on welfare at £10 per hour currently would need to pick up over 55 hours of overtime to earn £100 extra.
You are assuming though that the income tax would only be 50%. It will need to be much higher as I showed around 221 billion extra in tax flowing into government coffers.
To give an example of being revenue neutral.
Someone earning 30k a year currently pays 3498 tax and 2460 national insurance. for a total of 5958£ a year
To pay the same he would therefore have to pay 12000 (for ubi) +5938 for a total of 17938.
(17938/30000)*100 is a tax rate of 62% now add in extra for the 221 billion extra we need to find
You're double-counting. If you had 62% then you would have to find any extra for anyone earning £30k you've already found it (since you've 'paid' both the UBI and the existing £5958). You've covered both. Plus then for anyone earning more than £30k (who of course is most income tax already) you're now taking more off them than you were before, while taking less from anyone earning less.
Hence why a flat-rate 50%, once you take into account all multipliers and other factors, would probably be about break even - while leaving the country in a healthier position without anyone getting taxed over 80% at the moment.
Furthermore even if there is extra money to be raised why shouldn't it be raised differently? Why should the burden of 80% marginal tax be levied on anyone, let alone those least able to pay it?
That only pays for his own it doesnt account for all the people which ubi will give extra income to which is where the extra money comes in.
For example all students will be getting UBI of 1000 where they currently get nothing
Stay at home parents, carers, pensioners that own their own home but only get a state pension, adults that live at home to name but a few
With students , you could then reduce student loans (which although a nominal loan as opposed to a grant does cost a lot (or will in years to come) in defaults .
Fascinating, I suspect this is as much an insight into a country's overall international reputation as anything else. The US is the world leader in pharmaceutical research so to be viewed in the middle of the pack illustrates how Trump has tarnished the brand. We are still looked on quite positively by Asia and our ex colonies but the Europeans don't like us, especially the French and Germans, a sad reflection on Brexit. Countries in Asia really believe their own publicity. The US too, compared to other Western countries, although for a large and insular country maybe that's to be expected. And people really trust the Germans - which goes to show that international reputations really can be rehabilitated through good behaviour.
Hang on, I thought we were all ghastly oppressive racists universally despised in our ex-colonies due to slavery and colonialism, made worse by Brexit, or something?
Just seen that Toby Young is defending himself with the claim that ACTUALLY the IFR is only 0.25% and this is PROVEN!
Can't he do basic arithmetic?
If the IFR is 0.25%, then over half the country have had it.
In the North West, we've apparently passed 70% infected without seeing any increase in herd immunity, which is a bit disconcerting. And, burrowing down, out of the quarter-million people in Barnsley (which is large enough to be a statistical sample), 99.8% have had covid. So, under 500 people in Barnsley have apparently avoided covid to date. And the herd immunity threshold is pretty damn high, I guess.
(I've just noticed that 604 people had it in the w/e 9th January, so that's pretty much all of them, with a handful of reinfections...)
wrt discrepancy, tried to plot on same scale (as x-axis was missing above).
Isn't this because they're measuring slightly different things?
Absolutely but if you look over the full length of the pandemic they have pretty much moved in lockstep. Now though, with that last week in December, the 28 days figure has surged and the ONS figure is flat.
German toddlers called Fritz or Adele could be invited for a Covid-19 vaccination while octogenarian Peters and Brigittes will not, as an overzealous interpretation of data privacy laws in one state has forced officials to guess people’s ages from their first names.
Authorities in the northern German state of Lower Saxony claim legal hurdles blocked them from accessing official records when trying to send a written invitation for a vaccination appointment to all citizens aged over 80.
The state decided instead to use post office records, which it said met data protection requirements. But since the Deutsche Post database only partially includes dates of birth, officials have used people’s first names to estimate their ages and “increase the chances of reaching the right recipients”, a spokesperson told the newspaper Bild.
wrt discrepancy, tried to plot on same scale (as x-axis was missing above).
Isn't this because they're measuring slightly different things?
Absolutely but if you look over the full length of the pandemic they have pretty much moved in lockstep. Now though, with that last week in December, the 28 days figure has surged and the ONS figure is flat.
I wonder if the dept concerned spends half as much time considering before they implement their ideas.
Thanks and as I said I am not against UBI itself. Merely the idea that we can implement it at a level that makes it worthwhile and not have to raise taxes.
Like most policies there will be winners and losers and it may well be worth implementing but let us talk numbers and work out who will be losers and winners first and discuss if that is reasonable.
The other thing is off course second order effects. If for no effort 1000 drops into your account every month how much do you have to earn extra for example to make you want to get out of bed to scrub toilets for example 40 hours a week? 100, 200,300?
My suspicion is with a full country ubi a lot would only work a job a few months when they wanted something then go back to taking the money. I know for example if I was only getting 200£ extra for doing my job I would be saying take a hike and either finding a job I was willing to accept 200 for or staying in bed
German toddlers called Fritz or Adele could be invited for a Covid-19 vaccination while octogenarian Peters and Brigittes will not, as an overzealous interpretation of data privacy laws in one state has forced officials to guess people’s ages from their first names.
Authorities in the northern German state of Lower Saxony claim legal hurdles blocked them from accessing official records when trying to send a written invitation for a vaccination appointment to all citizens aged over 80.
The state decided instead to use post office records, which it said met data protection requirements. But since the Deutsche Post database only partially includes dates of birth, officials have used people’s first names to estimate their ages and “increase the chances of reaching the right recipients”, a spokesperson told the newspaper Bild.
They are pretty bonkers on this sort of thing, aren't they?
Clearly he misses out the fact - cheap food = full of sugar and other crap to keep costs down.
The only difference between now and the 19th century is that then cheap food was poor quality and often featured things that weren't food (so you were under weight). Now it contains calories that aren't easy to burn off.
If you were a one parent family with say two kids and struggling financially this would seem a cheap way to feed the family for three or four dinners
500g of pasta, one tin of tomatoes and 1kg of chicken is not going to provide 12 dinners, unless they are all for Tiny Tim. What planet are you on?
Two tins of tomatoes.
I am on planet normal - that could easily make one adult and two kids half a weeks dinners
It works out at about 300 calories per meal for 12 meals. An adult needs 2000-2500 calories per day and a child aged 6-12 needs 1600-2200. So 300 for your main meal of the day looks pretty inadequate. I shop and cook for a family of five and I can tell you that your meal would do us for about one dinner, maybe with a bit left over. Our kids are far from fat (in fact most clothes don't fit them because they are too skinny) so we are definitely not overfeeding them.
Fair enough, let them buy double what I suggested - three or four meals for less than £12
I think there is general agreement that people can just about afford to eat a decent diet on benefits as long as they don't buy anything else. Unfortunately people also need to pay for clothes, transport, heating, etc. Some people compound their difficulties by not knowing how to cook (a widespread problem not only affecting the poor; not helped by schools no longer teaching home economics). Some people working long hours and shifts don't have time to cook. Some people don't have the equipment. I just find all this smug wisdom being dispensed by well off people a bit too Marie Antoinette* for my liking. (*I know she was misquoted).
How much do you think is required to feed a family of four 2 children 2 adults per week? As a pound figure?
About £150. Less if the kids are on free school meals. The Food Standards Agency have a report on the cost of a healthy food basket in Northern Ireland in 2018, they have it as £159 for a family of 4 with 2 school age kids. Presumably it is higher in 2020 with inflation, but NI may have higher costs than GB. I think we probably spend about £200/week on food for a family of 5. We don't shop at the cheapest supermarket and get organic meat and milk, but we cook everything from scratch which saves money and don't normally buy any alcohol.
And on uc the least that family would get per week is 229£ the most 253£
Add in 100£ per month for gas and electric 25£ per month for internet two sim only deals for the adults 10£ a month comes to another 33£ a week
So using your figure we come to 183£ leaving them between 46£ a week and 70£ a week
Aha you say they may need to pay some towards rent well lets add in another 100£ a month for rent and 60 for council tax thats another 34£ a week
Still leaves a net of 12£ a week to 36£ a week
Clothes and bus fares. Car needs a repair. Haircuts. Furniture and appliances need to be replaced. School trips. Curtains and bedding. This all assumes your benefits are paid on time, you don't get sanctioned unfairly, you're not subject to the bedroom tax etc.
The last sentence brings us back to UBI...
I'd like to see fair minimum determined by focus group and explicit listing of what, on average, should be covered as basic (what speed of broadband etc etc) year by year. And I'd mandate from government that contract exits are made available for discretionary services for change of circumstances (e.g. get sacked, you may bin Sky Sports: when you so wish)
That I would expect it to almost always work out at pretty much the 60% of median relative poverty line that the right love to whinge about is besides the point. The fact the right like to whinge about it is reason enough to sink government money into making an explicit calculation.
And UBI, plus a restructuring of tax to make good the difference (e.g. if you take UBI, you go on higher tax rates for a period of time, your call. And 'something, something' for the self employed), yes please. And btw, state pension, child benefit, student financing - yes, ultimately, they're going to be UBI too.
The contract exits seem a good idea or for that matter contract breaks. However what did I not list that you consider necessary?
Both adults have a mobile, they have internet access, they have gas and electric,they have food a roof some money left over for discretionary spending on clothes etc. That is by its very definition a safety net. The purpose of benefits is to provide support when you fall on hard times not to provide a living.
UBI is a pipedream that will never happen because it would cost too much. Merely giving every adult in britain 1000£ a month ubi would cost in the region of 480 billion and 1000 a month would not be enough to live on it would probably need to be double that assuming housing benefit and other benefits would be axed. Add in the NHS, defence,schools etc and you are pretty much looking at the entirety of GDP going to the government coffers. When that happens no one is getting enough extra from working to bother. Why would a surgeon do a hugely stressful job when he is not getting a lot more than the ubi recipient
Your maths is completely flawed because you're assuming that it would be new money.
If the UBI replaces the tax-free threshold then it is effectively cost-neutral for anyone over the tax-free threshold. Or is not much extra cash for those above the tax-free threshold.
For anyone on benefits it would replace or supplement the benefits they were getting previously - so again not much extra cash up front.
It should lead to major cost reductions. You could essentially abolish Job Centre Plus and streamline much of HMRC. Job centres should be about helping people find work because they want to rather than because they need to pretend they want to and need to attend meetings or they'll get sanctioned.
Done properly people should actually want to work anyway as the poverty trap the current benefits system creates would be abolished.
A surgeon would be earning well more than the UBI, that is ridiculous. In fact done properly every single person who works would be earning more than the UBI, the UBI would be the floor not the ceiling that benefits currently create.
It is your maths that is flawed I am afraid. The tax free threshold is 12500 or so about a 1000 a month. That saves you paying tax of 200£ a month so giving someone a 1000 a month is a net loss of 800£.
Yes if you abolished housing benefit and uc that would be a saving but lets face it that won't happen and if it did the howls of protest would be huge as people would be getting even less than they are now.
Going back to that family of four they currently get
1100 a month uc 1000 a month housing benefit about 150£ a month reduction on council tax
That is before we add in free school meals, prescriptions etc.
You plan to replace this with 2X1000 ubi leaving them 250£ less well off
In addition you are giving every basic rate tax payer a boost to their pay of 1000£ a month in pay while charging them 200£ more tax
In the case of the employed, the UBI would be *entirely* taxed off their wages and given back to them by the government.
At this point, people then say, why bother?
The point is to make the system utterly dependable. You get your UBI each month, no matter what. Lose your job, UBI etc etc
No forms to fill out, no claims to be made.
This has the important effect of reducing the obstacles to getting a job from unemployment - at the moment, there is a whole dance about signing off benefits etc.
In a UBI system, get some work, get some money, pay some tax. Your UBI cannot be effected.
Well see there is the issue you then have, if for example UBI is 1000 a month and if you work it all gets clawed back....
Working a 37.5 hour week full time means you are working 1950 hours a year. A person working currently and earning 18000 a year loses 12000 automatically to claw back ubi plus the tax to cover the rest of govenment expenditure is probably working 1950 hours a year for 3 to 4000 pounds. A mere 70 to 80 pounds extra in their pocket a week. How many will just say not worth it?
Which is the old, old argument against benefits.....
Yet people do jobs where they get *less* than benefits - rare, but it does happen
Very common are jobs which only make marginally more than benefits. Tons of those. No shortage of applicants...
Go through the numbers I posted and point out where I was mistaken about the extra costs. I already pointed out your error in thinking the tax free allowance gives you a reduction of tax of that amount when it actually equates to saving you paying basic rate tax on the first 1042 a month you earn which at 20% is about 200 a month not a thousand
The tax free rate has a knock-on effect on the higher tax rate take too, although I doubt it's a massive amount.
Yes it does however he is still failing to get the basic point that a tax free allowance of 1000 a month does not give you 1000 in your pocket automatically it just saves you 200 in tax you would of otherwise paid
Did I blink and miss National Insurance getting abolished?
If you do this properly you merge everything into one. You have just a single UBI (possibly supplemented per child and any other supplementaries getting added to the base figure, like how your tax-free allowance can be adjusted today) and just a single tax rate on any earnings that you have. So it isn't just the tax on Income Tax you need to account for but the tax on National Insurance too.
If someone is earning £12,500 then they should get the UBI plus be taxed on the entire £12,500 with whatever their appropriate tax rate is. If we were to have a 33% tax rate (for Income Tax and NI combined) then that individual would be paying £4,125 in tax.
Currently that individual pays £360 in National Insurance, £0 in Income Tax per annum.
So you could make a UBI of £3,765 without affecting tax rates, giving any extra income to anyone, having any savings, having any growth or anything else. The rest would need to be funded.
Of course by doing this as well anything currently exempt from paying NI (like the elderly that get away without paying it) would now get caught up in NI. As they should.
Which is all well and good but if you want to have ubi that replaces all benefits then it must be enough to live on, 1000 a month per adult is already less than they would get on uc. What tax rate would that be combined....pretty close to 100 when you consider it will go to all adults whether working or not.
Feel free to point out the error in my calculations of what the required tax take would be in the previous thread. Yes I left out ni in calculating but that would only make a difference of 0.12*12500*51,000,000 so subtract another 76 billion of the almost trillion tax take the government would need taking it down to about 880 billion and reducing the extra tax needed to be raised on people to 290 billion on top of the 194 billion it currently takes off them
UBI (not a bad idea but it has to be done right and across the board and be simple) should be funded by wealth and inheritance tax rather than income tax. I believe that all humans today shoudl have some natural inheritance from past society but many do not and it is random depending on wishes of (now) dead people . So increase inheritance or related taxes like wealth and gift tax and say the UBI bit is the universal inheritance
I am not against the idea of UBI itself. What I am against is this idea that we can have ubi that is reasonable and not have to raise taxation to pay for it
How would the numbers look with a UBI of £1000/month (untaxed) plus a flat rate of 50% on all additional income?
50% is a lower marginal rate than most people on benefits end up with.
At £40k earnings, you've have an income of £32k, roughly what you'd get now. Below that you'd do slightly better than now, above that slightly worse. It wouldn't be far off parity, but without the pitfalls.
and get rid of the resentment of others getting benefits (as you get them as well!) which does neither current recipients or current thinkers of this any good . So win win
It would also eliminate the poverty trap that gets people into vicious debt spirals. Let us say that someone gets a bill of £100 they need to pay (or wants to save that towards an expenditure or holiday). With a minimum wage of £10 per hour (which it will be soon so use that as a clean number) and a 50% tax rate someone on minimum wage would need to pick up 20 extra hours of minimum wage overtime in a month to earn that much extra
Someone on welfare at £10 per hour currently would need to pick up over 55 hours of overtime to earn £100 extra.
You are assuming though that the income tax would only be 50%. It will need to be much higher as I showed around 221 billion extra in tax flowing into government coffers.
To give an example of being revenue neutral.
Someone earning 30k a year currently pays 3498 tax and 2460 national insurance. for a total of 5958£ a year
To pay the same he would therefore have to pay 12000 (for ubi) +5938 for a total of 17938.
(17938/30000)*100 is a tax rate of 62% now add in extra for the 221 billion extra we need to find
You're double-counting. If you had 62% then you would have to find any extra for anyone earning £30k you've already found it (since you've 'paid' both the UBI and the existing £5958). You've covered both. Plus then for anyone earning more than £30k (who of course is most income tax already) you're now taking more off them than you were before, while taking less from anyone earning less.
Hence why a flat-rate 50%, once you take into account all multipliers and other factors, would probably be about break even - while leaving the country in a healthier position without anyone getting taxed over 80% at the moment.
Furthermore even if there is extra money to be raised why shouldn't it be raised differently? Why should the burden of 80% marginal tax be levied on anyone, let alone those least able to pay it?
That only pays for his own it doesnt account for all the people which ubi will give extra income to which is where the extra money comes in.
For example all students will be getting UBI of 1000 where they currently get nothing
Stay at home parents, carers, pensioners that own their own home but only get a state pension, adults that live at home to name but a few
There would be two crossover points.
Those who don't work (so only get the floor) will be no better off.
Those who earn whatever crossover point you've calculated will also be no better off.
Done right anyone who does work but earns less that the employment crossover point would be better off. Anyone who earns over the employment crossover point may need to pay a bit more tax to fund the system. But they won't be on over 80% tax like the poorest are today.
Just seen that Toby Young is defending himself with the claim that ACTUALLY the IFR is only 0.25% and this is PROVEN!
Can't he do basic arithmetic?
If the IFR is 0.25%, then over half the country have had it.
In the North West, we've apparently passed 70% infected without seeing any increase in herd immunity, which is a bit disconcerting. And, burrowing down, out of the quarter-million people in Barnsley (which is large enough to be a statistical sample), 99.8% have had covid. So, under 500 people in Barnsley have apparently avoided covid to date. And the herd immunity threshold is pretty damn high, I guess.
(I've just noticed that 604 people had it in the w/e 9th January, so that's pretty much all of them, with a handful of reinfections...)
Bloody denialists can't even do arithmetic.
there were some absurd IFR claims though on the lockdowners side as well early on (even including official stats) - 3-4% quoted in all seriousness and he is a lot closer with his calc to the true IFR than they were
3-4% is what was forecast *if* the NHS was so overloaded it was unable to treat people.
It is, of course, unknowable if that is correct, as lockdowns and other measures exist specifically to prevent that circumstance occurring.
German toddlers called Fritz or Adele could be invited for a Covid-19 vaccination while octogenarian Peters and Brigittes will not, as an overzealous interpretation of data privacy laws in one state has forced officials to guess people’s ages from their first names.
Authorities in the northern German state of Lower Saxony claim legal hurdles blocked them from accessing official records when trying to send a written invitation for a vaccination appointment to all citizens aged over 80.
The state decided instead to use post office records, which it said met data protection requirements. But since the Deutsche Post database only partially includes dates of birth, officials have used people’s first names to estimate their ages and “increase the chances of reaching the right recipients”, a spokesperson told the newspaper Bild.
They are pretty bonkers on this sort of thing, aren't they?
I know we complain about our civil service gold plating EU regulations but this seems beyond any reason.
My old mum (75-79 group, no underlying conditions) got a call today to be vaccinated at a new local vaccination centre, first appointment offered was in 2 working days.
Impressive.
This is the first time in my adult life that I have ever wished I was older. I want that jab.
Think I might try a cheeky call. If I make the effort to go the centre - Lords cricket ground - would they fit me in?
You can take the boy out of the City...
The only other person I have heard saying just this is very wedged up hedgie.
What is it with you City types and entitlement?
If it's going to waste, why not?
Well at the hospital vaccination centres there isn't waste. Not sure about the independent vaccination centres but I'm not 100% sure a fit and able (if politically-challenged) man coming coming to them to ask about overflow is the way ahead.
But absolutely, we don't want waste so maybe there should be a "returns/standby" system.
I have also to say from my experience that very few people are cancelling/no showing.
Amber warning on heavy snow in Eastern England early Saturday am. . Mrs C is beginning to become concerned at the prospect of an elderly husband driving 10 miles in such conditions tomorrow morning.
German toddlers called Fritz or Adele could be invited for a Covid-19 vaccination while octogenarian Peters and Brigittes will not, as an overzealous interpretation of data privacy laws in one state has forced officials to guess people’s ages from their first names.
Authorities in the northern German state of Lower Saxony claim legal hurdles blocked them from accessing official records when trying to send a written invitation for a vaccination appointment to all citizens aged over 80.
The state decided instead to use post office records, which it said met data protection requirements. But since the Deutsche Post database only partially includes dates of birth, officials have used people’s first names to estimate their ages and “increase the chances of reaching the right recipients”, a spokesperson told the newspaper Bild.
They are pretty bonkers on this sort of thing, aren't they?
Finally an advantage if back in the 40's your over-obsequious parents had you Christened Adolph.
Don't worry we can always ask Europol for their copy...oh wait.
I haven't read the story - but surely they back up their records
They do, but they deleted it from the PNC and the servers it was connected to.
I fear, genuinely, that this was a cock up caused by the 40,000 alerts relating to European criminals have already been deleted from the PNC after Britain’s deal with the EU in the last few days.
Brexit you say? That is plausible: a new, possibly ad-hoc procedure created at short notice and implemented (we can say, with the benefit of hindsight) without adequate testing in response to a last-minute agreement.
It seems the plausible reason why they had to quickly mass delete tens of thousands of records.
Personally I think this is a bloody good thing, as the "retain records of people who were not charged with anything" has been ruled outside the European Convention on Human Rights by the Court. This case from 2008.
The UK legislation from 2009 is a bit of a joke in its "safeguards", as whilst it is possible to request a sample be destroyed, in practice it is hugely difficult. A recent court case in NI took 11 years to achieve that.
A small step in the right direction, albeit by computer glitch. But we need to dump this bit of the database state.
People who have been acquitted or discharged are innocent, and entitled to be treated as such.
Just watched a piece on Israel vaccine roll out. They are going great guns, but where they are really struggling is vulerable old people who can't travel. They are really struggling with pfizer vaccine to get to them. Instead trying to vaccinate those that provide care for them to minimize risk.
German toddlers called Fritz or Adele could be invited for a Covid-19 vaccination while octogenarian Peters and Brigittes will not, as an overzealous interpretation of data privacy laws in one state has forced officials to guess people’s ages from their first names.
Authorities in the northern German state of Lower Saxony claim legal hurdles blocked them from accessing official records when trying to send a written invitation for a vaccination appointment to all citizens aged over 80.
The state decided instead to use post office records, which it said met data protection requirements. But since the Deutsche Post database only partially includes dates of birth, officials have used people’s first names to estimate their ages and “increase the chances of reaching the right recipients”, a spokesperson told the newspaper Bild.
They are pretty bonkers on this sort of thing, aren't they?
I know we complain about our civil service gold plating EU regulations but this seems beyond any reason.
The Nazi's and Stasi have left a deep impression on the German mindset.
I know of Germans who refuse to use contactless payment in the UK for transport as they deem that as too much of an infringement of their privacy.
I wonder if the dept concerned spends half as much time considering before they implement their ideas.
Thanks and as I said I am not against UBI itself. Merely the idea that we can implement it at a level that makes it worthwhile and not have to raise taxes.
Like most policies there will be winners and losers and it may well be worth implementing but let us talk numbers and work out who will be losers and winners first and discuss if that is reasonable.
The other thing is off course second order effects. If for no effort 1000 drops into your account every month how much do you have to earn extra for example to make you want to get out of bed to scrub toilets for example 40 hours a week? 100, 200,300?
My suspicion is with a full country ubi a lot would only work a job a few months when they wanted something then go back to taking the money. I know for example if I was only getting 200£ extra for doing my job I would be saying take a hike and either finding a job I was willing to accept 200 for or staying in bed
Don't you think at some point ordinary working-age people ought to see a benefit from automation in terms of having more discretionary time? That's what UBI does, it takes the pressure off to work 45+ hours per week. That is a feature, not a bug.
Clearly he misses out the fact - cheap food = full of sugar and other crap to keep costs down.
The only difference between now and the 19th century is that then cheap food was poor quality and often featured things that weren't food (so you were under weight). Now it contains calories that aren't easy to burn off.
If you were a one parent family with say two kids and struggling financially this would seem a cheap way to feed the family for three or four dinners
500g of pasta, one tin of tomatoes and 1kg of chicken is not going to provide 12 dinners, unless they are all for Tiny Tim. What planet are you on?
Two tins of tomatoes.
I am on planet normal - that could easily make one adult and two kids half a weeks dinners
It works out at about 300 calories per meal for 12 meals. An adult needs 2000-2500 calories per day and a child aged 6-12 needs 1600-2200. So 300 for your main meal of the day looks pretty inadequate. I shop and cook for a family of five and I can tell you that your meal would do us for about one dinner, maybe with a bit left over. Our kids are far from fat (in fact most clothes don't fit them because they are too skinny) so we are definitely not overfeeding them.
Fair enough, let them buy double what I suggested - three or four meals for less than £12
I think there is general agreement that people can just about afford to eat a decent diet on benefits as long as they don't buy anything else. Unfortunately people also need to pay for clothes, transport, heating, etc. Some people compound their difficulties by not knowing how to cook (a widespread problem not only affecting the poor; not helped by schools no longer teaching home economics). Some people working long hours and shifts don't have time to cook. Some people don't have the equipment. I just find all this smug wisdom being dispensed by well off people a bit too Marie Antoinette* for my liking. (*I know she was misquoted).
How much do you think is required to feed a family of four 2 children 2 adults per week? As a pound figure?
About £150. Less if the kids are on free school meals. The Food Standards Agency have a report on the cost of a healthy food basket in Northern Ireland in 2018, they have it as £159 for a family of 4 with 2 school age kids. Presumably it is higher in 2020 with inflation, but NI may have higher costs than GB. I think we probably spend about £200/week on food for a family of 5. We don't shop at the cheapest supermarket and get organic meat and milk, but we cook everything from scratch which saves money and don't normally buy any alcohol.
And on uc the least that family would get per week is 229£ the most 253£
Add in 100£ per month for gas and electric 25£ per month for internet two sim only deals for the adults 10£ a month comes to another 33£ a week
So using your figure we come to 183£ leaving them between 46£ a week and 70£ a week
Aha you say they may need to pay some towards rent well lets add in another 100£ a month for rent and 60 for council tax thats another 34£ a week
Still leaves a net of 12£ a week to 36£ a week
Clothes and bus fares. Car needs a repair. Haircuts. Furniture and appliances need to be replaced. School trips. Curtains and bedding. This all assumes your benefits are paid on time, you don't get sanctioned unfairly, you're not subject to the bedroom tax etc.
The last sentence brings us back to UBI...
I'd like to see fair minimum determined by focus group and explicit listing of what, on average, should be covered as basic (what speed of broadband etc etc) year by year. And I'd mandate from government that contract exits are made available for discretionary services for change of circumstances (e.g. get sacked, you may bin Sky Sports: when you so wish)
That I would expect it to almost always work out at pretty much the 60% of median relative poverty line that the right love to whinge about is besides the point. The fact the right like to whinge about it is reason enough to sink government money into making an explicit calculation.
And UBI, plus a restructuring of tax to make good the difference (e.g. if you take UBI, you go on higher tax rates for a period of time, your call. And 'something, something' for the self employed), yes please. And btw, state pension, child benefit, student financing - yes, ultimately, they're going to be UBI too.
The contract exits seem a good idea or for that matter contract breaks. However what did I not list that you consider necessary?
Both adults have a mobile, they have internet access, they have gas and electric,they have food a roof some money left over for discretionary spending on clothes etc. That is by its very definition a safety net. The purpose of benefits is to provide support when you fall on hard times not to provide a living.
UBI is a pipedream that will never happen because it would cost too much. Merely giving every adult in britain 1000£ a month ubi would cost in the region of 480 billion and 1000 a month would not be enough to live on it would probably need to be double that assuming housing benefit and other benefits would be axed. Add in the NHS, defence,schools etc and you are pretty much looking at the entirety of GDP going to the government coffers. When that happens no one is getting enough extra from working to bother. Why would a surgeon do a hugely stressful job when he is not getting a lot more than the ubi recipient
Your maths is completely flawed because you're assuming that it would be new money.
If the UBI replaces the tax-free threshold then it is effectively cost-neutral for anyone over the tax-free threshold. Or is not much extra cash for those above the tax-free threshold.
For anyone on benefits it would replace or supplement the benefits they were getting previously - so again not much extra cash up front.
It should lead to major cost reductions. You could essentially abolish Job Centre Plus and streamline much of HMRC. Job centres should be about helping people find work because they want to rather than because they need to pretend they want to and need to attend meetings or they'll get sanctioned.
Done properly people should actually want to work anyway as the poverty trap the current benefits system creates would be abolished.
A surgeon would be earning well more than the UBI, that is ridiculous. In fact done properly every single person who works would be earning more than the UBI, the UBI would be the floor not the ceiling that benefits currently create.
It is your maths that is flawed I am afraid. The tax free threshold is 12500 or so about a 1000 a month. That saves you paying tax of 200£ a month so giving someone a 1000 a month is a net loss of 800£.
Yes if you abolished housing benefit and uc that would be a saving but lets face it that won't happen and if it did the howls of protest would be huge as people would be getting even less than they are now.
Going back to that family of four they currently get
1100 a month uc 1000 a month housing benefit about 150£ a month reduction on council tax
That is before we add in free school meals, prescriptions etc.
You plan to replace this with 2X1000 ubi leaving them 250£ less well off
In addition you are giving every basic rate tax payer a boost to their pay of 1000£ a month in pay while charging them 200£ more tax
In the case of the employed, the UBI would be *entirely* taxed off their wages and given back to them by the government.
At this point, people then say, why bother?
The point is to make the system utterly dependable. You get your UBI each month, no matter what. Lose your job, UBI etc etc
No forms to fill out, no claims to be made.
This has the important effect of reducing the obstacles to getting a job from unemployment - at the moment, there is a whole dance about signing off benefits etc.
In a UBI system, get some work, get some money, pay some tax. Your UBI cannot be effected.
Well see there is the issue you then have, if for example UBI is 1000 a month and if you work it all gets clawed back....
Working a 37.5 hour week full time means you are working 1950 hours a year. A person working currently and earning 18000 a year loses 12000 automatically to claw back ubi plus the tax to cover the rest of govenment expenditure is probably working 1950 hours a year for 3 to 4000 pounds. A mere 70 to 80 pounds extra in their pocket a week. How many will just say not worth it?
Which is the old, old argument against benefits.....
Yet people do jobs where they get *less* than benefits - rare, but it does happen
Very common are jobs which only make marginally more than benefits. Tons of those. No shortage of applicants...
Go through the numbers I posted and point out where I was mistaken about the extra costs. I already pointed out your error in thinking the tax free allowance gives you a reduction of tax of that amount when it actually equates to saving you paying basic rate tax on the first 1042 a month you earn which at 20% is about 200 a month not a thousand
The tax free rate has a knock-on effect on the higher tax rate take too, although I doubt it's a massive amount.
Yes it does however he is still failing to get the basic point that a tax free allowance of 1000 a month does not give you 1000 in your pocket automatically it just saves you 200 in tax you would of otherwise paid
Did I blink and miss National Insurance getting abolished?
If you do this properly you merge everything into one. You have just a single UBI (possibly supplemented per child and any other supplementaries getting added to the base figure, like how your tax-free allowance can be adjusted today) and just a single tax rate on any earnings that you have. So it isn't just the tax on Income Tax you need to account for but the tax on National Insurance too.
If someone is earning £12,500 then they should get the UBI plus be taxed on the entire £12,500 with whatever their appropriate tax rate is. If we were to have a 33% tax rate (for Income Tax and NI combined) then that individual would be paying £4,125 in tax.
Currently that individual pays £360 in National Insurance, £0 in Income Tax per annum.
So you could make a UBI of £3,765 without affecting tax rates, giving any extra income to anyone, having any savings, having any growth or anything else. The rest would need to be funded.
Of course by doing this as well anything currently exempt from paying NI (like the elderly that get away without paying it) would now get caught up in NI. As they should.
Which is all well and good but if you want to have ubi that replaces all benefits then it must be enough to live on, 1000 a month per adult is already less than they would get on uc. What tax rate would that be combined....pretty close to 100 when you consider it will go to all adults whether working or not.
Feel free to point out the error in my calculations of what the required tax take would be in the previous thread. Yes I left out ni in calculating but that would only make a difference of 0.12*12500*51,000,000 so subtract another 76 billion of the almost trillion tax take the government would need taking it down to about 880 billion and reducing the extra tax needed to be raised on people to 290 billion on top of the 194 billion it currently takes off them
UBI (not a bad idea but it has to be done right and across the board and be simple) should be funded by wealth and inheritance tax rather than income tax. I believe that all humans today shoudl have some natural inheritance from past society but many do not and it is random depending on wishes of (now) dead people . So increase inheritance or related taxes like wealth and gift tax and say the UBI bit is the universal inheritance
I am not against the idea of UBI itself. What I am against is this idea that we can have ubi that is reasonable and not have to raise taxation to pay for it
How would the numbers look with a UBI of £1000/month (untaxed) plus a flat rate of 50% on all additional income?
50% is a lower marginal rate than most people on benefits end up with.
At £40k earnings, you've have an income of £32k, roughly what you'd get now. Below that you'd do slightly better than now, above that slightly worse. It wouldn't be far off parity, but without the pitfalls.
and get rid of the resentment of others getting benefits (as you get them as well!) which does neither current recipients or current thinkers of this any good . So win win
It would also eliminate the poverty trap that gets people into vicious debt spirals. Let us say that someone gets a bill of £100 they need to pay (or wants to save that towards an expenditure or holiday). With a minimum wage of £10 per hour (which it will be soon so use that as a clean number) and a 50% tax rate someone on minimum wage would need to pick up 20 extra hours of minimum wage overtime in a month to earn that much extra
Someone on welfare at £10 per hour currently would need to pick up over 55 hours of overtime to earn £100 extra.
You are assuming though that the income tax would only be 50%. It will need to be much higher as I showed around 221 billion extra in tax flowing into government coffers.
To give an example of being revenue neutral.
Someone earning 30k a year currently pays 3498 tax and 2460 national insurance. for a total of 5958£ a year
To pay the same he would therefore have to pay 12000 (for ubi) +5938 for a total of 17938.
(17938/30000)*100 is a tax rate of 62% now add in extra for the 221 billion extra we need to find
You're double-counting. If you had 62% then you would have to find any extra for anyone earning £30k you've already found it (since you've 'paid' both the UBI and the existing £5958). You've covered both. Plus then for anyone earning more than £30k (who of course is most income tax already) you're now taking more off them than you were before, while taking less from anyone earning less.
Hence why a flat-rate 50%, once you take into account all multipliers and other factors, would probably be about break even - while leaving the country in a healthier position without anyone getting taxed over 80% at the moment.
Furthermore even if there is extra money to be raised why shouldn't it be raised differently? Why should the burden of 80% marginal tax be levied on anyone, let alone those least able to pay it?
That only pays for his own it doesnt account for all the people which ubi will give extra income to which is where the extra money comes in.
For example all students will be getting UBI of 1000 where they currently get nothing
Stay at home parents, carers, pensioners that own their own home but only get a state pension, adults that live at home to name but a few
There would be two crossover points.
Those who don't work (so only get the floor) will be no better off.
Those who earn whatever crossover point you've calculated will also be no better off.
Done right anyone who does work but earns less that the employment crossover point would be better off. Anyone who earns over the employment crossover point may need to pay a bit more tax to fund the system. But they won't be on over 80% tax like the poorest are today.
I mentions several people who would be better off.
A wife or husband that stays home currently gets nothing now they get 1000
A student currently gets nothing now he gets 1000
A pensioner that is on state pension only but owns their own home currently gets 640 but now gets 1000
A person that lives at their parents home gets currently 342/409 depending on age now they get 1000
Required vaccination rate (UK) is now 331,197 first doses per day to hit the 13.9 million first dose target by the end of February 15th.
This is a correction of my earlier post that used England figures.
After today the required vaccination rate has ticked up to 332,780 first doses per day.
And today, the required vaccination rate is up slightly to 333,283 first doses per day.
They are going to crush the original target, aren't they?
With the bad weather we might see a few days of reduction in numbers, but clearly the capacity should be there by end of next week to crush it. Just got to keep fingers crossed on supply.
I wonder if the dept concerned spends half as much time considering before they implement their ideas.
Thank you.
This is an issue that has bugged me and I've studied for decades. I believe in low taxes and have been always horrified that we have a nearly 100% (it used to be in extremis over 100% under Brown) tax on those who can least afford it. It traps people in poverty.
29% of Registered GOP voters disapprove or are not sure about Donald Trump? And less than half strongly approve of him?
Not all hope is lost about everyone in the the GOP yet.
Trump really is the American Corbyn. Once he's gone even the majority of Republicans will want to be moving away from him as fast as they can I expect.
Trump got 47% in 2020 and suffered a narrow defeat, Corbyn got 32% in 2019 and suffered a landslide defeat, that is the difference
7 million votes behind and 74 electoral votes behind is NOT a narrow defeat!
The great thing about the american system is it can be both close and not close at the same time, even more dramatically than ours I'd say. l
German toddlers called Fritz or Adele could be invited for a Covid-19 vaccination while octogenarian Peters and Brigittes will not, as an overzealous interpretation of data privacy laws in one state has forced officials to guess people’s ages from their first names.
Authorities in the northern German state of Lower Saxony claim legal hurdles blocked them from accessing official records when trying to send a written invitation for a vaccination appointment to all citizens aged over 80.
The state decided instead to use post office records, which it said met data protection requirements. But since the Deutsche Post database only partially includes dates of birth, officials have used people’s first names to estimate their ages and “increase the chances of reaching the right recipients”, a spokesperson told the newspaper Bild.
They are pretty bonkers on this sort of thing, aren't they?
I know we complain about our civil service gold plating EU regulations but this seems beyond any reason.
The Nazi's and Stasi have left a deep impression on the German mindset.
I know of Germans who refuse to use contactless payment in the UK for transport as they deem that as too much of an infringement of their privacy.
But medical records not including age, or not giving access to that information for vaccine programmes?
I wonder if the dept concerned spends half as much time considering before they implement their ideas.
Thanks and as I said I am not against UBI itself. Merely the idea that we can implement it at a level that makes it worthwhile and not have to raise taxes.
Like most policies there will be winners and losers and it may well be worth implementing but let us talk numbers and work out who will be losers and winners first and discuss if that is reasonable.
The other thing is off course second order effects. If for no effort 1000 drops into your account every month how much do you have to earn extra for example to make you want to get out of bed to scrub toilets for example 40 hours a week? 100, 200,300?
My suspicion is with a full country ubi a lot would only work a job a few months when they wanted something then go back to taking the money. I know for example if I was only getting 200£ extra for doing my job I would be saying take a hike and either finding a job I was willing to accept 200 for or staying in bed
Don't you think at some point ordinary working-age people ought to see a benefit from automation in terms of having more discretionary time? That's what UBI does, it takes the pressure off to work 45+ hours per week. That is a feature, not a bug.
As I said I am not against UBI. I just get frustrated by people who claim we can have meaningful ubi and it is revenue neutral. Which is why I have been posting numbers and pointing out we need to find extra revenue and asking where it comes from
German toddlers called Fritz or Adele could be invited for a Covid-19 vaccination while octogenarian Peters and Brigittes will not, as an overzealous interpretation of data privacy laws in one state has forced officials to guess people’s ages from their first names.
Authorities in the northern German state of Lower Saxony claim legal hurdles blocked them from accessing official records when trying to send a written invitation for a vaccination appointment to all citizens aged over 80.
The state decided instead to use post office records, which it said met data protection requirements. But since the Deutsche Post database only partially includes dates of birth, officials have used people’s first names to estimate their ages and “increase the chances of reaching the right recipients”, a spokesperson told the newspaper Bild.
They are pretty bonkers on this sort of thing, aren't they?
I wonder if the dept concerned spends half as much time considering before they implement their ideas.
Thank you.
This is an issue that has bugged me and I've studied for decades. I believe in low taxes and have been always horrified that we have a nearly 100% (it used to be in extremis over 100% under Brown) tax on those who can least afford it. It traps people in poverty.
Amber warning on heavy snow in Eastern England early Saturday am. . Mrs C is beginning to become concerned at the prospect of an elderly husband driving 10 miles in such conditions tomorrow morning.
Tonnes of it around here, must be impacting Yorkshire/East Mids/North East vaccination program a bit.
McConnell and the others really really need to remember that. They cannot deny Trump told the mob to go, and angered them, and whatever his personal intentions about that many more people, including some of them, could have been killed. That none of them did does not diminish the personal threat to them and their positions.
German toddlers called Fritz or Adele could be invited for a Covid-19 vaccination while octogenarian Peters and Brigittes will not, as an overzealous interpretation of data privacy laws in one state has forced officials to guess people’s ages from their first names.
Authorities in the northern German state of Lower Saxony claim legal hurdles blocked them from accessing official records when trying to send a written invitation for a vaccination appointment to all citizens aged over 80.
The state decided instead to use post office records, which it said met data protection requirements. But since the Deutsche Post database only partially includes dates of birth, officials have used people’s first names to estimate their ages and “increase the chances of reaching the right recipients”, a spokesperson told the newspaper Bild.
They are pretty bonkers on this sort of thing, aren't they?
With some reason.
Discriminating based on first names is not within reason.
If they can't look it up based on age like we can then the alternative is to have people of the right age apply, not guess what first name they have!
"A man has been charged after a 92-year-old woman was falsely billed £160 to be injected with a fake COVID-19 vaccine.
David Chambers, 33, of Surbiton, southwest London, was arrested on Wednesday 13 January and charged the next day with five crimes. The indictment includes two counts of fraud by false representation, one count of common assault and two breaches of COVID regulations."
German toddlers called Fritz or Adele could be invited for a Covid-19 vaccination while octogenarian Peters and Brigittes will not, as an overzealous interpretation of data privacy laws in one state has forced officials to guess people’s ages from their first names.
Authorities in the northern German state of Lower Saxony claim legal hurdles blocked them from accessing official records when trying to send a written invitation for a vaccination appointment to all citizens aged over 80.
The state decided instead to use post office records, which it said met data protection requirements. But since the Deutsche Post database only partially includes dates of birth, officials have used people’s first names to estimate their ages and “increase the chances of reaching the right recipients”, a spokesperson told the newspaper Bild.
They are pretty bonkers on this sort of thing, aren't they?
I know we complain about our civil service gold plating EU regulations but this seems beyond any reason.
The Nazi's and Stasi have left a deep impression on the German mindset.
I know of Germans who refuse to use contactless payment in the UK for transport as they deem that as too much of an infringement of their privacy.
But medical records not including age, or not giving access to that information for vaccine programmes?
There is an Air Crash Investigation programme about a German pilot crashed a jet, full of passengers as a suicide mission.
His propensity to do this was known to his doctors, however, privacy rules meant that there was no way any of their worries could be shared.
On the whole I think you are massively under estimating how important this is to the German mentality and whilst the 90m of them will clearly have different opinions, the median attitude will be well away from our opinions in terms of the importance of privacy.
I wonder if the dept concerned spends half as much time considering before they implement their ideas.
Thanks and as I said I am not against UBI itself. Merely the idea that we can implement it at a level that makes it worthwhile and not have to raise taxes.
Like most policies there will be winners and losers and it may well be worth implementing but let us talk numbers and work out who will be losers and winners first and discuss if that is reasonable.
The other thing is off course second order effects. If for no effort 1000 drops into your account every month how much do you have to earn extra for example to make you want to get out of bed to scrub toilets for example 40 hours a week? 100, 200,300?
My suspicion is with a full country ubi a lot would only work a job a few months when they wanted something then go back to taking the money. I know for example if I was only getting 200£ extra for doing my job I would be saying take a hike and either finding a job I was willing to accept 200 for or staying in bed
Don't you think at some point ordinary working-age people ought to see a benefit from automation in terms of having more discretionary time? That's what UBI does, it takes the pressure off to work 45+ hours per week. That is a feature, not a bug.
As I said I am not against UBI. I just get frustrated by people who claim we can have meaningful ubi and it is revenue neutral. Which is why I have been posting numbers and pointing out we need to find extra revenue and asking where it comes from
If not taxing the poorest over 80% of their marginal income requires charging the richest a bit more then I am OK with that.
How is it sane to have the poorest on a higher marginal tax rate than the richest? A flat tax rate would be better than that.
The most "nationalist" (i.e. vote for vaccine from their own country) are in China (+83), India (+68) Singapore (+61) and Australia (+57)*. Germany (+44) and the UK (+40) are ahead of vaccine sceptics USA & France (+36).
*Ironic - Australian vaccine was a "bust" - as it was based on inactivated HIV, the vaccinated starting returning positive HIV tests!
I feel like chinese respondents may act as though they are being watched at all times, just in case.
My old mum (75-79 group, no underlying conditions) got a call today to be vaccinated at a new local vaccination centre, first appointment offered was in 2 working days.
Impressive.
This is the first time in my adult life that I have ever wished I was older. I want that jab.
Think I might try a cheeky call. If I make the effort to go the centre - Lords cricket ground - would they fit me in?
You can take the boy out of the City...
The only other person I have heard saying just this is very wedged up hedgie.
What is it with you City types and entitlement?
I'm more a washed up hedgie. But the jab might get me back rolling again.
Gimme that jab, gimme that, gimme gimme that, gimme that jab, gimme jab, gimme gimme jab. Gimme that jab, gimme that, gimme gimme that, gimme gimme gimme that jab! ☺
"A man has been charged after a 92-year-old woman was falsely billed £160 to be injected with a fake COVID-19 vaccine.
David Chambers, 33, of Surbiton, southwest London, was arrested on Wednesday 13 January and charged the next day with five crimes. The indictment includes two counts of fraud by false representation, one count of common assault and two breaches of COVID regulations."
Comments
Isn't this because they're measuring slightly different things?
To give an example of being revenue neutral.
Someone earning 30k a year currently pays 3498 tax and 2460 national insurance. for a total of 5958£ a year
To pay the same he would therefore have to pay 12000 (for ubi) +5938 for a total of 17938.
(17938/30000)*100 is a tax rate of 62% now add in extra for the 221 billion extra we need to find
Can't he do basic arithmetic?
If the IFR is 0.25%, then over half the country have had it.
In the North West, we've apparently passed 70% infected without seeing any increase in herd immunity, which is a bit disconcerting.
And, burrowing down, out of the quarter-million people in Barnsley (which is large enough to be a statistical sample), 99.8% have had covid. So, under 500 people in Barnsley have apparently avoided covid to date. And the herd immunity threshold is pretty damn high, I guess.
(I've just noticed that 604 people had it in the w/e 9th January, so that's pretty much all of them, with a handful of reinfections...)
Bloody denialists can't even do arithmetic.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/dec/11/university-of-queensland-covid-vaccine-the-governments-pulled-the-plug-so-what-happens-now
...The Covid-19 spike protein has been the focus of UQ and other vaccines because it is the part of the virus that enables it to enter human cells, where it replicates. However, when synthetic versions of these spike proteins are used in vaccines, they become unstable and can change. This means that the immune system may not recognise the protein as Covid-19, and the correct immune response to protect against it won’t be triggered.
This is where the UQ’s molecular clamp comes in. It locks the “spike” protein into a shape, stabilising it, and this allows the immune system to be able to recognise and then neutralise the Covid-19 virus. The clamp chosen by UQ researchers comprises two fragments of the glycoprotein 41 protein found in HIV, as those fragments provided the greatest stability to the spike protein.
Researchers thought the risk of these fragments triggering an HIV immune response was low, but ultimately found during the trial that those who received the vaccine did produce a very low-level antibody response...
Worth pointing out that the AZN vaccine does not use anything to stabilise the spike protein in a similar manner (unlike the both the mRNA vaccines and the Johnson & Johnson one, which all do), and it has been suggested that might be a reason for its somewhat lower efficacy.
Federal prosecutors offered the most chilling description yet of rioters who seized the Capitol last week, writing in a new court filing that the intention was "to capture and assassinate elected officials."
The view was included in a memo seeking to keep Jacob Anthony Chansley, who rallied people inside the Capitol using a bullhorn, in detention. According to Capitol Police information included in the filing, Chansley was notable for his headdress, face paint and carrying of a six-foot spear.
"Strong evidence, including Chansley's own words and actions at the Capitol, supports that the intent of the Capitol rioters was to capture and assassinate elected officials in the United States government," government prosecutors wrote.
The allegations, written by Justice Department lawyers in Arizona, come as the government have begun describing in more alarming terms what transpired.
The only other person I have heard saying just this is very wedged up hedgie.
What is it with you City types and entitlement?
https://xkcd.com/327/
Vaccination rates per million:
Date England Northern Ireland Scotland Wales
11/01/2021 2163 3254 2285 1677
12/01/2021 3112 3805 2913 3268
13/01/2021 4282 5939 2953 3743
14/01/2021 4907 6245 3024 4323
Wonder whether there's bad weather or something holding it up. NI smashing it and Wales having a decent catch up.
Essential journeys only. Turning up at a vaccine site on spec doesn't seem helpful at all.
Hopefully he'll go the way of Alistair Hames and never cited as a seer for several months and counting.
Hence why a flat-rate 50%, once you take into account all multipliers and other factors, would probably be about break even - while leaving the country in a healthier position without anyone getting taxed over 80% at the moment.
Furthermore even if there is extra money to be raised why shouldn't it be raised differently? Why should the burden of 80% marginal tax be levied on anyone, let alone those least able to pay it?
But absolutely, we don't want waste so maybe there should be a "returns/standby" system.
I have also to say from my experience that very few people are cancelling/no showing.
Clearly a prelude to a Presidential run in 2024 - planning to build up the IOU chits from Congressional candidates.
For example all students will be getting UBI of 1000 where they currently get nothing
Stay at home parents, carers, pensioners that own their own home but only get a state pension, adults that live at home to name but a few
More seriously, new stretch target of 500k / week by this time next week would be an excellent achievement to go for.
Discuss.
I wonder if the dept concerned spends half as much time considering before they implement their ideas.
I wonder what is causing the divergence.
Authorities in the northern German state of Lower Saxony claim legal hurdles blocked them from accessing official records when trying to send a written invitation for a vaccination appointment to all citizens aged over 80.
The state decided instead to use post office records, which it said met data protection requirements. But since the Deutsche Post database only partially includes dates of birth, officials have used people’s first names to estimate their ages and “increase the chances of reaching the right recipients”, a spokesperson told the newspaper Bild.
From cases
From hospital admissions
Like most policies there will be winners and losers and it may well be worth implementing but let us talk numbers and work out who will be losers and winners first and discuss if that is reasonable.
The other thing is off course second order effects. If for no effort 1000 drops into your account every month how much do you have to earn extra for example to make you want to get out of bed to scrub toilets for example 40 hours a week? 100, 200,300?
My suspicion is with a full country ubi a lot would only work a job a few months when they wanted something then go back to taking the money. I know for example if I was only getting 200£ extra for doing my job I would be saying take a hike and either finding a job I was willing to accept 200 for or staying in bed
Those who don't work (so only get the floor) will be no better off.
Those who earn whatever crossover point you've calculated will also be no better off.
Done right anyone who does work but earns less that the employment crossover point would be better off.
Anyone who earns over the employment crossover point may need to pay a bit more tax to fund the system. But they won't be on over 80% tax like the poorest are today.
It is, of course, unknowable if that is correct, as lockdowns and other measures exist specifically to prevent that circumstance occurring.
https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/app/conversion/pdf/?library=ECHR&id=003-2571936-2784147&filename=003-2571936-2784147.pdf
The UK legislation from 2009 is a bit of a joke in its "safeguards", as whilst it is possible to request a sample be destroyed, in practice it is hugely difficult. A recent court case in NI took 11 years to achieve that.
A small step in the right direction, albeit by computer glitch. But we need to dump this bit of the database state.
People who have been acquitted or discharged are innocent, and entitled to be treated as such.
They are going to crush the original target, aren't they?
With orange highlights.
I know of Germans who refuse to use contactless payment in the UK for transport as they deem that as too much of an infringement of their privacy.
A wife or husband that stays home currently gets nothing now they get 1000
A student currently gets nothing now he gets 1000
A pensioner that is on state pension only but owns their own home currently gets 640 but now gets 1000
A person that lives at their parents home gets currently 342/409 depending on age now they get 1000
This is an issue that has bugged me and I've studied for decades. I believe in low taxes and have been always horrified that we have a nearly 100% (it used to be in extremis over 100% under Brown) tax on those who can least afford it. It traps people in poverty.
If they can't look it up based on age like we can then the alternative is to have people of the right age apply, not guess what first name they have!
David Chambers, 33, of Surbiton, southwest London, was arrested on Wednesday 13 January and charged the next day with five crimes. The indictment includes two counts of fraud by false representation, one count of common assault and two breaches of COVID regulations."
https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-man-charged-with-assault-after-woman-92-injected-with-fake-coronavirus-vaccine-12188770
His propensity to do this was known to his doctors, however, privacy rules meant that there was no way any of their worries could be shared.
On the whole I think you are massively under estimating how important this is to the German mentality and whilst the 90m of them will clearly have different opinions, the median attitude will be well away from our opinions in terms of the importance of privacy.
How is it sane to have the poorest on a higher marginal tax rate than the richest? A flat tax rate would be better than that.
Gimme that jab, gimme that, gimme gimme that, gimme that jab, gimme jab, gimme gimme jab. Gimme that jab, gimme that, gimme gimme that, gimme gimme gimme that jab! ☺
Other proposals to solve cash crisis include cutting bus services, increasing fares and delaying the reopening of the Night Tube
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/transport/driver-550-daily-charge-greater-london-tube-zones-b899871.html
700k people have left London in the past year.
In other news, the cuts to the "levelling up of the North" begin.
https://twitter.com/ChronicleLive/status/1350121063649325064?s=20