Mr. (Ms?) Moonshine, more than half of households have an Amazon Prime subscription? If true, that's an astonishing stat.
Shows how gullible the fools are. I wonder how many of them even know they've got one. Amazon pulls out all the stops to get buyers to give them a contract for Prime, including by encouraging the less wary and literate to think it's a way to get "free" shipping. The button saying "No thanks, I want to forgo all the benefits of Prime and I might get free shipping this way too but everyone in the world will think I'm a pauper or else very mean" is usually very grey and not at all colourful. Think of how a six-month old baby decides what baby books they prefer.
??? I've had amazon prime for years.
£80 a year for free next day delivery of everything is a great deal if you use it often enough.
The upside for Amazon is that you then use Amazon for a lot more because delivery is already paid for.
And it crucifies smaller businesses
That is a fair point and that the government managed to create a new online sales tax but somehow exempt Amazon, seemingly without any big donations, dinners or tennis matches with the Tory party, is completely baffling.
It may be a moral failing of mine, but I must admit to find being a moral consumer hard, I enjoy the flexibility offered by Amazon and wouldn't like to give it up. Much prefer they are taxed and regulated fairly in relation to other businesses and employees, than consumer boycotts.
I must admit I do check off Amazon for other sellers as well (sometimes they are on Amazon but offer a better deal through their own websites).
Work hard, save, get your own home, then slowly lose it by having to either sell and downsize or have some sort of equity release nonsense.
Dr. Foxy, there's a reason medieval types loathed taxes. They were levied against property value (property as in general goods not just a home). Also, as a country, we need to save more. This is going to damage that as well.
Income tax should rise. It affects both the elderly and younger people and is fairer than raising NI.
Good to see a reasoned discussion on here today about funding social care and how to do it, without any nasty aggression or swearing
Absolutely right that we need a little Income Tax rise to fund this. It's fairer to all. I spent many efforts in trying to explain this very gently to @MaxPB but it didn't seem to sink in ... 😊
What we need is the integration of NI and IT so that everyone on the same income, whether from work or investments, under or over the age of retirement, pays the same. That would involve the retired having a larger tax increase than the rest of us initially but that additional burden will be borne by those with above average incomes who can, frankly, afford it, or at least afford it better than those trying to bring up children.
Increasing NI, paid by those who are suffering the most, to provide additional (and necessary) social care for the elderly is just not a solution that is worth the time of day.
Exactly. Spot on.
Time for a wealth tax too, ideally to help reduce the overall burdens of taxes on income.
Again, there are no taxes that do not have economic consequences. One of our biggest structural problems is our excessive tendency to consume. We simply do not, as a country, invest or save enough. This generates our serious balance of payments problem which have transformed us from a wealthy country with a considerable flow of investment income from abroad to a rentier economy, paying an ever increasing premium for the use of our own assets that have been bought up by foreigners.
Given this problem do we really want to disincentivise saving? I think we need a lot more of it.
One of the reasons for that is our complete lack of restrictions on foreign people buying property assets. It's sent property prices up so people who want to live here either have to waste money on rent or borrow a lot more to buy a house. You can see the step change once the foreign money started flowing into the UK housing market.
Isn't that a predominantly London problem though ?
Now if London wants to style itself as a 'world city' or even 'world capital' that's the sort of problem it needs to accept.
Mr. (Ms?) Moonshine, more than half of households have an Amazon Prime subscription? If true, that's an astonishing stat.
Shows how gullible the fools are. I wonder how many of them even know they've got one. Amazon pulls out all the stops to get buyers to give them a contract for Prime, including by encouraging the less wary and literate to think it's a way to get "free" shipping. The button saying "No thanks, I want to forgo all the benefits of Prime and I might get free shipping this way too but everyone in the world will think I'm a pauper or else very mean" is usually very grey and not at all colourful. Think of how a six-month old baby decides what baby books they prefer.
??? I've had amazon prime for years.
£80 a year for free next day delivery of everything is a great deal if you use it often enough.
The upside for Amazon is that you then use Amazon for a lot more because delivery is already paid for.
And it crucifies smaller businesses
That is a fair point and that the government managed to create a new online sales tax but somehow exempt Amazon, seemingly without any big donations, dinners or tennis matches with the Tory party, is completely baffling.
It may be a moral failing of mine, but I must admit to find being a moral consumer hard, I enjoy the flexibility offered by Amazon and wouldn't like to give it up. Much prefer they are taxed and regulated fairly in relation to other businesses and employees, than consumer boycotts.
I like the flexibility as well. Back in the day, living in a small town and being unable to source something reasonably local was a pain in the neck. It was bound to happen that someone could create an overarching sourcing company and delivery service. It is a shame for the small shopkeeper though. Things move on. I remember shopping towns in the 70s with very small supermarkets (the maypole, liptons, redmans), and the town was full everyday. Market days were fixed during the week. Then in the eighties the shopping centres and Malls arrived, Now the shopping streets are like ghost towns.
Work hard, save, get your own home, then slowly lose it by having to either sell and downsize or have some sort of equity release nonsense.
Dr. Foxy, there's a reason medieval types loathed taxes. They were levied against property value (property as in general goods not just a home). Also, as a country, we need to save more. This is going to damage that as well.
Income tax should rise. It affects both the elderly and younger people and is fairer than raising NI.
Good to see a reasoned discussion on here today about funding social care and how to do it, without any nasty aggression or swearing
Absolutely right that we need a little Income Tax rise to fund this. It's fairer to all. I spent many efforts in trying to explain this very gently to @MaxPB but it didn't seem to sink in ... 😊
What we need is the integration of NI and IT so that everyone on the same income, whether from work or investments, under or over the age of retirement, pays the same. That would involve the retired having a larger tax increase than the rest of us initially but that additional burden will be borne by those with above average incomes who can, frankly, afford it, or at least afford it better than those trying to bring up children.
Increasing NI, paid by those who are suffering the most, to provide additional (and necessary) social care for the elderly is just not a solution that is worth the time of day.
Exactly. Spot on.
Time for a wealth tax too, ideally to help reduce the overall burdens of taxes on income.
Again, there are no taxes that do not have economic consequences. One of our biggest structural problems is our excessive tendency to consume. We simply do not, as a country, invest or save enough. This generates our serious balance of payments problem which have transformed us from a wealthy country with a considerable flow of investment income from abroad to a rentier economy, paying an ever increasing premium for the use of our own assets that have been bought up by foreigners.
Given this problem do we really want to disincentivise saving? I think we need a lot more of it.
It's a good point but surely dealt with by a sufficiently high threshold. I'm suggesting £1m per individual, but I'd equally support a threshold of £5m per individual which could still raise £45bn pa at 1%.
Do we really need to encourage people to save >£5m each?
We need to recognise that most of us do not save anything at all. And many more "save" their house and that is it. As I reach 60 I am bemused that so many of my cohort are still managing debt on credit cards, car loans and the like. They have assets, usually houses, but are cash poor at a stage in life where they should be starting to draw down their savings.
The exceptions are those on final salaries who receive generous tax free lump sums on retirement but they are a privileged minority and I do not think that there are enough of them to pay the bills.
To say that most people save nothing at all is a gross exaggeration, but savings rates and totals are alarmingly low for even moderately comfortable households. According to this helpful digest - https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/savings-accounts/average-household-savings-uk - the median values for household savings are £11,000 for the total held, and the monthly savings rate is £180. Thus, half of households save more than this but half save less (and large numbers of the fiscally incontinent and the struggling alike have negative savings rates and are steadily sinking into debt, of course.)
Thus, if a typical household found its members out of work, they'd only be able to live off their savings for about 4-6 months before they were cleaned out and faced with ruin. Most people live quite precariously, even if they don't always realise it.
The point I was seeking to make is that most of our savings as a nation are done by the very well off. If we disincentivise them from saving then our national situation, already disastrous, will deteriorate. Savings of £180 a month just aren't going to cut it. In simple terms we need, as a nation, to save somewhere nearer to an additional £80bn a year, or something like £13k each. This is beyond most folk so we need to be careful about attacking those who do the majority of the saving for us.
I have never heard that argument before! For those too feckless to do their own saving please donate to @noneoftheabove.elitebankingforthe1%.com and I will be happy to do my patriotic duty and save on your behalf.
Opportunity (to save, this case) is reckoned to be a fine thing. It's not a question of being feckless. It's why, in days of yore, pubs ran Christmas Clubs. About the only thing many people 'save' for today are holidays. Otherwise there are deferred payments systems.
Pandemic lifestyle says different. Feckless is a horrible word I would only use as a parody. But people choose consumption over saving. It is a choice. If you look at the FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early) community you will find people on normal salaries saving half their income, just living very frugally to get an earlier retirement.
Interesting. And the pandemic has made people save, although the costs of a holiday in UK may have eaten into those savings. I suspect that people below median income, especially in the high cost areas, find saving a lot more difficult.
Mr. (Ms?) Moonshine, more than half of households have an Amazon Prime subscription? If true, that's an astonishing stat.
Shows how gullible the fools are. I wonder how many of them even know they've got one. Amazon pulls out all the stops to get buyers to give them a contract for Prime, including by encouraging the less wary and literate to think it's a way to get "free" shipping. The button saying "No thanks, I want to forgo all the benefits of Prime and I might get free shipping this way too but everyone in the world will think I'm a pauper or else very mean" is usually very grey and not at all colourful. Think of how a six-month old baby decides what baby books they prefer.
??? I've had amazon prime for years.
£80 a year for free next day delivery of everything is a great deal if you use it often enough.
The upside for Amazon is that you then use Amazon for a lot more because delivery is already paid for.
And it crucifies smaller businesses
That is a fair point and that the government managed to create a new online sales tax but somehow exempt Amazon, seemingly without any big donations, dinners or tennis matches with the Tory party, is completely baffling.
It may be a moral failing of mine, but I must admit to find being a moral consumer hard, I enjoy the flexibility offered by Amazon and wouldn't like to give it up. Much prefer they are taxed and regulated fairly in relation to other businesses and employees, than consumer boycotts.
I like the flexibility as well. Back in the day, living in a small town and being unable to source something reasonably local was a pain in the neck. It was bound to happen that someone could create an overarching sourcing company and delivery service. It is a shame for the small shopkeeper though. Things move on. I remember shopping towns in the 70s with very small supermarkets (the maypole, liptons, redmans), and the town was full everyday. Market days were fixed during the week. Then in the eighties the shopping centres and Malls arrived, Now the shopping streets are like ghost towns.
I don't have a car, so it was (for instance) infuriating when (for instance) the local DIY shops (2 at least in my small burgh) closed. Now with the internet it has been so much easier and quicker to get stuff (though for complex stuff like specially mixed paint it is sometimes better to phone them up and discuss with them).
And finding second hand books has been transformed.
Work hard, save, get your own home, then slowly lose it by having to either sell and downsize or have some sort of equity release nonsense.
Dr. Foxy, there's a reason medieval types loathed taxes. They were levied against property value (property as in general goods not just a home). Also, as a country, we need to save more. This is going to damage that as well.
Income tax should rise. It affects both the elderly and younger people and is fairer than raising NI.
Good to see a reasoned discussion on here today about funding social care and how to do it, without any nasty aggression or swearing
Absolutely right that we need a little Income Tax rise to fund this. It's fairer to all. I spent many efforts in trying to explain this very gently to @MaxPB but it didn't seem to sink in ... 😊
What we need is the integration of NI and IT so that everyone on the same income, whether from work or investments, under or over the age of retirement, pays the same. That would involve the retired having a larger tax increase than the rest of us initially but that additional burden will be borne by those with above average incomes who can, frankly, afford it, or at least afford it better than those trying to bring up children.
Increasing NI, paid by those who are suffering the most, to provide additional (and necessary) social care for the elderly is just not a solution that is worth the time of day.
Exactly. Spot on.
Time for a wealth tax too, ideally to help reduce the overall burdens of taxes on income.
Again, there are no taxes that do not have economic consequences. One of our biggest structural problems is our excessive tendency to consume. We simply do not, as a country, invest or save enough. This generates our serious balance of payments problem which have transformed us from a wealthy country with a considerable flow of investment income from abroad to a rentier economy, paying an ever increasing premium for the use of our own assets that have been bought up by foreigners.
Given this problem do we really want to disincentivise saving? I think we need a lot more of it.
One of the reasons for that is our complete lack of restrictions on foreign people buying property assets. It's sent property prices up so people who want to live here either have to waste money on rent or borrow a lot more to buy a house. You can see the step change once the foreign money started flowing into the UK housing market.
Isn't that a predominantly London problem though ?
Now if London wants to style itself as a 'world city' or even 'world capital' that's the sort of problem it needs to accept.
All the coastal towns moan about Londoners buying their property. If taxes on non resident London prices were much higher, Londoners in turn would by fewer coastal properties.
The point I was seeking to make is that most of our savings as a nation are done by the very well off. If we disincentivise them from saving then our national situation, already disastrous, will deteriorate. Savings of £180 a month just aren't going to cut it. In simple terms we need, as a nation, to save somewhere nearer to an additional £80bn a year, or something like £13k each. This is beyond most folk so we need to be careful about attacking those who do the majority of the saving for us.
It's not clear to me that 80 billion pounds of savings very unevenly distributed has the same benefit as 80 billion pounds of savings evenly distributed, though. The latter means everybody has a cushion against the unexpected; the former means that a small slice of the population (the well off middle classes and up) who likely already had decent savings have stashed away an even larger sum -- but they're not going to disburse it to the people who don't earn enough to save, so it's not (from a national perspective) as effective... I suspect I'm missing something here.
The point is about aggregate demand. Basically, as a nation, we consume about £80bn more than we produce. We don't produce that £80bn because we don't invest enough and our competitiveness is poor. It is a self reinforcing circle which we have been trapped in for more than 30 years, basically since North Sea oil stopped balancing the books for us.
The consequence of this is that £80bn of our assets fall into foreign ownership every year and we have to pay rent on them. This is becoming more and more of a problem. It means even a trade surplus now would be diminished by investment income flows in the way that they used to be offset by income coming the other way.
The point you are making is that we also have a really serious problem with individual excess consumption, the figures @malcolmg produced are horrendous. But these are simply a reflection of the national picture. Most of us live beyond our means. Why? Are we peculiarly feckless or stupid or do we have government policies and a tax structure that incentivises consumption and discourages saving? I think its the latter.
The point I was seeking to make is that most of our savings as a nation are done by the very well off. If we disincentivise them from saving then our national situation, already disastrous, will deteriorate. Savings of £180 a month just aren't going to cut it. In simple terms we need, as a nation, to save somewhere nearer to an additional £80bn a year, or something like £13k each. This is beyond most folk so we need to be careful about attacking those who do the majority of the saving for us.
It's not clear to me that 80 billion pounds of savings very unevenly distributed has the same benefit as 80 billion pounds of savings evenly distributed, though. The latter means everybody has a cushion against the unexpected; the former means that a small slice of the population (the well off middle classes and up) who likely already had decent savings have stashed away an even larger sum -- but they're not going to disburse it to the people who don't earn enough to save, so it's not (from a national perspective) as effective... I suspect I'm missing something here.
The point is about aggregate demand. Basically, as a nation, we consume about £80bn more than we produce. We don't produce that £80bn because we don't invest enough and our competitiveness is poor. It is a self reinforcing circle which we have been trapped in for more than 30 years, basically since North Sea oil stopped balancing the books for us.
The consequence of this is that £80bn of our assets fall into foreign ownership every year and we have to pay rent on them. This is becoming more and more of a problem. It means even a trade surplus now would be diminished by investment income flows in the way that they used to be offset by income coming the other way.
The point you are making is that we also have a really serious problem with individual excess consumption, the figures @malcolmg produced are horrendous. But these are simply a reflection of the national picture. Most of us live beyond our means. Why? Are we peculiarly feckless or stupid or do we have government policies and a tax structure that incentivises consumption and discourages saving? I think its the latter.
When and why did it become okay for people to spend money they don't have? It can't end well.
Niece went back to school this week - already a confirmed case in the class ....
buckle up for hysterical headlines as the cases rise.
Its why we should have been vaccinating kids about 2 months ago. At the very least it would have taken the edge off the increase and allowed the government to say that they were doing something about it.
The point I was seeking to make is that most of our savings as a nation are done by the very well off. If we disincentivise them from saving then our national situation, already disastrous, will deteriorate. Savings of £180 a month just aren't going to cut it. In simple terms we need, as a nation, to save somewhere nearer to an additional £80bn a year, or something like £13k each. This is beyond most folk so we need to be careful about attacking those who do the majority of the saving for us.
It's not clear to me that 80 billion pounds of savings very unevenly distributed has the same benefit as 80 billion pounds of savings evenly distributed, though. The latter means everybody has a cushion against the unexpected; the former means that a small slice of the population (the well off middle classes and up) who likely already had decent savings have stashed away an even larger sum -- but they're not going to disburse it to the people who don't earn enough to save, so it's not (from a national perspective) as effective... I suspect I'm missing something here.
The point is about aggregate demand. Basically, as a nation, we consume about £80bn more than we produce. We don't produce that £80bn because we don't invest enough and our competitiveness is poor. It is a self reinforcing circle which we have been trapped in for more than 30 years, basically since North Sea oil stopped balancing the books for us.
The consequence of this is that £80bn of our assets fall into foreign ownership every year and we have to pay rent on them. This is becoming more and more of a problem. It means even a trade surplus now would be diminished by investment income flows in the way that they used to be offset by income coming the other way.
The point you are making is that we also have a really serious problem with individual excess consumption, the figures @malcolmg produced are horrendous. But these are simply a reflection of the national picture. Most of us live beyond our means. Why? Are we peculiarly feckless or stupid or do we have government policies and a tax structure that incentivises consumption and discourages saving? I think its the latter.
When and why did it become okay for people to spend money they don't have? It can't end well.
Also, striking how the Balance of Payments fell out of primary national economic discourse - it used to be headline stuff.
I can't imagine anything more terrifying than losing one's mind.
If I ever get such a diagnosis, I'm heading for the Mediterranean, a good lunch and a very very long swim out to sea. Exhaustion, cold and the water will do the rest.
Though the Irish Sea would do just as well I suppose.
What I'm hoping for is to die in my garden, so I can just be laid in the earth and I can happily push up roses and daisies for all eternity. My family can have a proper Catholic Mass for me - with lovely hymns and tales of my outrageous behaviour - followed by one hell of a party back at the house and garden.
I will be mildly annoyed at missing the party but, hey, one can't have everything in life. Or death, come to that.
Ideally, I'd like to suddenly go overnight (with no warning, so I never know about it, and whilst I'm otherwise in very good health) some time in my 90s.
However, I think I'll need to be very lucky for that.
In Love in the Time of Cholera the character Jeremiah de Saint-Amour says, "I'll never be old" and kills himself on his 60th birthday. That has a certain philosophical coherence.
Niece went back to school this week - already a confirmed case in the class ....
buckle up for hysterical headlines as the cases rise.
Its why we should have been vaccinating kids about 2 months ago. At the very least it would have taken the edge off the increase and allowed the government to say that they were doing something about it.
Quite. Ms Sturgeon is evidently of your mind (!); she was complaining bitterly about the slowness of JCVI (I think) in even coming to a decision, and that was quite some weeks ago.
The point I was seeking to make is that most of our savings as a nation are done by the very well off. If we disincentivise them from saving then our national situation, already disastrous, will deteriorate. Savings of £180 a month just aren't going to cut it. In simple terms we need, as a nation, to save somewhere nearer to an additional £80bn a year, or something like £13k each. This is beyond most folk so we need to be careful about attacking those who do the majority of the saving for us.
It's not clear to me that 80 billion pounds of savings very unevenly distributed has the same benefit as 80 billion pounds of savings evenly distributed, though. The latter means everybody has a cushion against the unexpected; the former means that a small slice of the population (the well off middle classes and up) who likely already had decent savings have stashed away an even larger sum -- but they're not going to disburse it to the people who don't earn enough to save, so it's not (from a national perspective) as effective... I suspect I'm missing something here.
The point is about aggregate demand. Basically, as a nation, we consume about £80bn more than we produce. We don't produce that £80bn because we don't invest enough and our competitiveness is poor. It is a self reinforcing circle which we have been trapped in for more than 30 years, basically since North Sea oil stopped balancing the books for us.
The consequence of this is that £80bn of our assets fall into foreign ownership every year and we have to pay rent on them. This is becoming more and more of a problem. It means even a trade surplus now would be diminished by investment income flows in the way that they used to be offset by income coming the other way.
The point you are making is that we also have a really serious problem with individual excess consumption, the figures @malcolmg produced are horrendous. But these are simply a reflection of the national picture. Most of us live beyond our means. Why? Are we peculiarly feckless or stupid or do we have government policies and a tax structure that incentivises consumption and discourages saving? I think its the latter.
When and why did it become okay for people to spend money they don't have? It can't end well.
Also, striking how the Balance of Payments fell out of primary national economic discourse - it used to be headline stuff.
Gordon Brown said it didn't matter. That was an obvious red flag in retrospect.
I can't imagine anything more terrifying than losing one's mind.
If I ever get such a diagnosis, I'm heading for the Mediterranean, a good lunch and a very very long swim out to sea. Exhaustion, cold and the water will do the rest.
Though the Irish Sea would do just as well I suppose.
What I'm hoping for is to die in my garden, so I can just be laid in the earth and I can happily push up roses and daisies for all eternity. My family can have a proper Catholic Mass for me - with lovely hymns and tales of my outrageous behaviour - followed by one hell of a party back at the house and garden.
I will be mildly annoyed at missing the party but, hey, one can't have everything in life. Or death, come to that.
Ideally, I'd like to suddenly go overnight (with no warning, so I never know about it, and whilst I'm otherwise in very good health) some time in my 90s.
However, I think I'll need to be very lucky for that.
In Love in the Time of Cholera the character Jeremiah de Saint-Amour says, "I'll never be old" and kills himself on his 60th birthday. That has a certain philosophical coherence.
OTOH, another chap falls out of the tree when trying to extricate his parrot, and dies ...
He has been one of the better performers in the government during the pandemic. Measured and very on top of his brief. Probably due a promotion if some of the dead wood is being cleared out. Education Secretary too much to hope for?
Did the resigning Japanese PM not nominate their vaccine minister to take over...
So originally when Kono was given that job there was speculation that it was a poisoned chalice designed to knock out a potential rival. He was predictably shit at it, odious grandstander that he is, but it looks like he's going to fail upwards.
Apart from blaming local governments for not vaccinating fast enough then running out of vaccines, his other recent achievements were switching the order of the names on passports, so now half the passports have the first and last name in one order and the other half have them in the other order, and people are going to miss their flights faffing around with it. Also he made a great thing trying to impress everyone with how modern he was by telling Japanese ministries to stop using faxes, which obviously slows everything down because now they have to send their documents through the post.
I don't think that I have received a fax in 20 years. The last several were advertising bumf so when the paper ran out I did not replace it and eventually it was disconnected. Is this still a think in Japan?
It’s quite amazing in how many countries faxes (and cheques) are still around. Many legal systems consider a faxed document to be an ‘original’, but not an emailed document.
Thankfully the experience of the last 18 months has sped up the process of elimination, as services got forced online.
I’m making a call. The triple lock will remain untouched.
My reasoning - it’s more of a political gimmick, a very clever one, than an even more clever policy of genuinely helping pensioners right across the board. Politically, why bust your headline gimmick when there must by thousands of ways to claw the same money off the same people by stealth?
It's quite a lot of money, maybe not trivial to get it back by stealth without people noticing. Alzheimer's sufferer tax, I guess?
The way to fudge it is just to apply the adjustment over a whole parliamentary term, rather than every year. That preserves the spirit of the promise while sanding off the corona-induced crazy.
It's about £3 billion, and possibly less depending what increase Rishi does grant. That could probably be reclaimed by limiting tax relief on contributions, as last time, or in other ways. We should not count the cost as the difference between zero and full triple lock, because no-one thinks HMG will announce no inrease in pensions. The relevant figure is the difference between whatever Rishi will (or perhaps wants to) announce and full triple lock.
It will go from triple to double, dropping link to average earnings, absolutely politically impossible to drop link to inflation too.
But why even do that to a flagship electoral success, when you can just steal some back stealthily, such as cut to grant to local authorities, local authorities get blame for cutting what pensioners enjoyed, like bus routes that are already getting chopped right now in fact without central government getting the blame, in fact it’s their Tory MPs leading the local campaign to save them.
I think a lot of you can’t see how politically savvy the Conservative party is right now, because you can’t see passed the fog that is Boris.
Triple lock safe as safety mcsafeface, safeshire.
There's no need to drop the triple lock, just announce a technical "fix" to how earnings are calculated rather than looking at the past 12 months. Triple lock still in place, but the ridiculous 8% doesn't occur, because its not real in the first place.
Mr. (Ms?) Moonshine, more than half of households have an Amazon Prime subscription? If true, that's an astonishing stat.
Shows how gullible the fools are. I wonder how many of them even know they've got one. Amazon pulls out all the stops to get buyers to give them a contract for Prime, including by encouraging the less wary and literate to think it's a way to get "free" shipping. The button saying "No thanks, I want to forgo all the benefits of Prime and I might get free shipping this way too but everyone in the world will think I'm a pauper or else very mean" is usually very grey and not at all colourful. Think of how a six-month old baby decides what baby books they prefer.
??? I've had amazon prime for years.
£80 a year for free next day delivery of everything is a great deal if you use it often enough.
The upside for Amazon is that you then use Amazon for a lot more because delivery is already paid for.
And it crucifies smaller businesses
That is a fair point and that the government managed to create a new online sales tax but somehow exempt Amazon, seemingly without any big donations, dinners or tennis matches with the Tory party, is completely baffling.
It may be a moral failing of mine, but I must admit to find being a moral consumer hard, I enjoy the flexibility offered by Amazon and wouldn't like to give it up. Much prefer they are taxed and regulated fairly in relation to other businesses and employees, than consumer boycotts.
I like the flexibility as well. Back in the day, living in a small town and being unable to source something reasonably local was a pain in the neck. It was bound to happen that someone could create an overarching sourcing company and delivery service. It is a shame for the small shopkeeper though. Things move on. I remember shopping towns in the 70s with very small supermarkets (the maypole, liptons, redmans), and the town was full everyday. Market days were fixed during the week. Then in the eighties the shopping centres and Malls arrived, Now the shopping streets are like ghost towns.
I don't have a car, so it was (for instance) infuriating when (for instance) the local DIY shops (2 at least in my small burgh) closed. Now with the internet it has been so much easier and quicker to get stuff (though for complex stuff like specially mixed paint it is sometimes better to phone them up and discuss with them).
And finding second hand books has been transformed.
A Scottish Burgh? I remember when I lived in Aberdeen, sourcing wasn't as bad, but If the Guardian newspaper missed the train at Edinburgh or there was a printer's dispute reducing capacity, the whole of the North of Scotland lost their Guardians for the day! Supplies of specialist items were impossible when I lived in Elgin as well.
He has been one of the better performers in the government during the pandemic. Measured and very on top of his brief. Probably due a promotion if some of the dead wood is being cleared out. Education Secretary too much to hope for?
Did the resigning Japanese PM not nominate their vaccine minister to take over...
So originally when Kono was given that job there was speculation that it was a poisoned chalice designed to knock out a potential rival. He was predictably shit at it, odious grandstander that he is, but it looks like he's going to fail upwards.
Apart from blaming local governments for not vaccinating fast enough then running out of vaccines, his other recent achievements were switching the order of the names on passports, so now half the passports have the first and last name in one order and the other half have them in the other order, and people are going to miss their flights faffing around with it. Also he made a great thing trying to impress everyone with how modern he was by telling Japanese ministries to stop using faxes, which obviously slows everything down because now they have to send their documents through the post.
I don't think that I have received a fax in 20 years. The last several were advertising bumf so when the paper ran out I did not replace it and eventually it was disconnected. Is this still a think in Japan?
I imagine it's quicker to write than to type a document if it includes Chinese-style characters, though the Japanese also use two syllabic scripts IIRC (and roman too).
No, you mostly type the letter then print it out and fax it. Typing Japanese is pretty fast with a predictive system.
Way back when Microsoft or somebody tried to sell an input system where you write the character and scan it, thinking the IME systems looked cumbersome. What they didn't realize is that young people can't remember how to handwrite the characters, so they had to type it into their phone first to find out how to write it.
Mr. (Ms?) Moonshine, more than half of households have an Amazon Prime subscription? If true, that's an astonishing stat.
Shows how gullible the fools are. I wonder how many of them even know they've got one. Amazon pulls out all the stops to get buyers to give them a contract for Prime, including by encouraging the less wary and literate to think it's a way to get "free" shipping. The button saying "No thanks, I want to forgo all the benefits of Prime and I might get free shipping this way too but everyone in the world will think I'm a pauper or else very mean" is usually very grey and not at all colourful. Think of how a six-month old baby decides what baby books they prefer.
You cretinous halfwit , they pay for it and you have to physically purchase it.
You accidentally hit the wrong button when buying something and boom you're on the trial (which then will be billed if not cancelled).
You can cancel any time , you can return almost anything you purchase free of charge etc. Never had an issue and have returned many things. For me at £80 it is a bargain.
Yeah, easy to cancel. But that wasnt YoungTurk's point. They were saying it's very easy to accidentally sign up for it while ordering something.
I don't agree , it is very obvious and you can cancel Prime with one button press at any time, same as any regular order etc. YoungTurk is obviously not very bright or disingenious. I have had Prime since it came out and think it is very simple and find that if there are any mistakes or I don't like what I ordered , they take it back and pick it up free of charge as well. I may be lucky but doubt it.
It isn't very obvious, the button to continue without a prime trial is deliberately smaller and less prominent.
The point I was seeking to make is that most of our savings as a nation are done by the very well off. If we disincentivise them from saving then our national situation, already disastrous, will deteriorate. Savings of £180 a month just aren't going to cut it. In simple terms we need, as a nation, to save somewhere nearer to an additional £80bn a year, or something like £13k each. This is beyond most folk so we need to be careful about attacking those who do the majority of the saving for us.
It's not clear to me that 80 billion pounds of savings very unevenly distributed has the same benefit as 80 billion pounds of savings evenly distributed, though. The latter means everybody has a cushion against the unexpected; the former means that a small slice of the population (the well off middle classes and up) who likely already had decent savings have stashed away an even larger sum -- but they're not going to disburse it to the people who don't earn enough to save, so it's not (from a national perspective) as effective... I suspect I'm missing something here.
The point is about aggregate demand. Basically, as a nation, we consume about £80bn more than we produce. We don't produce that £80bn because we don't invest enough and our competitiveness is poor. It is a self reinforcing circle which we have been trapped in for more than 30 years, basically since North Sea oil stopped balancing the books for us.
The consequence of this is that £80bn of our assets fall into foreign ownership every year and we have to pay rent on them. This is becoming more and more of a problem. It means even a trade surplus now would be diminished by investment income flows in the way that they used to be offset by income coming the other way.
The point you are making is that we also have a really serious problem with individual excess consumption, the figures @malcolmg produced are horrendous. But these are simply a reflection of the national picture. Most of us live beyond our means. Why? Are we peculiarly feckless or stupid or do we have government policies and a tax structure that incentivises consumption and discourages saving? I think its the latter.
When and why did it become okay for people to spend money they don't have? It can't end well.
Also, striking how the Balance of Payments fell out of primary national economic discourse - it used to be headline stuff.
I guess it’s because of globalisation and so long as the currency doesn’t tank, then it doesn’t really matter. And it’s the same with monetary policy. So long as inflation isn’t a problem, the powers that be can keep interest rates at close to zero.
He has been one of the better performers in the government during the pandemic. Measured and very on top of his brief. Probably due a promotion if some of the dead wood is being cleared out. Education Secretary too much to hope for?
Did the resigning Japanese PM not nominate their vaccine minister to take over...
So originally when Kono was given that job there was speculation that it was a poisoned chalice designed to knock out a potential rival. He was predictably shit at it, odious grandstander that he is, but it looks like he's going to fail upwards.
Apart from blaming local governments for not vaccinating fast enough then running out of vaccines, his other recent achievements were switching the order of the names on passports, so now half the passports have the first and last name in one order and the other half have them in the other order, and people are going to miss their flights faffing around with it. Also he made a great thing trying to impress everyone with how modern he was by telling Japanese ministries to stop using faxes, which obviously slows everything down because now they have to send their documents through the post.
I don't think that I have received a fax in 20 years. The last several were advertising bumf so when the paper ran out I did not replace it and eventually it was disconnected. Is this still a think in Japan?
It’s quite amazing in how many countries faxes (and cheques) are still around. Many legal systems consider a faxed document to be an ‘original’, but not an emailed document.
Thankfully the experience of the last 18 months has sped up the process of elimination, as services got forced online.
Even only a couple of years ago that was still common places in some UK government departments. A stubborn refusal to accept anything online, while still using faxes.
The point I was seeking to make is that most of our savings as a nation are done by the very well off. If we disincentivise them from saving then our national situation, already disastrous, will deteriorate. Savings of £180 a month just aren't going to cut it. In simple terms we need, as a nation, to save somewhere nearer to an additional £80bn a year, or something like £13k each. This is beyond most folk so we need to be careful about attacking those who do the majority of the saving for us.
It's not clear to me that 80 billion pounds of savings very unevenly distributed has the same benefit as 80 billion pounds of savings evenly distributed, though. The latter means everybody has a cushion against the unexpected; the former means that a small slice of the population (the well off middle classes and up) who likely already had decent savings have stashed away an even larger sum -- but they're not going to disburse it to the people who don't earn enough to save, so it's not (from a national perspective) as effective... I suspect I'm missing something here.
The point is about aggregate demand. Basically, as a nation, we consume about £80bn more than we produce. We don't produce that £80bn because we don't invest enough and our competitiveness is poor. It is a self reinforcing circle which we have been trapped in for more than 30 years, basically since North Sea oil stopped balancing the books for us.
The consequence of this is that £80bn of our assets fall into foreign ownership every year and we have to pay rent on them. This is becoming more and more of a problem. It means even a trade surplus now would be diminished by investment income flows in the way that they used to be offset by income coming the other way.
The point you are making is that we also have a really serious problem with individual excess consumption, the figures @malcolmg produced are horrendous. But these are simply a reflection of the national picture. Most of us live beyond our means. Why? Are we peculiarly feckless or stupid or do we have government policies and a tax structure that incentivises consumption and discourages saving? I think its the latter.
When and why did it become okay for people to spend money they don't have? It can't end well.
There's an element of race memory, I suspect. Germans in the late 50's were prudent with money because their parents and grandparents told them about the 20's. My children grew up in the 70's and 80's when inflation was running at up to (almost) 20% some of the time, and 'buy now, pay later' made lot of sense. I think.... hope..... though that we're now leaving that experience behind.
Mr. Taz, a wealth tax seems unwise. If it doesn't apply to houses then people will just shovel their money into property, pushing up prices even more. If it does apply to houses then tons of people who spent their lives paying off a mortgage and have retired will have a new significant cost they can't afford.
If they're sitting on a large debt-free asset worth enough for the wealth tax to kick in then by definition they can afford the new cost.
Plenty of people are asset rich but cash poor. Effectively they In that situation will be forced to take secured loans or even sell to pay the debt.
If the figures are small (as they would be with a land value tax) it's possible for the money to be paid upfront against a first charge on the property.
That doesn't work for care homes as at £60,000 a year everything adds up quickly.
Most people's stay in care homes is not very long. I understand the median is about 9 months. I would have thought that the edge cases which involve staying for years could be covered by insurance of some kind.
The real issue is care in the community. There's lots of people struggling along with the help of relatives and/or 15 minute visits from carers. Very few live with their parents or grandparents any more.
They would be far better in a middle way of sheltered or purpose built accommodation but there isn't enough of it and there's a reluctance to sell up.
Lets face it, society is a Ponzi scheme, one way or another.
One further point - when my mum died I was warned by a friend to be cautious about buying sheltered accommodation for dad as it could be very difficult to sell. Which contradicts what you say, seemingly, please? In the end my father did not need it but it would be useful to know for other elderly relatives.
Sheltered accommodation usually comes with very high service charges, and the demand for it is much less than more regular apartments. It can take ages to sell it, or require heavy discounting if you need to sell in a hurry.
The point I was seeking to make is that most of our savings as a nation are done by the very well off. If we disincentivise them from saving then our national situation, already disastrous, will deteriorate. Savings of £180 a month just aren't going to cut it. In simple terms we need, as a nation, to save somewhere nearer to an additional £80bn a year, or something like £13k each. This is beyond most folk so we need to be careful about attacking those who do the majority of the saving for us.
It's not clear to me that 80 billion pounds of savings very unevenly distributed has the same benefit as 80 billion pounds of savings evenly distributed, though. The latter means everybody has a cushion against the unexpected; the former means that a small slice of the population (the well off middle classes and up) who likely already had decent savings have stashed away an even larger sum -- but they're not going to disburse it to the people who don't earn enough to save, so it's not (from a national perspective) as effective... I suspect I'm missing something here.
The point is about aggregate demand. Basically, as a nation, we consume about £80bn more than we produce. We don't produce that £80bn because we don't invest enough and our competitiveness is poor. It is a self reinforcing circle which we have been trapped in for more than 30 years, basically since North Sea oil stopped balancing the books for us.
The consequence of this is that £80bn of our assets fall into foreign ownership every year and we have to pay rent on them. This is becoming more and more of a problem. It means even a trade surplus now would be diminished by investment income flows in the way that they used to be offset by income coming the other way.
The point you are making is that we also have a really serious problem with individual excess consumption, the figures @malcolmg produced are horrendous. But these are simply a reflection of the national picture. Most of us live beyond our means. Why? Are we peculiarly feckless or stupid or do we have government policies and a tax structure that incentivises consumption and discourages saving? I think its the latter.
When and why did it become okay for people to spend money they don't have? It can't end well.
I think quite a lot of it came from big bang and the removal of restrictions in credit. This was a part of Thatcherism that Brown enthusiastically endorsed. When I was a trainee solicitor 40 years ago now there were queues for mortgages. Getting a credit card was hard. Loans were not easy either.
Politicians saw that increasing credit meant that the me generation got more now. Once the international balances of payments became less of an issue with the freer flow of capital it seemed an easy solution. So we had a boom based on excess consumption and the run down of savings. The theory was that these capital flows and external foreign investment could offset our ability to invest ourselves but the problem with that was these pesky foreigners wanting a return on their investment.
We are now in a deep hole. Getting out is not a job for this government, its a job for the governments of the next 30-40 years. But we do need to stop digging.
Mr. (Ms?) Moonshine, more than half of households have an Amazon Prime subscription? If true, that's an astonishing stat.
Shows how gullible the fools are. I wonder how many of them even know they've got one. Amazon pulls out all the stops to get buyers to give them a contract for Prime, including by encouraging the less wary and literate to think it's a way to get "free" shipping. The button saying "No thanks, I want to forgo all the benefits of Prime and I might get free shipping this way too but everyone in the world will think I'm a pauper or else very mean" is usually very grey and not at all colourful. Think of how a six-month old baby decides what baby books they prefer.
You cretinous halfwit , they pay for it and you have to physically purchase it.
You accidentally hit the wrong button when buying something and boom you're on the trial (which then will be billed if not cancelled).
You can cancel any time , you can return almost anything you purchase free of charge etc. Never had an issue and have returned many things. For me at £80 it is a bargain.
Yeah, easy to cancel. But that wasnt YoungTurk's point. They were saying it's very easy to accidentally sign up for it while ordering something.
I don't agree , it is very obvious and you can cancel Prime with one button press at any time, same as any regular order etc. YoungTurk is obviously not very bright or disingenious. I have had Prime since it came out and think it is very simple and find that if there are any mistakes or I don't like what I ordered , they take it back and pick it up free of charge as well. I may be lucky but doubt it.
It isn't very obvious, the button to continue without a prime trial is deliberately smaller and less prominent.
Mr. (Ms?) Moonshine, more than half of households have an Amazon Prime subscription? If true, that's an astonishing stat.
Shows how gullible the fools are. I wonder how many of them even know they've got one. Amazon pulls out all the stops to get buyers to give them a contract for Prime, including by encouraging the less wary and literate to think it's a way to get "free" shipping. The button saying "No thanks, I want to forgo all the benefits of Prime and I might get free shipping this way too but everyone in the world will think I'm a pauper or else very mean" is usually very grey and not at all colourful. Think of how a six-month old baby decides what baby books they prefer.
You cretinous halfwit , they pay for it and you have to physically purchase it.
You accidentally hit the wrong button when buying something and boom you're on the trial (which then will be billed if not cancelled).
You can cancel any time , you can return almost anything you purchase free of charge etc. Never had an issue and have returned many things. For me at £80 it is a bargain.
Yeah, easy to cancel. But that wasnt YoungTurk's point. They were saying it's very easy to accidentally sign up for it while ordering something.
I don't agree , it is very obvious and you can cancel Prime with one button press at any time, same as any regular order etc. YoungTurk is obviously not very bright or disingenious. I have had Prime since it came out and think it is very simple and find that if there are any mistakes or I don't like what I ordered , they take it back and pick it up free of charge as well. I may be lucky but doubt it.
It isn't very obvious, the button to continue without a prime trial is deliberately smaller and less prominent.
Mr. Taz, a wealth tax seems unwise. If it doesn't apply to houses then people will just shovel their money into property, pushing up prices even more. If it does apply to houses then tons of people who spent their lives paying off a mortgage and have retired will have a new significant cost they can't afford.
If they're sitting on a large debt-free asset worth enough for the wealth tax to kick in then by definition they can afford the new cost.
Plenty of people are asset rich but cash poor. Effectively they In that situation will be forced to take secured loans or even sell to pay the debt.
If the figures are small (as they would be with a land value tax) it's possible for the money to be paid upfront against a first charge on the property.
That doesn't work for care homes as at £60,000 a year everything adds up quickly.
Most people's stay in care homes is not very long. I understand the median is about 9 months. I would have thought that the edge cases which involve staying for years could be covered by insurance of some kind.
The real issue is care in the community. There's lots of people struggling along with the help of relatives and/or 15 minute visits from carers. Very few live with their parents or grandparents any more.
They would be far better in a middle way of sheltered or purpose built accommodation but there isn't enough of it and there's a reluctance to sell up.
Lets face it, society is a Ponzi scheme, one way or another.
One further point - when my mum died I was warned by a friend to be cautious about buying sheltered accommodation for dad as it could be very difficult to sell. Which contradicts what you say, seemingly, please? In the end my father did not need it but it would be useful to know for other elderly relatives.
Sheltered accommodation usually comes with very high service charges, and the demand for it is much less than more regular apartments. It can take ages to sell it, or require heavy discounting if you need to sell in a hurry.
Thanks - that makes sense. More sensible to rent as one might not end up needing it for very long anyway.
Niece went back to school this week - already a confirmed case in the class ....
buckle up for hysterical headlines as the cases rise.
Its why we should have been vaccinating kids about 2 months ago. At the very least it would have taken the edge off the increase and allowed the government to say that they were doing something about it.
Quite. Ms Sturgeon is evidently of your mind (!); she was complaining bitterly about the slowness of JCVI (I think) in even coming to a decision, and that was quite some weeks ago.
The honours system is a bit of flim-flam. Not worth very much. If people need a pat on the head to give money to charity that’s a bit sad but whatever. It’s much more serious when it’s things like a seat in the Lords.
@Benpointer i fully accept it looks bad, although that’s partly the way the media chooses to present it. Perhaps you create a new class on honour specific for people who give a lot of money to good causes?
More disturbing is the use of fixers who get fees. That’s bullshit. The Prince’s Foundation doesn’t need to pay introduction fees
@kle4 re the Sacklers the issue is the Library and Gallery were funded by the family of the younger brother who sold his shares *before* OxyContin was launched. Yes he sold Valium but I don’t think that was as bad(?). So the campaigners were punishing people who weren’t responsible and damaging the cultural sector because their cousins did bad stuff
That doesnt explain your reaction to the company being fined for its criminality which I recall you questioning in connection with how the money could be better utilised and referencing the arts. That punishment would be the least that could be done and is entirely distinct from campaigners going after previous Sackler contributions, but you connected the two as the campaigners do too, for different reason.
I have no problem with the company being forfeited and the owners paying restitution for their wrong doing (although as an aside what they did at Rhodes Pharma was far worse than Purdue).
May be you misremembered, or may be I didn’t express myself clearly enough.
There is a careful balance that needs to be struck when looking to charge people after the fact for consequences of legal actions, but Purdue overstepped the mark in terms of off-label marketing
Niece went back to school this week - already a confirmed case in the class ....
buckle up for hysterical headlines as the cases rise.
Its why we should have been vaccinating kids about 2 months ago. At the very least it would have taken the edge off the increase and allowed the government to say that they were doing something about it.
Quite. Ms Sturgeon is evidently of your mind (!); she was complaining bitterly about the slowness of JCVI (I think) in even coming to a decision, and that was quite some weeks ago.
However she always looks for a scapegoat such that it is never her fault , always the big boy ( he/ she / they / who/it/thing) that ran away
Mr. (Ms?) Moonshine, more than half of households have an Amazon Prime subscription? If true, that's an astonishing stat.
Shows how gullible the fools are. I wonder how many of them even know they've got one. Amazon pulls out all the stops to get buyers to give them a contract for Prime, including by encouraging the less wary and literate to think it's a way to get "free" shipping. The button saying "No thanks, I want to forgo all the benefits of Prime and I might get free shipping this way too but everyone in the world will think I'm a pauper or else very mean" is usually very grey and not at all colourful. Think of how a six-month old baby decides what baby books they prefer.
??? I've had amazon prime for years.
£80 a year for free next day delivery of everything is a great deal if you use it often enough.
The upside for Amazon is that you then use Amazon for a lot more because delivery is already paid for.
And it crucifies smaller businesses
That is a fair point and that the government managed to create a new online sales tax but somehow exempt Amazon, seemingly without any big donations, dinners or tennis matches with the Tory party, is completely baffling.
It may be a moral failing of mine, but I must admit to find being a moral consumer hard, I enjoy the flexibility offered by Amazon and wouldn't like to give it up. Much prefer they are taxed and regulated fairly in relation to other businesses and employees, than consumer boycotts.
I like the flexibility as well. Back in the day, living in a small town and being unable to source something reasonably local was a pain in the neck. It was bound to happen that someone could create an overarching sourcing company and delivery service. It is a shame for the small shopkeeper though. Things move on. I remember shopping towns in the 70s with very small supermarkets (the maypole, liptons, redmans), and the town was full everyday. Market days were fixed during the week. Then in the eighties the shopping centres and Malls arrived, Now the shopping streets are like ghost towns.
I don't have a car, so it was (for instance) infuriating when (for instance) the local DIY shops (2 at least in my small burgh) closed. Now with the internet it has been so much easier and quicker to get stuff (though for complex stuff like specially mixed paint it is sometimes better to phone them up and discuss with them).
And finding second hand books has been transformed.
A Scottish Burgh? I remember when I lived in Aberdeen, sourcing wasn't as bad, but If the Guardian newspaper missed the train at Edinburgh or there was a printer's dispute reducing capacity, the whole of the North of Scotland lost their Guardians for the day! Supplies of specialist items were impossible when I lived in Elgin as well.
Yep. Smaller though than Elgin (itself a nice place: been there a fair bit for work and a holiday).
Mr. Taz, a wealth tax seems unwise. If it doesn't apply to houses then people will just shovel their money into property, pushing up prices even more. If it does apply to houses then tons of people who spent their lives paying off a mortgage and have retired will have a new significant cost they can't afford.
If they're sitting on a large debt-free asset worth enough for the wealth tax to kick in then by definition they can afford the new cost.
Plenty of people are asset rich but cash poor. Effectively they In that situation will be forced to take secured loans or even sell to pay the debt.
If the figures are small (as they would be with a land value tax) it's possible for the money to be paid upfront against a first charge on the property.
That doesn't work for care homes as at £60,000 a year everything adds up quickly.
Most people's stay in care homes is not very long. I understand the median is about 9 months. I would have thought that the edge cases which involve staying for years could be covered by insurance of some kind.
The real issue is care in the community. There's lots of people struggling along with the help of relatives and/or 15 minute visits from carers. Very few live with their parents or grandparents any more.
They would be far better in a middle way of sheltered or purpose built accommodation but there isn't enough of it and there's a reluctance to sell up.
Lets face it, society is a Ponzi scheme, one way or another.
One further point - when my mum died I was warned by a friend to be cautious about buying sheltered accommodation for dad as it could be very difficult to sell. Which contradicts what you say, seemingly, please? In the end my father did not need it but it would be useful to know for other elderly relatives.
Sheltered accommodation usually comes with very high service charges, and the demand for it is much less than more regular apartments. It can take ages to sell it, or require heavy discounting if you need to sell in a hurry.
Thanks - that makes sense. More sensible to rent as one might not end up needing it for very long anyway.
That’s what my Dad did when he had to find somewhere to live at 84. Hopefully he’ll be there a while but it’s not going to be a millstone in future. A couple he looked at were being rented by inheritors of their parents estate as they couldn’t sell them
Mr. (Ms?) Moonshine, more than half of households have an Amazon Prime subscription? If true, that's an astonishing stat.
Shows how gullible the fools are. I wonder how many of them even know they've got one. Amazon pulls out all the stops to get buyers to give them a contract for Prime, including by encouraging the less wary and literate to think it's a way to get "free" shipping. The button saying "No thanks, I want to forgo all the benefits of Prime and I might get free shipping this way too but everyone in the world will think I'm a pauper or else very mean" is usually very grey and not at all colourful. Think of how a six-month old baby decides what baby books they prefer.
??? I've had amazon prime for years.
£80 a year for free next day delivery of everything is a great deal if you use it often enough.
The upside for Amazon is that you then use Amazon for a lot more because delivery is already paid for.
And it crucifies smaller businesses
That is a fair point and that the government managed to create a new online sales tax but somehow exempt Amazon, seemingly without any big donations, dinners or tennis matches with the Tory party, is completely baffling.
It may be a moral failing of mine, but I must admit to find being a moral consumer hard, I enjoy the flexibility offered by Amazon and wouldn't like to give it up. Much prefer they are taxed and regulated fairly in relation to other businesses and employees, than consumer boycotts.
I must admit I do check off Amazon for other sellers as well (sometimes they are on Amazon but offer a better deal through their own websites).
I never use Amazon; a personal boycott, if you like. Several reasons; they represent the worst of avaricious capitalism - huge profits that they don't pay enough tax on, dodgy treatment of workers, etc. But also because of Amazon's impact on the high street, and on smaller retailers - both physical and online, which is devastating.
Though I do confess I live in a city - if I lived out in the sticks, I may have to swallow my principles on occasion. And my efforts to persuade my kids to follow my lead have been an abject failure. It's a lonely war.
Niece went back to school this week - already a confirmed case in the class ....
buckle up for hysterical headlines as the cases rise.
Its why we should have been vaccinating kids about 2 months ago. At the very least it would have taken the edge off the increase and allowed the government to say that they were doing something about it.
Quite. Ms Sturgeon is evidently of your mind (!); she was complaining bitterly about the slowness of JCVI (I think) in even coming to a decision, and that was quite some weeks ago.
However she always looks for a scapegoat such that it is never her fault , always the big boy ( he/ she / they / who/it/thing) that ran away
In this case, though, it's a big boy who didn;t even ring the bell ...
All this money wasted to trash trade links with your biggest export market! Brexit really is a turd that only the most deluded can cling to and continue to justify .
As has just been said @RochdalePioneers no amount of attacks on Brexit is going to change it and the need now is for it to be made to work with compromise on all sides
What’s there to compromise on. The UK signed the trade deal and the WA , that should be the end of it . The negotiations are over . If the UK doesn’t like being treated as a third country it shouldn’t have left or should have done a trade deal with less barriers . Leavers own the whole stinking mess and should not be allowed to try and scapegoat the EU for the impact of their own vote .
As the old Irish joke has it, I wouldn’t start from here (as a response to being asked for directions to Dublin).
But it’s incumbent on all of us to build a better country starting with where we are. Your approach is not constructive
Mr. (Ms?) Moonshine, more than half of households have an Amazon Prime subscription? If true, that's an astonishing stat.
Shows how gullible the fools are. I wonder how many of them even know they've got one. Amazon pulls out all the stops to get buyers to give them a contract for Prime, including by encouraging the less wary and literate to think it's a way to get "free" shipping. The button saying "No thanks, I want to forgo all the benefits of Prime and I might get free shipping this way too but everyone in the world will think I'm a pauper or else very mean" is usually very grey and not at all colourful. Think of how a six-month old baby decides what baby books they prefer.
You cretinous halfwit , they pay for it and you have to physically purchase it.
You accidentally hit the wrong button when buying something and boom you're on the trial (which then will be billed if not cancelled).
You can cancel any time , you can return almost anything you purchase free of charge etc. Never had an issue and have returned many things. For me at £80 it is a bargain.
Yeah, easy to cancel. But that wasnt YoungTurk's point. They were saying it's very easy to accidentally sign up for it while ordering something.
I don't agree , it is very obvious and you can cancel Prime with one button press at any time, same as any regular order etc. YoungTurk is obviously not very bright or disingenious. I have had Prime since it came out and think it is very simple and find that if there are any mistakes or I don't like what I ordered , they take it back and pick it up free of charge as well. I may be lucky but doubt it.
It isn't very obvious, the button to continue without a prime trial is deliberately smaller and less prominent.
Imagine if leavers had adopted that attitude after Maastricht.
Exactly this.
Brexiteers launched a culture war that napalmed our children's future for a fantasy past, and now that it has turned out as well as Afghanistan they want us all to be friends and forget about it.
They won.
They will have to suck it up.
They *will* suck it up, gladly, telling you that they were right all along. You are fighting a battle you cannot win with people who will not be persuaded.
Leaving the EU is done. You will not persuade anyone that the decision was incorrect. Finding a place in the world outside the EU is not done, with the trade restrictions deal we signed with the EU still to fully kick in. Once it does then there is an opportunity to point to the cost and complexity and stupidity of the situation and start looking for solutions.
Quote them bloody Thatcher as she absolutely got the need to remove what we now have in exchange for free trade. You need to negotiate the deal on a ground where agreement is possible. All you and yours are doing is pushing the agreement range further and further away from your desired position.
It is, frankly, stupid.
It is but most people have moved on from it and all that is left is a few angry people howling at the moon. It’s a waste of energy and effort. But if people want to waste their time engaging in it they can.
They need to move on because we need to fix the growing disaster that is our post-brexit settlement. There is a reason the right wing have banged on about red tape for decades - and yet here we are with more red tape and more cost than ever imposed by the right wing.
Once the brexit war finally ends and their adrenaline rush subsides, the right are going to find themselves in a red tape hell of their own creation. The solution is the old solution - remove the costs and barriers to free trade.
The point I was seeking to make is that most of our savings as a nation are done by the very well off. If we disincentivise them from saving then our national situation, already disastrous, will deteriorate. Savings of £180 a month just aren't going to cut it. In simple terms we need, as a nation, to save somewhere nearer to an additional £80bn a year, or something like £13k each. This is beyond most folk so we need to be careful about attacking those who do the majority of the saving for us.
It's not clear to me that 80 billion pounds of savings very unevenly distributed has the same benefit as 80 billion pounds of savings evenly distributed, though. The latter means everybody has a cushion against the unexpected; the former means that a small slice of the population (the well off middle classes and up) who likely already had decent savings have stashed away an even larger sum -- but they're not going to disburse it to the people who don't earn enough to save, so it's not (from a national perspective) as effective... I suspect I'm missing something here.
The point is about aggregate demand. Basically, as a nation, we consume about £80bn more than we produce. We don't produce that £80bn because we don't invest enough and our competitiveness is poor. It is a self reinforcing circle which we have been trapped in for more than 30 years, basically since North Sea oil stopped balancing the books for us.
The consequence of this is that £80bn of our assets fall into foreign ownership every year and we have to pay rent on them. This is becoming more and more of a problem. It means even a trade surplus now would be diminished by investment income flows in the way that they used to be offset by income coming the other way.
The point you are making is that we also have a really serious problem with individual excess consumption, the figures @malcolmg produced are horrendous. But these are simply a reflection of the national picture. Most of us live beyond our means. Why? Are we peculiarly feckless or stupid or do we have government policies and a tax structure that incentivises consumption and discourages saving? I think its the latter.
When and why did it become okay for people to spend money they don't have? It can't end well.
Also, striking how the Balance of Payments fell out of primary national economic discourse - it used to be headline stuff.
Indeed. In the ‘80s there were stories of various government departments trying to ‘persuade’ British Airways to delay delivery of new 747s, because a $200m plane or two could make quite the difference to the quarterly BoP numbers!
Mr. (Ms?) Moonshine, more than half of households have an Amazon Prime subscription? If true, that's an astonishing stat.
Shows how gullible the fools are. I wonder how many of them even know they've got one. Amazon pulls out all the stops to get buyers to give them a contract for Prime, including by encouraging the less wary and literate to think it's a way to get "free" shipping. The button saying "No thanks, I want to forgo all the benefits of Prime and I might get free shipping this way too but everyone in the world will think I'm a pauper or else very mean" is usually very grey and not at all colourful. Think of how a six-month old baby decides what baby books they prefer.
??? I've had amazon prime for years.
£80 a year for free next day delivery of everything is a great deal if you use it often enough.
The upside for Amazon is that you then use Amazon for a lot more because delivery is already paid for.
And it crucifies smaller businesses
That is a fair point and that the government managed to create a new online sales tax but somehow exempt Amazon, seemingly without any big donations, dinners or tennis matches with the Tory party, is completely baffling.
It may be a moral failing of mine, but I must admit to find being a moral consumer hard, I enjoy the flexibility offered by Amazon and wouldn't like to give it up. Much prefer they are taxed and regulated fairly in relation to other businesses and employees, than consumer boycotts.
I must admit I do check off Amazon for other sellers as well (sometimes they are on Amazon but offer a better deal through their own websites).
I never use Amazon; a personal boycott, if you like. Several reasons; they represent the worst of avaricious capitalism - huge profits that they don't pay enough tax on, dodgy treatment of workers, etc. But also because of Amazon's impact on the high street, and on smaller retailers - both physical and online, which is devastating.
Though I do confess I live in a city - if I lived out in the sticks, I may have to swallow my principles on occasion. And my efforts to persuade my kids to follow my lead have been an abject failure. It's a lonely war.
Out in the sticks for me - but I agree about the taxation. And am shifting more from Amazon to the actual vendors as the latter have improved their online services and handling.
Imagine if leavers had adopted that attitude after Maastricht.
Exactly this.
Brexiteers launched a culture war that napalmed our children's future for a fantasy past, and now that it has turned out as well as Afghanistan they want us all to be friends and forget about it.
They won.
They will have to suck it up.
They *will* suck it up, gladly, telling you that they were right all along. You are fighting a battle you cannot win with people who will not be persuaded.
Leaving the EU is done. You will not persuade anyone that the decision was incorrect. Finding a place in the world outside the EU is not done, with the trade restrictions deal we signed with the EU still to fully kick in. Once it does then there is an opportunity to point to the cost and complexity and stupidity of the situation and start looking for solutions.
Quote them bloody Thatcher as she absolutely got the need to remove what we now have in exchange for free trade. You need to negotiate the deal on a ground where agreement is possible. All you and yours are doing is pushing the agreement range further and further away from your desired position.
It is, frankly, stupid.
It is but most people have moved on from it and all that is left is a few angry people howling at the moon. It’s a waste of energy and effort. But if people want to waste their time engaging in it they can.
They need to move on because we need to fix the growing disaster that is our post-brexit settlement. There is a reason the right wing have banged on about red tape for decades - and yet here we are with more red tape and more cost than ever imposed by the right wing.
Once the brexit war finally ends and their adrenaline rush subsides, the right are going to find themselves in a red tape hell of their own creation. The solution is the old solution - remove the costs and barriers to free trade.
Would love to do that
A genuine free trade agreement would be great.
Don’t need any of the political stuff though
Absolutely. So long as we're not in their customs union, or their "Single Market" the more red tape that can be reciprocally removed the better.
On topic: I'm up to my neck in Trump lays, for both the nomination and the WH. If he were to go all the way I'd lose all of my chunky 'TrumpToast' profits from 2020 and then some. But you know what, I do not give a fuck and I'll be doubling down if he goes very short off the back of an announcement he's running. Point 1, regardless of ostensibly sound analytics and logic trees, the big picture is I cannot see the US, having just recently dodged the self-inflicted bullet (a Trump 2nd term) that would have maimed it beyond recognition, deciding to reload and really do the job this time. Point 2, if I'm wrong we would be talking about a genuine catastrophe, something equivalent to a huge natural disaster, and I would not wish to make money out of such a thing. I'm a seasoned old campaigner of the betting trenches, proud to be better than most at this absorbing activity, but there are limits.
Mr. (Ms?) Moonshine, more than half of households have an Amazon Prime subscription? If true, that's an astonishing stat.
Shows how gullible the fools are. I wonder how many of them even know they've got one. Amazon pulls out all the stops to get buyers to give them a contract for Prime, including by encouraging the less wary and literate to think it's a way to get "free" shipping. The button saying "No thanks, I want to forgo all the benefits of Prime and I might get free shipping this way too but everyone in the world will think I'm a pauper or else very mean" is usually very grey and not at all colourful. Think of how a six-month old baby decides what baby books they prefer.
You cretinous halfwit , they pay for it and you have to physically purchase it.
You accidentally hit the wrong button when buying something and boom you're on the trial (which then will be billed if not cancelled).
You can cancel any time , you can return almost anything you purchase free of charge etc. Never had an issue and have returned many things. For me at £80 it is a bargain.
Yeah, easy to cancel. But that wasnt YoungTurk's point. They were saying it's very easy to accidentally sign up for it while ordering something.
I don't agree , it is very obvious and you can cancel Prime with one button press at any time, same as any regular order etc. YoungTurk is obviously not very bright or disingenious. I have had Prime since it came out and think it is very simple and find that if there are any mistakes or I don't like what I ordered , they take it back and pick it up free of charge as well. I may be lucky but doubt it.
It isn't very obvious, the button to continue without a prime trial is deliberately smaller and less prominent.
We're not talking about returning orders here, just about how it is easy to accidentally subscribe to their prime service.
you would soon notice the 80 quid charge and then cancel it
We have Amazon Prime because its great value, not because we're too thick to read a webpage.
Rather obnoxious of YoungTurk to imply otherwise about people.
I can confirm I have Amazon Prime because I'm too thick to read a web page. I definitely never knowingly ordered it, and I apparently have it. I could cancel it, but that would involve looking into it and deciding whether I want it or not, which I never get around to.
Amazon test every UX change to death so they know perfectly well that this is what happens, that's why they use dark patterns.
Mr. Taz, a wealth tax seems unwise. If it doesn't apply to houses then people will just shovel their money into property, pushing up prices even more. If it does apply to houses then tons of people who spent their lives paying off a mortgage and have retired will have a new significant cost they can't afford.
That's why a tax on sale is better (though not without some problems). You know the actual value of the house and the seller has the money. If they are trading down they don't need as much. If they are trading up, it helps cap price rises. It releases some of the value contained in property.
We can always find reasons not to do things, not to tax this, that and the other. But if we want a decent care system we will have to pay so rather than find reasons for not paying we need to find a way to pay which raises the money needed and is reasonably fair to all. Income tax is one such way, merging of NI with it and making it applicable to all another. Extending CGT a third. Some form of LVT or wealth tax another. All have pluses and minuses. But we can either argue about it for another 10/20 years and do nothing or actually get on with it.
So argument and doing nothing it is then ......
I'd go for a more broadly-based Inheritance Tax. One could lower the headline rate of 40% and still raise more money by scrapping most exemptions and reliefs.
Imagine if leavers had adopted that attitude after Maastricht.
Exactly this.
Brexiteers launched a culture war that napalmed our children's future for a fantasy past, and now that it has turned out as well as Afghanistan they want us all to be friends and forget about it.
They won.
They will have to suck it up.
They *will* suck it up, gladly, telling you that they were right all along. You are fighting a battle you cannot win with people who will not be persuaded.
Leaving the EU is done. You will not persuade anyone that the decision was incorrect. Finding a place in the world outside the EU is not done, with the trade restrictions deal we signed with the EU still to fully kick in. Once it does then there is an opportunity to point to the cost and complexity and stupidity of the situation and start looking for solutions.
Quote them bloody Thatcher as she absolutely got the need to remove what we now have in exchange for free trade. You need to negotiate the deal on a ground where agreement is possible. All you and yours are doing is pushing the agreement range further and further away from your desired position.
It is, frankly, stupid.
If we could go back to the pre -Maastricht economic relationship that would be great. The EU has decided that is not available. So if we are not willing to make the political compromises then we need to come up with a new approach.
It’s why the arguments about “this costs us more it’s crap” don’t work - people who make those arguments don’t factor in the advantages (because they put limited value on them or positively advocate for those compromises because they see them as a good in their own right)
But people who voted to leave made a different calculation
The majority of people who voted were clueless about how anything works. We don't need to worry about their opinion now as the war is over and they won. Time to go back to government in their interest.
Nobody can tell me why reams of paperwork and delay and cost is better for business than free trade. Certainly no-one on the right who spent decades campaigning for the very free trade they just ended.
Ignoring my argument doesn’t progress debate.
We can’t have a free trade agreement because the EU won’t give us one without adding on lots of irrelevant extras we don’t like
With a deep breath I ask: what are posters views about Dignitas? Is this the elephant in the room?
For me, if I get to the point that I have dementia to the extent that I need round-the-clock care, I'm checking out thank you very much. The idea that I would want to linger with not much or no quality of life whilst bringing expense, heartbreak and worry to others is abhorrent to me.
Sadly once you have dementia you lose the ability to reason and rationale disappears
My son in laws mother has been suffering severe dementia for a few years now and is in specialist care.
She was a matron and has told the staff she does not want any medication but day to day she lives in a surreal world not knowing her family or loved ones and taking her medication
It is the dispirited moral the family suffer as well, and I have been very surprised at just how aggressively @MaxPB has attacked pensioners
A couple of contributions to the discussion:
- Dementia is always distressing to the family, not always to the sufferer. My father had it in relatively mild form - my parents were still living with me and my mother and I looked after him. He would often be unable to remember things like how to get home or what my job was, and he gradually faded. He knew what was happening and joked about it - "means I can read all my books again as I can't remember how they end!" though in reality he'd forget the previous page. But he said he'd never been happier and I believed him. Being fully mentally competent is not the only thing in life.
- My uncle seems to have developed it on top of Parkinsons - he didn't recognise me when I went down to Cornwall to see him in his nursing home. But he's being what seems to me extremely caringly looked after, all at the expense of Cornwall County Council, whose officers have been absolutely wonderful - not only going to great lengths to find thhe best place but visiting again afterwards to check he's OK. It was only the second cheapest home at £1100/week so I offered to pay the £116 difference, and have reminded them twice - they've not taken it up so far. Again, he seems content, dozing much of the day, watching some sport, listening to some music. If one's relatives aren't too bothered about inheritance, I wouldn't let cost considerations be decisive in the discussion - the rule that the authority pays when your savings are down to £23K does work. The key is to make sure the minimum standards are sufficient, though.
- But I do agree with Dignitas and my former boss used it, writing to his friends a sweet letter saying what Stocky says and thanking us for our friendship and shared pleasure in life. We are so into personal choice in every aspect of our lives, so it should ultimately be a legitimate choice too. I'd require that the intent was stated by the individual in a living will signed without the presence of relatives twice, a month apart, to avoid it being a momentary impulse. I'm not sure I'd choose it, but I think anyone who wants to should be able to.
I disagree with you re the early stages of dementia. It was a shock to me when my mum got it and I found out anger was a normal situation. The sufferer gets very angry when they have the power to think but can't explain what they are seeing. My mother would beat my father with a stick because he was having an affair with a non existent woman staying in their home. On another day my mother phoned me and screamed at me why I hadn't told her, her mother is a man. I had to sit my children done to explain everything in case they took one of these calls.
I have no idea whether they are happy once they have lost all comprehension.
It depends on the individual, and probably what bits of the brain are most significantly eroded by the disease. I visited my dad a couple of times a week for quite a few years, and encountered both happy and utterly miserable dementia sufferers. The latter outnumbered the former, and there were many somewhere in between. Uncontrollable anger is very hard for both family and staff to deal with, and I’m not sure I could.
In answer to a number of responses (sorry not to do them individually).
It seems well documented as a mid term dementia symptom and it is easy to see why although I was completely oblivious to it until I experienced it. I guess like most I viewed dementia suffers as people sitting in armchairs who had lost their mental capacity, which is how she ended up and I have know idea whether she was happy then or not.
It is simple to explain. My mother had not lost her capacity to reason, but she was seeing things that contradicted that reasoning. My father became two different people, eventually this other person's family moved in and my father was having an affair with a woman in this family in front of her, so of course she was angry. She also started seeing my father as her mother, hence why she asked 'why didn't I tell her, her mother was a man'. When I explained this all to her she understood, but that soon gets overwhelmed by what she sees. Also when I explained it she asked me whether she would get better. I can't remember what I said, but that was hard.
On the positive side there were some funny sides. She wouldn't go out when both my father and the other man were wearing the same pullover and she also enjoyed our downstairs cinema.
Just to make clear: We don't have a downstairs cinema, there is no other man, family or other woman and her mother was not a man.
All this money wasted to trash trade links with your biggest export market! Brexit really is a turd that only the most deluded can cling to and continue to justify .
As has just been said @RochdalePioneers no amount of attacks on Brexit is going to change it and the need now is for it to be made to work with compromise on all sides
What’s there to compromise on. The UK signed the trade deal and the WA , that should be the end of it . The negotiations are over . If the UK doesn’t like being treated as a third country it shouldn’t have left or should have done a trade deal with less barriers . Leavers own the whole stinking mess and should not be allowed to try and scapegoat the EU for the impact of their own vote .
As the old Irish joke has it, I wouldn’t start from here (as a response to being asked for directions to Dublin).
But it’s incumbent on all of us to build a better country starting with where we are. Your approach is not constructive
I would counter that comment by saying the Leaver's approach in 2016 wasn't very constructive either.
Mr. Taz, a wealth tax seems unwise. If it doesn't apply to houses then people will just shovel their money into property, pushing up prices even more. If it does apply to houses then tons of people who spent their lives paying off a mortgage and have retired will have a new significant cost they can't afford.
If they're sitting on a large debt-free asset worth enough for the wealth tax to kick in then by definition they can afford the new cost.
Plenty of people are asset rich but cash poor. Effectively they In that situation will be forced to take secured loans or even sell to pay the debt.
If the figures are small (as they would be with a land value tax) it's possible for the money to be paid upfront against a first charge on the property.
That doesn't work for care homes as at £60,000 a year everything adds up quickly.
Most people's stay in care homes is not very long. I understand the median is about 9 months. I would have thought that the edge cases which involve staying for years could be covered by insurance of some kind.
The real issue is care in the community. There's lots of people struggling along with the help of relatives and/or 15 minute visits from carers. Very few live with their parents or grandparents any more.
They would be far better in a middle way of sheltered or purpose built accommodation but there isn't enough of it and there's a reluctance to sell up.
Lets face it, society is a Ponzi scheme, one way or another.
One further point - when my mum died I was warned by a friend to be cautious about buying sheltered accommodation for dad as it could be very difficult to sell. Which contradicts what you say, seemingly, please? In the end my father did not need it but it would be useful to know for other elderly relatives.
Sheltered accommodation usually comes with very high service charges, and the demand for it is much less than more regular apartments. It can take ages to sell it, or require heavy discounting if you need to sell in a hurry.
Thanks - that makes sense. More sensible to rent as one might not end up needing it for very long anyway.
That’s what my Dad did when he had to find somewhere to live at 84. Hopefully he’ll be there a while but it’s not going to be a millstone in future. A couple he looked at were being rented by inheritors of their parents estate as they couldn’t sell them
My wife's aunt lost quite a lot on her McCarthy & Stone flat when she moved into a Care Home. Mrs C and I were lucky (we think) that after her, and just before, my retirement we found a two-bed bungalow in a very nice small Essex town, close to the surgery, pharmacy and grocers, with more than adequate car parking and not too big a garden.
Niece went back to school this week - already a confirmed case in the class ....
buckle up for hysterical headlines as the cases rise.
Its why we should have been vaccinating kids about 2 months ago. At the very least it would have taken the edge off the increase and allowed the government to say that they were doing something about it.
I doubt it would have much effect:
1) 12-15s aren't the biggest group 2) Many have already been infected 3) Some have been vaccinated 4) Vaccination rates would have been low
Work hard, save, get your own home, then slowly lose it by having to either sell and downsize or have some sort of equity release nonsense.
Dr. Foxy, there's a reason medieval types loathed taxes. They were levied against property value (property as in general goods not just a home). Also, as a country, we need to save more. This is going to damage that as well.
Income tax should rise. It affects both the elderly and younger people and is fairer than raising NI.
Good to see a reasoned discussion on here today about funding social care and how to do it, without any nasty aggression or swearing
Absolutely right that we need a little Income Tax rise to fund this. It's fairer to all. I spent many efforts in trying to explain this very gently to @MaxPB but it didn't seem to sink in ... 😊
What we need is the integration of NI and IT so that everyone on the same income, whether from work or investments, under or over the age of retirement, pays the same. That would involve the retired having a larger tax increase than the rest of us initially but that additional burden will be borne by those with above average incomes who can, frankly, afford it, or at least afford it better than those trying to bring up children.
Increasing NI, paid by those who are suffering the most, to provide additional (and necessary) social care for the elderly is just not a solution that is worth the time of day.
Exactly. Spot on.
Time for a wealth tax too, ideally to help reduce the overall burdens of taxes on income.
Again, there are no taxes that do not have economic consequences. One of our biggest structural problems is our excessive tendency to consume. We simply do not, as a country, invest or save enough. This generates our serious balance of payments problem which have transformed us from a wealthy country with a considerable flow of investment income from abroad to a rentier economy, paying an ever increasing premium for the use of our own assets that have been bought up by foreigners.
Given this problem do we really want to disincentivise saving? I think we need a lot more of it.
It's a good point but surely dealt with by a sufficiently high threshold. I'm suggesting £1m per individual, but I'd equally support a threshold of £5m per individual which could still raise £45bn pa at 1%.
Do we really need to encourage people to save >£5m each?
It hits business owners, reducing the capital available to invest
Mr. Taz, a wealth tax seems unwise. If it doesn't apply to houses then people will just shovel their money into property, pushing up prices even more. If it does apply to houses then tons of people who spent their lives paying off a mortgage and have retired will have a new significant cost they can't afford.
That's why a tax on sale is better (though not without some problems). You know the actual value of the house and the seller has the money. If they are trading down they don't need as much. If they are trading up, it helps cap price rises. It releases some of the value contained in property.
We can always find reasons not to do things, not to tax this, that and the other. But if we want a decent care system we will have to pay so rather than find reasons for not paying we need to find a way to pay which raises the money needed and is reasonably fair to all. Income tax is one such way, merging of NI with it and making it applicable to all another. Extending CGT a third. Some form of LVT or wealth tax another. All have pluses and minuses. But we can either argue about it for another 10/20 years and do nothing or actually get on with it.
So argument and doing nothing it is then ......
The problem with your solution is the following (used large round numbers to make maths easy rather than because they are realistic!)
Buy a house for £10m
Sell house 5 years later for £20m
Pay 45% tax on the profit (£10m = £4.5m)
Net proceeds available to move house = £15.5m
So I have to move to a significantly less nice house in order to move (assuming all other houses have gone up in value at the same rate since the original purchase)
That reduces people’s willingness to sell their houses and move with all sorts of knock on effects
Mr. Taz, a wealth tax seems unwise. If it doesn't apply to houses then people will just shovel their money into property, pushing up prices even more. If it does apply to houses then tons of people who spent their lives paying off a mortgage and have retired will have a new significant cost they can't afford.
If they're sitting on a large debt-free asset worth enough for the wealth tax to kick in then by definition they can afford the new cost.
Plenty of people are asset rich but cash poor. Effectively they In that situation will be forced to take secured loans or even sell to pay the debt.
If the figures are small (as they would be with a land value tax) it's possible for the money to be paid upfront against a first charge on the property.
That doesn't work for care homes as at £60,000 a year everything adds up quickly.
Most people's stay in care homes is not very long. I understand the median is about 9 months. I would have thought that the edge cases which involve staying for years could be covered by insurance of some kind.
The real issue is care in the community. There's lots of people struggling along with the help of relatives and/or 15 minute visits from carers. Very few live with their parents or grandparents any more.
They would be far better in a middle way of sheltered or purpose built accommodation but there isn't enough of it and there's a reluctance to sell up.
Lets face it, society is a Ponzi scheme, one way or another.
One further point - when my mum died I was warned by a friend to be cautious about buying sheltered accommodation for dad as it could be very difficult to sell. Which contradicts what you say, seemingly, please? In the end my father did not need it but it would be useful to know for other elderly relatives.
Sheltered accommodation usually comes with very high service charges, and the demand for it is much less than more regular apartments. It can take ages to sell it, or require heavy discounting if you need to sell in a hurry.
Thanks - that makes sense. More sensible to rent as one might not end up needing it for very long anyway.
That’s what my Dad did when he had to find somewhere to live at 84. Hopefully he’ll be there a while but it’s not going to be a millstone in future. A couple he looked at were being rented by inheritors of their parents estate as they couldn’t sell them
My wife's aunt lost quite a lot on her McCarthy & Stone flat when she moved into a Care Home. Mrs C and I were lucky (we think) that after her, and just before, my retirement we found a two-bed bungalow in a very nice small Essex town, close to the surgery, pharmacy and grocers, with more than adequate car parking and not too big a garden.
That’s what my wife and I are looking to do jn either rural Northumberland or Durham in about five years time. We both really don’t want to go on past 60/61 and we have reasonable personal provision and are prepared to accept a drop in living standards. In effect the pandemic started that process.
These McCarthy and Stone style,developments seem to be being thrown up everywhere at the moment. I wonder if saturation of the market is the issue.
On topic: I'm up to my neck in Trump lays, for both the nomination and the WH. If he were to go all the way I'd lose all of my chunky 'TrumpToast' profits from 2020 and then some. But you know what, I do not give a fuck and I'll be doubling down if he goes very short off the back of an announcement he's running. Point 1, regardless of ostensibly sound analytics and logic trees, the big picture is I cannot see the US, having just recently dodged the self-inflicted bullet (a Trump 2nd term) that would have maimed it beyond recognition, deciding to reload and really do the job this time. Point 2, if I'm wrong we would be talking about a genuine catastrophe, something equivalent to a huge natural disaster, and I would not wish to make money out of such a thing. I'm a seasoned old campaigner of the betting trenches, proud to be better than most at this absorbing activity, but there are limits.
I am leaning towards the view that Trump may be outflanked. That he is simply too moderate and sensible for the Republican base. He is pro-vax. He hasn't promoted Ivermectin. Think there may be someone younger, less personally distasteful, more professional and thus far more scary, as the nominee.
Niece went back to school this week - already a confirmed case in the class ....
buckle up for hysterical headlines as the cases rise.
Its why we should have been vaccinating kids about 2 months ago. At the very least it would have taken the edge off the increase and allowed the government to say that they were doing something about it.
I doubt it would have much effect:
1) 12-15s aren't the biggest group 2) Many have already been infected 3) Some have been vaccinated 4) Vaccination rates would have been low
Booster shots are a much bigger issue.
The problem with booster shots, AIUI, is that those who received them would not be able to receive yet another shot if we had to have a different vaccine for a new variant. This seems to me to be a significant risk which the government is clearly conscious of. In the history of this virus to date delta has remained the dominant variant for a surprisingly long time.
In contrast reducing the infectivity of kids and reducing their already small risks further seems a no brainer and I can fully understand why the government is so frustrated that the JCVI have dithered over it.
Mr. Taz, a wealth tax seems unwise. If it doesn't apply to houses then people will just shovel their money into property, pushing up prices even more. If it does apply to houses then tons of people who spent their lives paying off a mortgage and have retired will have a new significant cost they can't afford.
It's very wise, Morris. It's very very wise indeed.
Picture an ancient snowy-haired man, old as the sea, he's seen it all and done it all, and is now in mellow stasis. He sits lotus style, gazing out at infinity, for eternity, just contemplating everything he has learnt.
Mr. Taz, a wealth tax seems unwise. If it doesn't apply to houses then people will just shovel their money into property, pushing up prices even more. If it does apply to houses then tons of people who spent their lives paying off a mortgage and have retired will have a new significant cost they can't afford.
That's why a tax on sale is better (though not without some problems). You know the actual value of the house and the seller has the money. If they are trading down they don't need as much. If they are trading up, it helps cap price rises. It releases some of the value contained in property.
We can always find reasons not to do things, not to tax this, that and the other. But if we want a decent care system we will have to pay so rather than find reasons for not paying we need to find a way to pay which raises the money needed and is reasonably fair to all. Income tax is one such way, merging of NI with it and making it applicable to all another. Extending CGT a third. Some form of LVT or wealth tax another. All have pluses and minuses. But we can either argue about it for another 10/20 years and do nothing or actually get on with it.
So argument and doing nothing it is then ......
The problem with your solution is the following (used large round numbers to make maths easy rather than because they are realistic!)
Buy a house for £10m
Sell house 5 years later for £20m
Pay 45% tax on the profit (£10m = £4.5m)
Net proceeds available to move house = £15.5m
So I have to move to a significantly less nice house in order to move (assuming all other houses have gone up in value at the same rate since the original purchase)
That reduces people’s willingness to sell their houses and move with all sorts of knock on effects
Isn't there some kind of capital gains tax allowance? It could be saved up over the time of ownership, thus reducing the taxable amount.
Work hard, save, get your own home, then slowly lose it by having to either sell and downsize or have some sort of equity release nonsense.
Dr. Foxy, there's a reason medieval types loathed taxes. They were levied against property value (property as in general goods not just a home). Also, as a country, we need to save more. This is going to damage that as well.
Income tax should rise. It affects both the elderly and younger people and is fairer than raising NI.
Good to see a reasoned discussion on here today about funding social care and how to do it, without any nasty aggression or swearing
Absolutely right that we need a little Income Tax rise to fund this. It's fairer to all. I spent many efforts in trying to explain this very gently to @MaxPB but it didn't seem to sink in ... 😊
What we need is the integration of NI and IT so that everyone on the same income, whether from work or investments, under or over the age of retirement, pays the same. That would involve the retired having a larger tax increase than the rest of us initially but that additional burden will be borne by those with above average incomes who can, frankly, afford it, or at least afford it better than those trying to bring up children.
Increasing NI, paid by those who are suffering the most, to provide additional (and necessary) social care for the elderly is just not a solution that is worth the time of day.
Exactly. Spot on.
Time for a wealth tax too, ideally to help reduce the overall burdens of taxes on income.
Again, there are no taxes that do not have economic consequences. One of our biggest structural problems is our excessive tendency to consume. We simply do not, as a country, invest or save enough. This generates our serious balance of payments problem which have transformed us from a wealthy country with a considerable flow of investment income from abroad to a rentier economy, paying an ever increasing premium for the use of our own assets that have been bought up by foreigners.
Given this problem do we really want to disincentivise saving? I think we need a lot more of it.
It's a good point but surely dealt with by a sufficiently high threshold. I'm suggesting £1m per individual, but I'd equally support a threshold of £5m per individual which could still raise £45bn pa at 1%.
Do we really need to encourage people to save >£5m each?
Raising the threshold from £1m to £5m has no effect on the take? Something seems odd about those numbers.
No, a threshold of £1m would raise approx 1% x 40% of £17tn = £68bn per annum.
I just said I'd be happy to concede a £5m threshold, which would still raise £45bn.
I'm talking now from a purely selfish and privileged point of view on my part, but if you don't have a pension £1m is not a huge amount to retire on, particularly if much of it is invested in your house. How will you distinguish between a DB pension whose value is £1m and someone living off £1m in savings?
I would go for a limit just above what I am worth personally
Mr. Taz, a wealth tax seems unwise. If it doesn't apply to houses then people will just shovel their money into property, pushing up prices even more. If it does apply to houses then tons of people who spent their lives paying off a mortgage and have retired will have a new significant cost they can't afford.
If they're sitting on a large debt-free asset worth enough for the wealth tax to kick in then by definition they can afford the new cost.
Plenty of people are asset rich but cash poor. Effectively they In that situation will be forced to take secured loans or even sell to pay the debt.
If the figures are small (as they would be with a land value tax) it's possible for the money to be paid upfront against a first charge on the property.
That doesn't work for care homes as at £60,000 a year everything adds up quickly.
Most people's stay in care homes is not very long. I understand the median is about 9 months. I would have thought that the edge cases which involve staying for years could be covered by insurance of some kind.
The real issue is care in the community. There's lots of people struggling along with the help of relatives and/or 15 minute visits from carers. Very few live with their parents or grandparents any more.
They would be far better in a middle way of sheltered or purpose built accommodation but there isn't enough of it and there's a reluctance to sell up.
Lets face it, society is a Ponzi scheme, one way or another.
One further point - when my mum died I was warned by a friend to be cautious about buying sheltered accommodation for dad as it could be very difficult to sell. Which contradicts what you say, seemingly, please? In the end my father did not need it but it would be useful to know for other elderly relatives.
Sheltered accommodation usually comes with very high service charges, and the demand for it is much less than more regular apartments. It can take ages to sell it, or require heavy discounting if you need to sell in a hurry.
Thanks - that makes sense. More sensible to rent as one might not end up needing it for very long anyway.
That’s what my Dad did when he had to find somewhere to live at 84. Hopefully he’ll be there a while but it’s not going to be a millstone in future. A couple he looked at were being rented by inheritors of their parents estate as they couldn’t sell them
My wife's aunt lost quite a lot on her McCarthy & Stone flat when she moved into a Care Home. Mrs C and I were lucky (we think) that after her, and just before, my retirement we found a two-bed bungalow in a very nice small Essex town, close to the surgery, pharmacy and grocers, with more than adequate car parking and not too big a garden.
That’s what my wife and I are looking to do jn either rural Northumberland or Durham in about five years time. We both really don’t want to go on past 60/61 and we have reasonable personal provision and are prepared to accept a drop in living standards. In effect the pandemic started that process.
These McCarthy and Stone style,developments seem to be being thrown up everywhere at the moment. I wonder if saturation of the market is the issue.
Aunt's flat sale, in Morecambe, was quite a while ago, but I wouldn't be surprised if the same applied. We didn't want to leave Essex because, at the time, one son was living close by and our daughter was only about 45 minutes away. However neither of those advantages still hold, but we've become settled, we think, in the community. It's difficult to go down to the town centre with stopping for, or being stopped for, a chat.
Social care funding is and interesting challenge. Basically we don’t pay enough for social care (although in the main the homes that I know - which are the national chains - do a decent enough job at a cost to local authorities of c £900 per week
It’s not as simple as saying “let old people pay” - they paid for their parent generation. @MaxPB has got caught up in his crusade about BTL again and decided that all old people are evil and tax should be hypothecated to hit them.
The reality is that society as a whole needs to fund social care. There are positive externalities from not having old people blocking hospital beds or dying in the streets. Tax should be simple, broad based, low rates, and hard to avoid. Income tax meets all of those criteria.
We were paying £50 an hour for home care for the mother-in-law when she lived with us. The one residential place we looked at that was under £1,000 a week was akin to a Victorian asylum. The costs are immense and with salaries for staff having to rise substantially to attract UK citizens to do the work previously done by minimum wage immigrants, the costs are only going to get higher. The big issue is that unlike in previous generations a lot of old people are surviving to an age where dementia becomes an issue. And, of course, it's not just the old that require care. We need a fundamental rethink. Sadly, it's not going to happen.
I think that's partly a London / SE problem, as mentioned before. And one risk as ever is letting the London tail wag the UK dog. Our more parochial politicians fall for that one far too often.
What sort of care cost £50 per hour in London? With what level of medical supervision? Just like care homes, where far too often the "residential" category is muddled with the "care" category there is a huge difference between "personal care", and something including eg giving medication.
Here we were paying, for home care, something like £15 an hour in mid-2019 for my mum. That was for personal care (feed / dress / toilet etc). The company, run by a former nurse iirc, took about 15-20% and had around 15 carers working for them. So very much run as a vocation. Most employees were local, and tended to be mums working whilst kids were at school, or in their 50s where kids had left. Mostly Brits and a couple of Eastern Europeans who have come to the area and settled. One used to go around on a bike.
But North Notts is not London.
I think it is quite possible that remuneration will need to increase, but I wouldn't see an issue with opening up work visas. One joy of Brexit is that we now control this stuff properly.
Though we need to remember that eg average *real* wages in Poland have doubled since about 2009.
Mr. Taz, a wealth tax seems unwise. If it doesn't apply to houses then people will just shovel their money into property, pushing up prices even more. If it does apply to houses then tons of people who spent their lives paying off a mortgage and have retired will have a new significant cost they can't afford.
That's why a tax on sale is better (though not without some problems). You know the actual value of the house and the seller has the money. If they are trading down they don't need as much. If they are trading up, it helps cap price rises. It releases some of the value contained in property.
We can always find reasons not to do things, not to tax this, that and the other. But if we want a decent care system we will have to pay so rather than find reasons for not paying we need to find a way to pay which raises the money needed and is reasonably fair to all. Income tax is one such way, merging of NI with it and making it applicable to all another. Extending CGT a third. Some form of LVT or wealth tax another. All have pluses and minuses. But we can either argue about it for another 10/20 years and do nothing or actually get on with it.
So argument and doing nothing it is then ......
The problem with your solution is the following (used large round numbers to make maths easy rather than because they are realistic!)
Buy a house for £10m
Sell house 5 years later for £20m
Pay 45% tax on the profit (£10m = £4.5m)
Net proceeds available to move house = £15.5m
So I have to move to a significantly less nice house in order to move (assuming all other houses have gone up in value at the same rate since the original purchase)
That reduces people’s willingness to sell their houses and move with all sorts of knock on effects
Isn't there some kind of capital gains tax allowance? It could be saved up over the time of ownership, thus reducing the taxable amount.
IANAE but the annual allowance can't be carried forward if unused in a given year. Losses on other items can, however, be carried forward to offset gains, I think.
Used to be able to index link the original price before deducting it, which helped a lot, but that seems to have gone.
Mr. Taz, a wealth tax seems unwise. If it doesn't apply to houses then people will just shovel their money into property, pushing up prices even more. If it does apply to houses then tons of people who spent their lives paying off a mortgage and have retired will have a new significant cost they can't afford.
If they're sitting on a large debt-free asset worth enough for the wealth tax to kick in then by definition they can afford the new cost.
Plenty of people are asset rich but cash poor. Effectively they In that situation will be forced to take secured loans or even sell to pay the debt.
If the figures are small (as they would be with a land value tax) it's possible for the money to be paid upfront against a first charge on the property.
That doesn't work for care homes as at £60,000 a year everything adds up quickly.
Most people's stay in care homes is not very long. I understand the median is about 9 months. I would have thought that the edge cases which involve staying for years could be covered by insurance of some kind.
The real issue is care in the community. There's lots of people struggling along with the help of relatives and/or 15 minute visits from carers. Very few live with their parents or grandparents any more.
They would be far better in a middle way of sheltered or purpose built accommodation but there isn't enough of it and there's a reluctance to sell up.
Lets face it, society is a Ponzi scheme, one way or another.
One further point - when my mum died I was warned by a friend to be cautious about buying sheltered accommodation for dad as it could be very difficult to sell. Which contradicts what you say, seemingly, please? In the end my father did not need it but it would be useful to know for other elderly relatives.
Sheltered accommodation usually comes with very high service charges, and the demand for it is much less than more regular apartments. It can take ages to sell it, or require heavy discounting if you need to sell in a hurry.
Thanks - that makes sense. More sensible to rent as one might not end up needing it for very long anyway.
That’s what my Dad did when he had to find somewhere to live at 84. Hopefully he’ll be there a while but it’s not going to be a millstone in future. A couple he looked at were being rented by inheritors of their parents estate as they couldn’t sell them
My wife's aunt lost quite a lot on her McCarthy & Stone flat when she moved into a Care Home. Mrs C and I were lucky (we think) that after her, and just before, my retirement we found a two-bed bungalow in a very nice small Essex town, close to the surgery, pharmacy and grocers, with more than adequate car parking and not too big a garden.
We were looking at McCarthy and Stone flats, not that my father will move into one, and it is noticeable how the second hand value plummets. The character of the places changes from when new. They start off vibrant, full of relative young couples. They all stay, get old and most of the males die off. The marketplace for resale has then completely changed. 70 year old couples now don't want to move in to a place full of 90 year olds.
Social care funding is and interesting challenge. Basically we don’t pay enough for social care (although in the main the homes that I know - which are the national chains - do a decent enough job at a cost to local authorities of c £900 per week
It’s not as simple as saying “let old people pay” - they paid for their parent generation. @MaxPB has got caught up in his crusade about BTL again and decided that all old people are evil and tax should be hypothecated to hit them.
The reality is that society as a whole needs to fund social care. There are positive externalities from not having old people blocking hospital beds or dying in the streets. Tax should be simple, broad based, low rates, and hard to avoid. Income tax meets all of those criteria.
We were paying £50 an hour for home care for the mother-in-law when she lived with us. The one residential place we looked at that was under £1,000 a week was akin to a Victorian asylum. The costs are immense and with salaries for staff having to rise substantially to attract UK citizens to do the work previously done by minimum wage immigrants, the costs are only going to get higher. The big issue is that unlike in previous generations a lot of old people are surviving to an age where dementia becomes an issue. And, of course, it's not just the old that require care. We need a fundamental rethink. Sadly, it's not going to happen.
I think that's partly a London / SE problem, as mentioned before. And one risk as ever is letting the London tail wag the UK dog. Our more parochial politicians fall for that one far too often.
What sort of care cost £50 per hour in London? With what level of medical supervision? Just like care homes, where far too often the "residential" category is muddled with the "care" category there is a huge difference between "personal care", and something including eg giving medication.
Here we were paying, for home care, something like £15 an hour in mid-2019 for my mum. That was for personal care (feed / dress / toilet etc). The company, run by a former nurse iirc, took about 15-20% and had around 15 carers working for them. So very much run as a vocation. Most employees were local, and tended to be mums working whilst kids were at school, or in their 50s where kids had left. Mostly Brits and a couple of Eastern Europeans who have come to the area and settled. One used to go around on a bike.
But North Notts is not London.
I think it is quite possible that remuneration will need to increase, but I wouldn't see an issue with opening up work visas. One joy of Brexit is that we now control this stuff properly.
Though we need to remember that eg average *real* wages in Poland have doubled since about 2009.
Care Homes were 'muddled' with Residential Homes by the 1990 Act.
On topic: I'm up to my neck in Trump lays, for both the nomination and the WH. If he were to go all the way I'd lose all of my chunky 'TrumpToast' profits from 2020 and then some. But you know what, I do not give a fuck and I'll be doubling down if he goes very short off the back of an announcement he's running. Point 1, regardless of ostensibly sound analytics and logic trees, the big picture is I cannot see the US, having just recently dodged the self-inflicted bullet (a Trump 2nd term) that would have maimed it beyond recognition, deciding to reload and really do the job this time. Point 2, if I'm wrong we would be talking about a genuine catastrophe, something equivalent to a huge natural disaster, and I would not wish to make money out of such a thing. I'm a seasoned old campaigner of the betting trenches, proud to be better than most at this absorbing activity, but there are limits.
I am leaning towards the view that Trump may be outflanked. That he is simply too moderate and sensible for the Republican base. He is pro-vax. He hasn't promoted Ivermectin. Think there may be someone younger, less personally distasteful, more professional and thus far more scary, as the nominee.
Well he's flirting with anti-vax with the usual nudge and a wink deniabilty. I know what you mean about someone worse but nothing in America scares and dispirits me more than he does. My point 2 was kidding around - I'm ok with making money out of bad outcomes - so it's mainly about trusting my intuition on this. I think WH24 will feature neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump. And if somehow the latter gets the GOP nomination I'm confident he'll lose again.
Imagine if leavers had adopted that attitude after Maastricht.
Exactly this.
Brexiteers launched a culture war that napalmed our children's future for a fantasy past, and now that it has turned out as well as Afghanistan they want us all to be friends and forget about it.
They won.
They will have to suck it up.
They *will* suck it up, gladly, telling you that they were right all along. You are fighting a battle you cannot win with people who will not be persuaded.
Leaving the EU is done. You will not persuade anyone that the decision was incorrect. Finding a place in the world outside the EU is not done, with the trade restrictions deal we signed with the EU still to fully kick in. Once it does then there is an opportunity to point to the cost and complexity and stupidity of the situation and start looking for solutions.
Quote them bloody Thatcher as she absolutely got the need to remove what we now have in exchange for free trade. You need to negotiate the deal on a ground where agreement is possible. All you and yours are doing is pushing the agreement range further and further away from your desired position.
It is, frankly, stupid.
Whereas I don't disagree with your general analysis of where we are after Brexit and at what we need to be doing to make it work, I believe Scott is perfectly entitled to call out the lies that have made us financially and culturally poorer.
I have every respect for people like Tyndall, who accepted there would be catastrophic loss, but that was worth it for the political independence it undoubtedly allowed. What I can't abide are those who say such problems like the empty shelves are a Remainer mirage, or they are 100% exclusive from Brexit. Or those supporters of Liz Truss, who when she apes some EU trade deal with a Pacific Island and implies it will compensate trading tarrif-free with the EU, they claim it as a post-Brexit victory. Or the GFA is faulty because it never anticipated Btexit.
We left, we sucked it up and we looked on as Johnson torched the bridges as we exited. We need to make the most of what we can from the ruins, but I don't see why we should pretend we liked, and agreed to the whole enterprise.
Work hard, save, get your own home, then slowly lose it by having to either sell and downsize or have some sort of equity release nonsense.
Dr. Foxy, there's a reason medieval types loathed taxes. They were levied against property value (property as in general goods not just a home). Also, as a country, we need to save more. This is going to damage that as well.
Income tax should rise. It affects both the elderly and younger people and is fairer than raising NI.
Good to see a reasoned discussion on here today about funding social care and how to do it, without any nasty aggression or swearing
Absolutely right that we need a little Income Tax rise to fund this. It's fairer to all. I spent many efforts in trying to explain this very gently to @MaxPB but it didn't seem to sink in ... 😊
What we need is the integration of NI and IT so that everyone on the same income, whether from work or investments, under or over the age of retirement, pays the same. That would involve the retired having a larger tax increase than the rest of us initially but that additional burden will be borne by those with above average incomes who can, frankly, afford it, or at least afford it better than those trying to bring up children.
Increasing NI, paid by those who are suffering the most, to provide additional (and necessary) social care for the elderly is just not a solution that is worth the time of day.
Exactly. Spot on.
Time for a wealth tax too, ideally to help reduce the overall burdens of taxes on income.
Again, there are no taxes that do not have economic consequences. One of our biggest structural problems is our excessive tendency to consume. We simply do not, as a country, invest or save enough. This generates our serious balance of payments problem which have transformed us from a wealthy country with a considerable flow of investment income from abroad to a rentier economy, paying an ever increasing premium for the use of our own assets that have been bought up by foreigners.
Given this problem do we really want to disincentivise saving? I think we need a lot more of it.
It's a good point but surely dealt with by a sufficiently high threshold. I'm suggesting £1m per individual, but I'd equally support a threshold of £5m per individual which could still raise £45bn pa at 1%.
Do we really need to encourage people to save >£5m each?
We need to recognise that most of us do not save anything at all. And many more "save" their house and that is it. As I reach 60 I am bemused that so many of my cohort are still managing debt on credit cards, car loans and the like. They have assets, usually houses, but are cash poor at a stage in life where they should be starting to draw down their savings.
The exceptions are those on final salaries who receive generous tax free lump sums on retirement but they are a privileged minority and I do not think that there are enough of them to pay the bills.
To say that most people save nothing at all is a gross exaggeration, but savings rates and totals are alarmingly low for even moderately comfortable households. According to this helpful digest - https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/savings-accounts/average-household-savings-uk - the median values for household savings are £11,000 for the total held, and the monthly savings rate is £180. Thus, half of households save more than this but half save less (and large numbers of the fiscally incontinent and the struggling alike have negative savings rates and are steadily sinking into debt, of course.)
Thus, if a typical household found its members out of work, they'd only be able to live off their savings for about 4-6 months before they were cleaned out and faced with ruin. Most people live quite precariously, even if they don't always realise it.
The point I was seeking to make is that most of our savings as a nation are done by the very well off. If we disincentivise them from saving then our national situation, already disastrous, will deteriorate. Savings of £180 a month just aren't going to cut it. In simple terms we need, as a nation, to save somewhere nearer to an additional £80bn a year, or something like £13k each. This is beyond most folk so we need to be careful about attacking those who do the majority of the saving for us.
I have never heard that argument before! For those too feckless to do their own saving please donate to @noneoftheabove.elitebankingforthe1%.com and I will be happy to do my patriotic duty and save on your behalf.
Mr. Taz, a wealth tax seems unwise. If it doesn't apply to houses then people will just shovel their money into property, pushing up prices even more. If it does apply to houses then tons of people who spent their lives paying off a mortgage and have retired will have a new significant cost they can't afford.
If they're sitting on a large debt-free asset worth enough for the wealth tax to kick in then by definition they can afford the new cost.
Plenty of people are asset rich but cash poor. Effectively they In that situation will be forced to take secured loans or even sell to pay the debt.
If the figures are small (as they would be with a land value tax) it's possible for the money to be paid upfront against a first charge on the property.
That doesn't work for care homes as at £60,000 a year everything adds up quickly.
Most people's stay in care homes is not very long. I understand the median is about 9 months. I would have thought that the edge cases which involve staying for years could be covered by insurance of some kind.
The real issue is care in the community. There's lots of people struggling along with the help of relatives and/or 15 minute visits from carers. Very few live with their parents or grandparents any more.
They would be far better in a middle way of sheltered or purpose built accommodation but there isn't enough of it and there's a reluctance to sell up.
Lets face it, society is a Ponzi scheme, one way or another.
One further point - when my mum died I was warned by a friend to be cautious about buying sheltered accommodation for dad as it could be very difficult to sell. Which contradicts what you say, seemingly, please? In the end my father did not need it but it would be useful to know for other elderly relatives.
Sheltered accommodation usually comes with very high service charges, and the demand for it is much less than more regular apartments. It can take ages to sell it, or require heavy discounting if you need to sell in a hurry.
Thanks - that makes sense. More sensible to rent as one might not end up needing it for very long anyway.
That’s what my Dad did when he had to find somewhere to live at 84. Hopefully he’ll be there a while but it’s not going to be a millstone in future. A couple he looked at were being rented by inheritors of their parents estate as they couldn’t sell them
My wife's aunt lost quite a lot on her McCarthy & Stone flat when she moved into a Care Home. Mrs C and I were lucky (we think) that after her, and just before, my retirement we found a two-bed bungalow in a very nice small Essex town, close to the surgery, pharmacy and grocers, with more than adequate car parking and not too big a garden.
We were looking at McCarthy and Stone flats, not that my father will move into one, and it is noticeable how the second hand value plummets. The character of the places changes from when new. They start off vibrant, full of relative young couples. They all stay, get old and most of the males die off. The marketplace for resale has then completely changed. 70 year old couples now don't want to move in to a place full of 90 year olds.
My widowed dad was being very depressed and talking about buying a sheltered home - till we pointed out that he'd lose his woodwork workshop and his garden.
Social care funding is and interesting challenge. Basically we don’t pay enough for social care (although in the main the homes that I know - which are the national chains - do a decent enough job at a cost to local authorities of c £900 per week
It’s not as simple as saying “let old people pay” - they paid for their parent generation. @MaxPB has got caught up in his crusade about BTL again and decided that all old people are evil and tax should be hypothecated to hit them.
The reality is that society as a whole needs to fund social care. There are positive externalities from not having old people blocking hospital beds or dying in the streets. Tax should be simple, broad based, low rates, and hard to avoid. Income tax meets all of those criteria.
A property tax of some sort meets those criteria, as well as helping to address wider economic imbalances and is harder to avoid than income tax.
Capital gains tax on houses - including main homes. A tax on property and doesn't run into the asset rich, cash poor problem.
We want to encourage people to trade down, which makes the property market more efficient. Capital gains on main residences does the opposite.
+1 a bill of 25%+ on the sale price is not really going to encourage people to downsize and given that capital gains tax on residential property sale's is based on the initial (not inflation adjusted) it would be about that level.
As I've said before and it's the only sane approach (even before my daughter became an apprentice chartered Valuation Surveyer) is to introduce a land value tax and then use that to replace Council tax.
Yes it may result in prices dropping slightly but it really is the only possible option as everything else is rapidly ruled out.
As for the argument that some people are cash poor, I suspect a lot of the equity release firms will be happy to pay the money upfront or central government can find a way of doing it.
Introduction should be easy to manage, surely. Taper out the tax relief at 2% a year per year over 9 or 14 years (depending on whether we are taking it to the general 18% CGT rate or the 28% paid on second homes etc). Then whilst the change happens, loners or couples in big houses will see their free money leaking away and will be tempted to take the cash whilst they can.
Bring in the Proportional Property tax based on 0.5% of house value annum, and abolish Stamp Duty on houses at the same time.
And then we will have a far less disorderly housing market.
The details can be worked out. The real question is whether we want to continue to spend £30bn+ a year giving tax breaks to the wealthier people / regions in our communities, and particularly to the very wealthy.
The Govt should be doing this as a bedrock element of levelling up.
Niece went back to school this week - already a confirmed case in the class ....
buckle up for hysterical headlines as the cases rise.
Its why we should have been vaccinating kids about 2 months ago. At the very least it would have taken the edge off the increase and allowed the government to say that they were doing something about it.
I doubt it would have much effect:
1) 12-15s aren't the biggest group 2) Many have already been infected 3) Some have been vaccinated 4) Vaccination rates would have been low
Booster shots are a much bigger issue.
The problem with booster shots, AIUI, is that those who received them would not be able to receive yet another shot if we had to have a different vaccine for a new variant. This seems to me to be a significant risk which the government is clearly conscious of. In the history of this virus to date delta has remained the dominant variant for a surprisingly long time.
In contrast reducing the infectivity of kids and reducing their already small risks further seems a no brainer and I can fully understand why the government is so frustrated that the JCVI have dithered over it.
a) That seems very hypothetical compared with the actual situation of there being now over a million who had their second dose over six months ago - often the most vulnerable and a number which is going to increase rapidly this month.
b) Its tiny risks one way or another as to infectivity so what ? If the government is worried about hypothetical variants then there's no point in reducing current infectivity.
Social care funding is and interesting challenge. Basically we don’t pay enough for social care (although in the main the homes that I know - which are the national chains - do a decent enough job at a cost to local authorities of c £900 per week
It’s not as simple as saying “let old people pay” - they paid for their parent generation. @MaxPB has got caught up in his crusade about BTL again and decided that all old people are evil and tax should be hypothecated to hit them.
The reality is that society as a whole needs to fund social care. There are positive externalities from not having old people blocking hospital beds or dying in the streets. Tax should be simple, broad based, low rates, and hard to avoid. Income tax meets all of those criteria.
A property tax of some sort meets those criteria, as well as helping to address wider economic imbalances and is harder to avoid than income tax.
Capital gains tax on houses - including main homes. A tax on property and doesn't run into the asset rich, cash poor problem.
We want to encourage people to trade down, which makes the property market more efficient. Capital gains on main residences does the opposite.
+1 a bill of 25%+ on the sale price is not really going to encourage people to downsize and given that capital gains tax on residential property sale's is based on the initial (not inflation adjusted) it would be about that level.
As I've said before and it's the only sane approach (even before my daughter became an apprentice chartered Valuation Surveyer) is to introduce a land value tax and then use that to replace Council tax.
Yes it may result in prices dropping slightly but it really is the only possible option as everything else is rapidly ruled out.
As for the argument that some people are cash poor, I suspect a lot of the equity release firms will be happy to pay the money upfront or central government can find a way of doing it.
Introduction should be very easy to manage. Taper out the tax relief at 2% a year per year over 9 or 14 years (depending on whether we are taking it to the general 18% CGT rate or the 28% paid on second homes etc).
Bring in the Proportional Property tax based on 0.5% of house value annum, and abolish Stamp Duty on houses at the same time.
And then we will have a far less disorderly housing market.
The details can be worked out. The real question is whether we want to continue to spend £30bn+ a year giving tax breaks to the wealthier people / regions in our communities, and particularly to the very wealthy.
The Govt should be doing this as a bedrock element of levelling up.
That would leave this working age person paying about 10x as much property tax than a 1% increase in NI. Of course the abolition of stamp duty will help - but only when I retire as realising some of my house value (and just moving somewhere different) are part of my retirement plans.
On topic: I'm up to my neck in Trump lays, for both the nomination and the WH. If he were to go all the way I'd lose all of my chunky 'TrumpToast' profits from 2020 and then some. But you know what, I do not give a fuck and I'll be doubling down if he goes very short off the back of an announcement he's running. Point 1, regardless of ostensibly sound analytics and logic trees, the big picture is I cannot see the US, having just recently dodged the self-inflicted bullet (a Trump 2nd term) that would have maimed it beyond recognition, deciding to reload and really do the job this time. Point 2, if I'm wrong we would be talking about a genuine catastrophe, something equivalent to a huge natural disaster, and I would not wish to make money out of such a thing. I'm a seasoned old campaigner of the betting trenches, proud to be better than most at this absorbing activity, but there are limits.
I am leaning towards the view that Trump may be outflanked. That he is simply too moderate and sensible for the Republican base. He is pro-vax. He hasn't promoted Ivermectin. Think there may be someone younger, less personally distasteful, more professional and thus far more scary, as the nominee.
Well he's flirting with anti-vax with the usual nudge and a wink deniabilty. I know what you mean about someone worse but nothing in America scares and dispirits me more than he does. My point 2 was kidding around - I'm ok with making money out of bad outcomes - so it's mainly about trusting my intuition on this. I think WH24 will feature neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump. And if somehow the latter gets the GOP nomination I'm confident he'll lose again.
For what it's worth I think Trump will get the nomination by a coronation. I suppose Romney might try a 'do or die' mission to try and save the GOP and the country.
All this money wasted to trash trade links with your biggest export market! Brexit really is a turd that only the most deluded can cling to and continue to justify .
As has just been said @RochdalePioneers no amount of attacks on Brexit is going to change it and the need now is for it to be made to work with compromise on all sides
What’s there to compromise on. The UK signed the trade deal and the WA , that should be the end of it . The negotiations are over . If the UK doesn’t like being treated as a third country it shouldn’t have left or should have done a trade deal with less barriers . Leavers own the whole stinking mess and should not be allowed to try and scapegoat the EU for the impact of their own vote .
As the old Irish joke has it, I wouldn’t start from here (as a response to being asked for directions to Dublin).
But it’s incumbent on all of us to build a better country starting with where we are. Your approach is not constructive
I would counter that comment by saying the Leaver's approach in 2016 wasn't very constructive either.
Some were, some weren’t.
But it was 5 years ago and we all have a duty to build a better future
Mr. Taz, a wealth tax seems unwise. If it doesn't apply to houses then people will just shovel their money into property, pushing up prices even more. If it does apply to houses then tons of people who spent their lives paying off a mortgage and have retired will have a new significant cost they can't afford.
That's why a tax on sale is better (though not without some problems). You know the actual value of the house and the seller has the money. If they are trading down they don't need as much. If they are trading up, it helps cap price rises. It releases some of the value contained in property.
We can always find reasons not to do things, not to tax this, that and the other. But if we want a decent care system we will have to pay so rather than find reasons for not paying we need to find a way to pay which raises the money needed and is reasonably fair to all. Income tax is one such way, merging of NI with it and making it applicable to all another. Extending CGT a third. Some form of LVT or wealth tax another. All have pluses and minuses. But we can either argue about it for another 10/20 years and do nothing or actually get on with it.
So argument and doing nothing it is then ......
The problem with your solution is the following (used large round numbers to make maths easy rather than because they are realistic!)
Buy a house for £10m
Sell house 5 years later for £20m
Pay 45% tax on the profit (£10m = £4.5m)
Net proceeds available to move house = £15.5m
So I have to move to a significantly less nice house in order to move (assuming all other houses have gone up in value at the same rate since the original purchase)
That reduces people’s willingness to sell their houses and move with all sorts of knock on effects
Isn't there some kind of capital gains tax allowance? It could be saved up over the time of ownership, thus reducing the taxable amount.
There is, from memory (I don’t use it much as my investments are in ISAs or EIS) it’s about £12k and you can only look back for 3 year so it helps at the margin.
On topic: I'm up to my neck in Trump lays, for both the nomination and the WH. If he were to go all the way I'd lose all of my chunky 'TrumpToast' profits from 2020 and then some. But you know what, I do not give a fuck and I'll be doubling down if he goes very short off the back of an announcement he's running. Point 1, regardless of ostensibly sound analytics and logic trees, the big picture is I cannot see the US, having just recently dodged the self-inflicted bullet (a Trump 2nd term) that would have maimed it beyond recognition, deciding to reload and really do the job this time. Point 2, if I'm wrong we would be talking about a genuine catastrophe, something equivalent to a huge natural disaster, and I would not wish to make money out of such a thing. I'm a seasoned old campaigner of the betting trenches, proud to be better than most at this absorbing activity, but there are limits.
I am leaning towards the view that Trump may be outflanked. That he is simply too moderate and sensible for the Republican base. He is pro-vax. He hasn't promoted Ivermectin. Think there may be someone younger, less personally distasteful, more professional and thus far more scary, as the nominee.
There's a huge opportunity for GOP anti-vaxxers.
On the other hand death rates are going to be so huge among the anti-vaxxers this next year that they're overall electability must be limited.
All this money wasted to trash trade links with your biggest export market! Brexit really is a turd that only the most deluded can cling to and continue to justify .
As has just been said @RochdalePioneers no amount of attacks on Brexit is going to change it and the need now is for it to be made to work with compromise on all sides
What’s there to compromise on. The UK signed the trade deal and the WA , that should be the end of it . The negotiations are over . If the UK doesn’t like being treated as a third country it shouldn’t have left or should have done a trade deal with less barriers . Leavers own the whole stinking mess and should not be allowed to try and scapegoat the EU for the impact of their own vote .
As the old Irish joke has it, I wouldn’t start from here (as a response to being asked for directions to Dublin).
But it’s incumbent on all of us to build a better country starting with where we are. Your approach is not constructive
I would counter that comment by saying the Leaver's approach in 2016 wasn't very constructive either.
Some were, some weren’t.
But it was 5 years ago and we all have a duty to build a better future
By rejoining.
Sorry, couldn't resist the temptation, but it's clear that Leavers made a dreadful mistake, compounded by dishonesty.
Andrew Lilico @andrew_lilico · 1h Since the epidemic in England's over, any vaccine passport introduced at this stage cannot have an epidemic management justification. It's only rationale wld be as a permanent change to the rights of citizens based upon their health choices. So what's the argument for doing that?
On Trump I vaguely recall reading a piece here from the period after the last election (?) but before the electoral college vote talking about what would happen if the House and (then GOP) Senate ended up playing procedural hardball over the certification. IIRC the basic gist was that Speaker of the House held a lot of cards, and had moves available like refusing to seat GOP members. However I can't find this in the archives.
Can anyone find a link? It would be interesting to read it again, this time substituting the assumption that the GOP holds the House, now purged of many of the people who refused to go along with this last time, and maybe also the Senate.
All this money wasted to trash trade links with your biggest export market! Brexit really is a turd that only the most deluded can cling to and continue to justify .
As has just been said @RochdalePioneers no amount of attacks on Brexit is going to change it and the need now is for it to be made to work with compromise on all sides
What’s there to compromise on. The UK signed the trade deal and the WA , that should be the end of it . The negotiations are over . If the UK doesn’t like being treated as a third country it shouldn’t have left or should have done a trade deal with less barriers . Leavers own the whole stinking mess and should not be allowed to try and scapegoat the EU for the impact of their own vote .
As the old Irish joke has it, I wouldn’t start from here (as a response to being asked for directions to Dublin).
But it’s incumbent on all of us to build a better country starting with where we are. Your approach is not constructive
I would counter that comment by saying the Leaver's approach in 2016 wasn't very constructive either.
Some were, some weren’t.
But it was 5 years ago and we all have a duty to build a better future
By rejoining.
Sorry, couldn't resist the temptation, but it's clear that Leavers made a dreadful mistake, compounded by dishonesty.
There is a waiting list of 1.6 million for mental health*. Before even thinking about physical. Given that, does anybody, at all, think this will "solve social care?"
* Like the lorry drivers. There isn't anyone to do the jobs. Even if there was funding.
That doesn't work for care homes as at £60,000 a year everything adds up quickly.
Most people's stay in care homes is not very long. I understand the median is about 9 months. I would have thought that the edge cases which involve staying for years could be covered by insurance of some kind.
The real issue is care in the community. There's lots of people struggling along with the help of relatives and/or 15 minute visits from carers. Very few live with their parents or grandparents any more.
Roughly agree in your time on care homes - residential is probably rather longer.
The number of multigenerational households has been increasing for quite a few years. Though there are boomerang kids as well as granny moving in.
If kids leave, Granny can fit in quite well into the space - the requirements are eventually either 2 decent reception rooms downstairs, or a convertible integral garage. Doable in most detached estate houses. Though in many areas of the country it is more about family living reasonably close together.
They're doing it back to front. First work out what you want to do, then debate how you fund it.....
That was the point IDS made on the radio yesterday… I thought he was very sensible
I can feel a u-turn coming tomorrow before that 1922 meeting.
They will claim it's not a u-turn as the press have been told that nothing has been absolutely decided, but...
Yep. This government seems to have a somewhat lengthy and protracted pre-decision phase. Followed by a procrastination. Such is the nature of a coalition government who never detailed their aims.
Edit. They did. Deliver Brexit. Done. Unite the Party. Done for the duration of the campaign. Defeat Corbyn. Done.
They're doing it back to front. First work out what you want to do, then debate how you fund it.....
That was the point IDS made on the radio yesterday… I thought he was very sensible
I can feel a u-turn coming tomorrow before that 1922 meeting.
They will claim it's not a u-turn as the press have been told that nothing has been absolutely decided, but...
I think you're right. All governments fly kites to test the water, though this one does it more often, and more cynically, than most. The NI idea won't run, and they'll say it was never really considered, just 'media speculation'. Quite what they'll do instead, who knows? Probably, kick the can down the road again until after the next election.
Work hard, save, get your own home, then slowly lose it by having to either sell and downsize or have some sort of equity release nonsense.
Dr. Foxy, there's a reason medieval types loathed taxes. They were levied against property value (property as in general goods not just a home). Also, as a country, we need to save more. This is going to damage that as well.
Income tax should rise. It affects both the elderly and younger people and is fairer than raising NI.
Good to see a reasoned discussion on here today about funding social care and how to do it, without any nasty aggression or swearing
Absolutely right that we need a little Income Tax rise to fund this. It's fairer to all. I spent many efforts in trying to explain this very gently to @MaxPB but it didn't seem to sink in ... 😊
What we need is the integration of NI and IT so that everyone on the same income, whether from work or investments, under or over the age of retirement, pays the same. That would involve the retired having a larger tax increase than the rest of us initially but that additional burden will be borne by those with above average incomes who can, frankly, afford it, or at least afford it better than those trying to bring up children.
Increasing NI, paid by those who are suffering the most, to provide additional (and necessary) social care for the elderly is just not a solution that is worth the time of day.
Exactly. Spot on.
Time for a wealth tax too, ideally to help reduce the overall burdens of taxes on income.
Again, there are no taxes that do not have economic consequences. One of our biggest structural problems is our excessive tendency to consume. We simply do not, as a country, invest or save enough. This generates our serious balance of payments problem which have transformed us from a wealthy country with a considerable flow of investment income from abroad to a rentier economy, paying an ever increasing premium for the use of our own assets that have been bought up by foreigners.
Given this problem do we really want to disincentivise saving? I think we need a lot more of it.
One of the reasons for that is our complete lack of restrictions on foreign people buying property assets. It's sent property prices up so people who want to live here either have to waste money on rent or borrow a lot more to buy a house. You can see the step change once the foreign money started flowing into the UK housing market.
I think this is mainly nonsense.
All kinds of significant extra costs are imposed on foreign property owners.
eg Extra Stamp Duty, and the ATED tax on property etc dwellings that is up to around 1% of property value per year.
In some places the taxes on purchase alone can pay to rent the same property for about 5 years.
Plus, the number of foreign owned properties is very small.
I suggest that 30-35bn spent on tax breaks for UK property owners in the form of Main Dwelling CGT Relief is a far larger contribution to house price increases than a very small number of foreign owned properties.
There is a waiting list of 1.6 million for mental health*. Before even thinking about physical. Given that, does anybody, at all, think this will "solve social care?"
* Like the lorry drivers. There isn't anyone to do the jobs. Even if there was funding.
It's a nightmare. These numbers suggest that deaths from over doses are not coming down any time soon.
Comments
Now if London wants to style itself as a 'world city' or even 'world capital' that's the sort of problem it needs to accept.
I suspect that people below median income, especially in the high cost areas, find saving a lot more difficult.
And finding second hand books has been transformed.
The consequence of this is that £80bn of our assets fall into foreign ownership every year and we have to pay rent on them. This is becoming more and more of a problem. It means even a trade surplus now would be diminished by investment income flows in the way that they used to be offset by income coming the other way.
The point you are making is that we also have a really serious problem with individual excess consumption, the figures @malcolmg produced are horrendous. But these are simply a reflection of the national picture. Most of us live beyond our means. Why? Are we peculiarly feckless or stupid or do we have government policies and a tax structure that incentivises consumption and discourages saving? I think its the latter.
Tories embracing high taxes.
Trump sticking around.
Democrats still have nobody better than Biden.
Politics is not looking good for the intermediate future.
He tells me: "It would provoke a very significant backlash and cause the govt and Conservative party significant damage."...
"Expanding the state further to protect private assets has got to be the wrong thing to do."
https://twitter.com/paulwaugh/status/1434452856095100929?s=20
They're doing it back to front. First work out what you want to do, then debate how you fund it.....
Thankfully the experience of the last 18 months has sped up the process of elimination, as services got forced online.
Way back when Microsoft or somebody tried to sell an input system where you write the character and scan it, thinking the IME systems looked cumbersome. What they didn't realize is that young people can't remember how to handwrite the characters, so they had to type it into their phone first to find out how to write it.
I think.... hope..... though that we're now leaving that experience behind.
Politicians saw that increasing credit meant that the me generation got more now. Once the international balances of payments became less of an issue with the freer flow of capital it seemed an easy solution. So we had a boom based on excess consumption and the run down of savings. The theory was that these capital flows and external foreign investment could offset our ability to invest ourselves but the problem with that was these pesky foreigners wanting a return on their investment.
We are now in a deep hole. Getting out is not a job for this government, its a job for the governments of the next 30-40 years. But we do need to stop digging.
Rather obnoxious of YoungTurk to imply otherwise about people.
May be you misremembered, or may be I didn’t express myself clearly enough.
There is a careful balance that needs to be struck when looking to charge people after the fact for consequences of legal actions, but Purdue overstepped the mark in terms of off-label marketing
Though I do confess I live in a city - if I lived out in the sticks, I may have to swallow my principles on occasion. And my efforts to persuade my kids to follow my lead have been an abject failure. It's a lonely war.
But it’s incumbent on all of us to build a better country starting with where we are. Your approach is not constructive
A genuine free trade agreement would be great.
Don’t need any of the political stuff though
Amazon test every UX change to death so they know perfectly well that this is what happens, that's why they use dark patterns.
We can’t have a free trade agreement because the EU won’t give us one without adding on lots of irrelevant extras we don’t like
It seems well documented as a mid term dementia symptom and it is easy to see why although I was completely oblivious to it until I experienced it. I guess like most I viewed dementia suffers as people sitting in armchairs who had lost their mental capacity, which is how she ended up and I have know idea whether she was happy then or not.
It is simple to explain. My mother had not lost her capacity to reason, but she was seeing things that contradicted that reasoning. My father became two different people, eventually this other person's family moved in and my father was having an affair with a woman in this family in front of her, so of course she was angry. She also started seeing my father as her mother, hence why she asked 'why didn't I tell her, her mother was a man'. When I explained this all to her she understood, but that soon gets overwhelmed by what she sees. Also when I explained it she asked me whether she would get better. I can't remember what I said, but that was hard.
On the positive side there were some funny sides. She wouldn't go out when both my father and the other man were wearing the same pullover and she also enjoyed our downstairs cinema.
Just to make clear: We don't have a downstairs cinema, there is no other man, family or other woman and her mother was not a man.
Mrs C and I were lucky (we think) that after her, and just before, my retirement we found a two-bed bungalow in a very nice small Essex town, close to the surgery, pharmacy and grocers, with more than adequate car parking and not too big a garden.
1) 12-15s aren't the biggest group
2) Many have already been infected
3) Some have been vaccinated
4) Vaccination rates would have been low
Booster shots are a much bigger issue.
Buy a house for £10m
Sell house 5 years later for £20m
Pay 45% tax on the profit (£10m = £4.5m)
Net proceeds available to move house = £15.5m
So I have to move to a significantly less nice house in order to move (assuming all other houses have gone up in value at the same rate since the original purchase)
That reduces people’s willingness to sell their houses and move with all sorts of knock on effects
These McCarthy and Stone style,developments seem to be being thrown up everywhere at the moment. I wonder if saturation of the market is the issue.
Think there may be someone younger, less personally distasteful, more professional and thus far more scary, as the nominee.
In contrast reducing the infectivity of kids and reducing their already small risks further seems a no brainer and I can fully understand why the government is so frustrated that the JCVI have dithered over it.
Picture an ancient snowy-haired man, old as the sea, he's seen it all and done it all, and is now in mellow stasis. He sits lotus style, gazing out at infinity, for eternity, just contemplating everything he has learnt.
That's a Wealth Tax that is.
I would go for a limit just above what I am worth personally
We didn't want to leave Essex because, at the time, one son was living close by and our daughter was only about 45 minutes away.
However neither of those advantages still hold, but we've become settled, we think, in the community. It's difficult to go down to the town centre with stopping for, or being stopped for, a chat.
What sort of care cost £50 per hour in London? With what level of medical supervision? Just like care homes, where far too often the "residential" category is muddled with the "care" category there is a huge difference between "personal care", and something including eg giving medication.
Here we were paying, for home care, something like £15 an hour in mid-2019 for my mum. That was for personal care (feed / dress / toilet etc). The company, run by a former nurse iirc, took about 15-20% and had around 15 carers working for them. So very much run as a vocation. Most employees were local, and tended to be mums working whilst kids were at school, or in their 50s where kids had left. Mostly Brits and a couple of Eastern Europeans who have come to the area and settled. One used to go around on a bike.
But North Notts is not London.
I think it is quite possible that remuneration will need to increase, but I wouldn't see an issue with opening up work visas. One joy of Brexit is that we now control this stuff properly.
Though we need to remember that eg average *real* wages in Poland have doubled since about 2009.
@JohnRentoul
·
12m
Your annual reminder: 1 in 10 adults in the UK own a second home; 4 in 10 own no property https://theguardian.com/money/2017/aug/19/second-home-ownership-up-30-since-2000-research-finds
What is the world coming to!
Used to be able to index link the original price before deducting it, which helped a lot, but that seems to have gone.
I have every respect for people like Tyndall, who accepted there would be catastrophic loss, but that was worth it for the political independence it undoubtedly allowed. What I can't abide are those who say such problems like the empty shelves are a Remainer mirage, or they are 100% exclusive from Brexit. Or those supporters of Liz Truss, who when she apes some EU trade deal with a Pacific Island and implies it will compensate trading tarrif-free with the EU, they claim it as a post-Brexit victory. Or the GFA is faulty because it never anticipated Btexit.
We left, we sucked it up and we looked on as Johnson torched the bridges as we exited. We need to make the most of what we can from the ruins, but I don't see why we should pretend we liked, and agreed to the whole enterprise.
😝
Bring in the Proportional Property tax based on 0.5% of house value annum, and abolish Stamp Duty on houses at the same time.
And then we will have a far less disorderly housing market.
The details can be worked out. The real question is whether we want to continue to spend £30bn+ a year giving tax breaks to the wealthier people / regions in our communities, and particularly to the very wealthy.
The Govt should be doing this as a bedrock element of levelling up.
Lisa Nandy has ended her relationship with the Corbynites
But where is their plan, ffs this is so easy.
Wealth tax => fund social care.
b) Its tiny risks one way or another as to infectivity so what ? If the government is worried about hypothetical variants then there's no point in reducing current infectivity.
But it was 5 years ago and we all have a duty to build a better future
On the other hand death rates are going to be so huge among the anti-vaxxers this next year that they're overall electability must be limited.
Sorry, couldn't resist the temptation, but it's clear that Leavers made a dreadful mistake, compounded by dishonesty.
Andrew Lilico
@andrew_lilico
·
1h
Since the epidemic in England's over, any vaccine passport introduced at this stage cannot have an epidemic management justification. It's only rationale wld be as a permanent change to the rights of citizens based upon their health choices. So what's the argument for doing that?
Can anyone find a link? It would be interesting to read it again, this time substituting the assumption that the GOP holds the House, now purged of many of the people who refused to go along with this last time, and maybe also the Senate.
They will claim it's not a u-turn as the press have been told that nothing has been absolutely decided, but...
He was saying “it’s all shit, it’s all your fault and F*** YOU!!!!”
You are saying “I believe this would be a better way forward and I am going to campaign for it”
Somebody page contrarian
Given that, does anybody, at all, think this will "solve social care?"
* Like the lorry drivers. There isn't anyone to do the jobs. Even if there was funding.
The number of multigenerational households has been increasing for quite a few years. Though there are boomerang kids as well as granny moving in.
If kids leave, Granny can fit in quite well into the space - the requirements are eventually either 2 decent reception rooms downstairs, or a convertible integral garage. Doable in most detached estate houses. Though in many areas of the country it is more about family living reasonably close together.
https://www.aviva.com/newsroom/news-releases/2020/09/1-in-3-homes-are-multi-generational
Such is the nature of a coalition government who never detailed their aims.
Edit. They did.
Deliver Brexit. Done.
Unite the Party. Done for the duration of the campaign.
Defeat Corbyn. Done.
Now what?
We've seen a 3 point lead recently, there's not much for that to become a 1 point Labour lead even with random movements in the polling.
All kinds of significant extra costs are imposed on foreign property owners.
eg Extra Stamp Duty, and the ATED tax on property etc dwellings that is up to around 1% of property value per year.
In some places the taxes on purchase alone can pay to rent the same property for about 5 years.
Plus, the number of foreign owned properties is very small.
I suggest that 30-35bn spent on tax breaks for UK property owners in the form of Main Dwelling CGT Relief is a far larger contribution to house price increases than a very small number of foreign owned properties.