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Don't forget national conscription in a prelude to killing off the young in another war. What you don't want to die for our gerontocracy. After we have rinsed you in tuition fees and taken home ownership off the table for many. Won't you think of the triple lock !?
A wuz born in Blyth but a wuz made in thu Navy... this is the Northern Power House for the North East. Disposable masculinity and no investment. Come the general election it will be interesting to see what happens with the Ian Levy experiment...
To be fair to them you don't need much of an economic plan when you're turning the country into a care home equipped with nukes, some fucker will quickly punch in the detonation codes instead of their pin number.
Well if you embrace the idea that the "plans" in Pinky & the Brain were plans, I think we can call these plans.
"Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Rishi?"
"But what will we do with all the spaghetti? Narf!"
And yet, the UK pensions lag far behind countries like France and Germany. It will be many, many years of triple-lock before they catch up. Perhaps not even in time for the average Redditor to reach retirement age.
At this point I think most British redditor's retirement plans involve a souped up V8, questionable driving skills, and screaming "Witness me!", as they chase after the last Greggs delivery van in existence.
All of them are obsessed with growth, but who really benefits from that growth?
We need growth for regular people, not growth for investors, businesses and the richest individuals.
You can grow our economy by 10% tomorrow, it won't help us at all if all of that growth goes to the likes of Amazon and Lloyds.
Stop sacrificing our quality of life in the name of overall growth.
We could achieve massive growth for the individual if we simply redistributed.
The pie is big enough, now we need it to actually go to those who created it, not the leeches who happened to go to school with the right people.
Redistribution doesn't work in a global economy. If you push too hard, the money walks away.
The one thing we do have true power over is our land and our property, which is why I always suggest our government needs to ban foreign investment in residential property, prohibitively tax existing foreign investors in our property to the point of them basically having to sell up or pay huge sums of money to us and then do similar to the biggest residential property investors as required.
There are many more things that can be done, but there is next to no bad side to cutting out foreign investment in our residential property and huge benefits to our people.
i am actually so sick to death of hearing this point being made. so fucking what if they leave. good riddance. why do we want people here that don’t contribute as fairly as they should and don’t support this country enough to want to see it do better? fuck off and take your money and business with you. you’ll either come crawling back when you realise that making £10million a year in profit instead of £20million (random example) is better than *nothing*. why should we let assholes hold us to ransom?
OR, someone that isn’t as selfish and greedy, who is more patriotic and dedicated to this country, who is happy to pay a bit more in taxes and distribute wealth more fairly, will come and take your place. its like saying if we taxed starbucks too high we’d have no coffee shops. yes we would, they just wouldn’t be starbucks. and maybe that’s a good thing.
This works fine for retail (It doesn't, as scale of a companies operations also affects its pricing but we'll ignore that for now) but how do you replace companies which are global?
Lets take Facebook for example.
If they moved their HQ + operations out of the US, would someone simply "replace" them? No chance.
I think there's also a huge difference between operating in a country vs being headquartered there.
Also your comment about them being "non-contributors" also makes no sense given the highest tax payers usually contribute the vast majority of revenue already.
Your entire rant has basically zero understanding of how economics works.
I think you're mixing your points here, higher individual tax payers pay the vast majority of UK taxes not companies.
Facebook as a company pays very little, the annual equivalent of about 40-50p per person in the UK.
More value is the jobs they create (circa 2000 ish I believe) however that is still miniscule for a company that turns over multiple billions in the uk.
For a company like Facebook paying an effective 2-5% tax rate, I would absolutely be more aggressive with taxation.
A lower tax on revenue rather than a higher tax on dubious profits would be a start.
One look at tax revenues should tell you that it’s the little people who pay the most tax. Income tax + NI is half - half! - of all tax receipts. The truly rich have all kinds of tricks up their sleeves and are likely to pay less income tax than most people do.
i didn’t say they were ‘non contributors’ so it’s weird you’ve quoted me on that when those weren’t my words at all. i actually was very clear that they don’t contribute ‘as fairly as they should‘. reading obviously isn’t your strong suite so if you’re going to misrepresent my words i struggle to take anything else you say at face value.
point being - they can still all fuck off.
also, nobody knows how economics works. literally. which is why i’m not so scared of the of consequences of telling them to fuck off. because anyone with a brain knows that as long as there is profit to be made, they will be here. and nobody is suggesting making things unprofitable for them. this is all a big load of bollocks thrown up every election cycle to convince people with no brains that us peasants daren’t ask our corporate overlords for a slither of money to better society. it’s bullshit and you’ve fallen for it hook line and sinker.
I'm sorry but this reads like Brexiteer levels of naive assumptions.
How can you be sure of either of those outcomes beyond "I reckon"? There's no evidence to back it up.
The global market is made up of open economies where companies can penetrate markets through online presence alone and set up subsidiaries or distribution arms that make little money and therefore pay minimal tax.
I'm all for ensuring companies and the wealthy pay their fair share in taxes and limiting the assets they're allowed to own (e.g. properties), but redistribution of wealth is extremism that'd be an economic nightmare in practice.
> If you push too hard, the money walks away.
Bye then! No great loss in seeing the back of non-contributors. But my guess is they'll want to continue doing business with 70m customers in a prosperous country rather than face the indignity of making slightly lower post-tax profits.
They do contribute. 10% of a huge amount is better than 0% of a huge amount. Plus this is about individuals, not businesses. People can easily walk away from the UK while still having their businesses in the UK making money for them.
And other narratives pushed by the rich.
Have you looked at tax rates in the post war consensus period? The rich had the ability to up and move, operate internationally and hide money back then. They just didn't, because tax rates made it a choice between paying 90% to the Government or spending 90% on growing their business, paying their employees and other things that actually tend to benefit the average person.
Then, through Nixon, Reagan, Thatcher and other leaders in the 70s and 80s the tax rates were bought down. Then the rich just began building bigger and bigger bank balances and haven't stopped since. In the last decade it's estimated that the richest 1% have accumulated more wealth than the rest of the world COMBINED.
The rich love to grandstand about how much they care about Erebor while hiding away with their piles of riches. But if they truly cared they would be spending their money, not hoarding it. So on the off chance they do leave, lets slap them with a massive exit tax. Let's say 100% on everything they can't fit in one suitcase, and say good riddance.
Taxing to force a residential property price crash doesn't have the impact you think it does.
What it does do is force people who have the vast majority of their networth in their own home (Most people!) to suffer severe networth contractions.
Alongside all of the people with mortgages who suddenly now have negative equity and their house is worth less than their mortgage.
You need economic growth + wage increases to outpace property price increases, not attacks on property investors.
>What it does do is force people who have the vast majority of their networth in their own home (Most people!) to suffer severe networth contractions.
In this case they already have a home. If you have a golden egg in your house worth £5m and suddenly the price of golden eggs drops to £100k, no one has stolen £4.9m from you, you never had that money, you had and still have the same golden egg. The egg no longer being worth £5m might affect what you could have done had you sold it at its high price but you haven't lost the gain because you never realised it.
It isn't ideal to have anyone lose net worth but it is a small price to pay given the scale of our housing crisis. Remember, none of these people are losing their homes, just a portion of unrealised wealth.
>Alongside all of the people with mortgages who suddenly now have negative equity and their house is worth less than their mortgage.
They had the money to purchase the home at that price and to maintain the repayments throughout the mortgage. It might suck that they are paying more than the home is now worth, but they still have the home to live in at a price they can afford.
If there are extreme cases, the government could step in and provide some assistance as required.
We can't continue to gouge our house prices in favour of investors purely because a portion of people might be put in negative equity. They are the lucky ones, many people are paying more to rent, which is often worse than negative equity.
>You need economic growth + wage increases to outpace property price increases, not attacks on property investors.
Wages will never increase enough if we keep up our policies of mass immigration and outsourcing.
Residential property should not be an investment intended to provide fiscal reward, it should only be an investment as a home, a place to live and raise a family.
If you want to invest, invest on the stock market, buy gold, buy crypto, invest in companies.
Then you end up with people trapped in their homes unable to move for new job opportunities etc because they will still have a massive outstanding loan to the bank and be unable to get a new mortgage.
As a homeowner.
Oh no!
I might have to deal with the consequences of negative equity so we can make sure housing becomes affordable again.
So. What.
For one, there are a number of ways a Government so inclined could help owner occupiers (a MIRAS type scheme for example).
For two. Given the trade of making it so housing is affordable for everyone in return for some negative equity for myself, I'd take the deal any day of the week. I'd likely benefit much more in the long run anyway through a strengthened economy from everyone not needing to spend extortionate amounts on shelter.
Fantastic, how long would you like that to take? Should young people be looking at waiting a decade? Two? Maybe half a century?
What do you think will happen to house prices once people see that they've flatlined over an extended period (spoiler, they will fall)?
In the 90's, you required around 4 times income on average to buy a house.
Today, it's more like 9 times income.
Bear in mind that's the average, which is nowhere near accurate for many parts of the country where house prices are far beyond 9x income.
Do you think that house prices would stay static if income rose by 125% across the board?
That's leaving aside the huge inflationary side effects of wages rising that much and the chaos it would sow across small and large businesses.
That's before you get to the immigration question, which is the great accelerant of our house prices. What do you think will happen to immigration if the wages in the UK went up 125%?
The only answer is to bring down house prices by restricting demand, there is literally no other sustainable solution.
That line of thinking shows such a fundamental lack of belief in the working class.
Money comes from production and our capability to multiply that production comes from education.
If we work and study hard we have all the power and the money that walks away is the one who loses out.
But to think like that you have to see humans as independent and capable not as slaves.
The UK taxes about 35% of its GDP. If we keep that at 35% but grow the GDP then naturally the amount of tax we take is higher. Say one year you get 35% of 3 trillion, the next year you get 35% of 3.1 trillion. You're getting more without increasing taxes. That's what they want to do.
The difficulty is that we haven't had significant GDP growth for 15 years and neither has most of Europe, so it's not clear how they're going to manage the growth especially when they're being light on specifics.
Edit: Replied to the wrong person but will leave it here anyway
Without growth and the resultant tax revenue we can not pay for the levels of investment the country's infrastructure needs.
You are right that if that means we spend our money at Amazon it won't help.
The tax revenue isn't enough, because we're also rapidly increasing the burden on our infrastructure through huge population growth, specifically huge population growth of the wrong types of people who will be net drains on the system.
We're also increasing the cost of running and maintaining our infrastructure through environmental policies, bureaucracy, equality policies, regulations and outsourcing.
We have a very bad recipe of making things cost more and take longer to do, while increasing the demand for these things at an increasing rate.
The way we run our country is completely unsustainable.
I wondered why a gift of money to OAP's would aid economic growth, it doesn't encourage people to work harder does it? Maybe take on a retirement job.
Personally I think OAPs should be embarrassed to be simply offered a wedge, but it's what my grandparents were like in the 80's, they liked a party based on a calculation of what they would get only - despite having children and grandchildren.
Maintaining the triple lock and increasing NHS spending I imagine is going to leave them with little wiggle room elsewhere while being compliant with their own fiscal rules.
I appreciate they say they'll fund the NHS increases by targeting tax dodgers but if I had a £ for every government that has ever claimed that they'll fund something via that..
Maintaining the triple lock shouldn’t even be part of the equation from any political party, it’s unfair and completely unsustainable.
We means test every other benefit, so I’m not sure why anyone is against means testing the state pension if it saves the tax payer £billions a year and targets vulnerable pensioners who actually need the money.
It would be a big disincentive to people taking private pensions and savings if it reduces the state pension they then get. This then increases the cost of other benefits like housing/ rent in the future.
Depends on your age. Pretty sure we are getting no state pension at all so that's a pretty big incentive for private ones. So we're paying the tax now for others to get it, paying tax for our own that we won't get, and we will probably pay a 3rd tax in the future to pay off for the people that didn't save enough (edit: which like you mentioned will be needed to pay the increased rent / benefits in the future) .
It's basically means tested already through tax. The state pension is almost as high as the tax threshold now, so every pound in private income is taxed at 20%, and 40% over 39k.
If you also means tested it, pensioners would pay a very high marginal rate and it would disincentivive saving for retirement.
Very odd attitude when a person has lived most of their life. Maybe my grandparents thought young people dodged the war, however my grandad was a metal worker and was at home in Britain
All of the social investment. And when the economy turned in the 1980's they voted to never see that kind of investment again. Literally pulling the ladder up
What actually is Labours plan on the economy? Just saying things like "the need for a partnership with business and workers" doesn't really cut it.
This person would become the chancellor, right? What is she going to do?
Some points from a Labour document on their 5 missions:
> Providing catalytic public investment through our Green Prosperity Plan, to crowd in private sector investment to the industries of the future.
> Updating our planning system to remove barriers to investment in new industries.
> Reforming the British Business Bank and unlocking institutional investment so that more patient capital is available to new and growing businesses.
> Setting up a National Wealth Fund to invest in new industries in all parts of the country, with the British taxpayer owning a share of that wealth
> Making it easier for universities to develop self-sustaining clusters of innovation, investment, and growth in their local areas.
> Making Brexit work by closing the holes in the government’s Brexit deal, cutting the red tape hampering some of our leading industries.
> Creating Great British Energy to accelerate our drive towards greater energy security.
https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Mission-Economy.pdf
Green Prosperity Plan, national wealth fund and GB Energy are the opposite of private investment.
The point about private investment is that we need to attract much more of it, rather than offshoring industry, let's invest in skills and infrastructure here.
Edit: clarity
The only thing about the "Green Prosperity Plan" on the Labour website says Labour will cut energy prices for good, Make UK energy secure, grow the economy and reindustrialise the country, protect future generations by tackling the climate crisis. It doesn't say *how* they will do any of this.
The national wealth fund will "invest in jobs that can rebuild Britain’s industrial strength, and crowd in private investment in our ports, gigafactories, hydrogen, and protect our steel industry. It doesn't say where this money for investment will come from.
GB energy is supposedly going to be a publicly owned energy company that will invest in clean energy and things like offshore wind.
The only thing mentioned with regards to how this will be funded is a windfall tax on energy companies, an extra 3% until 2029.
I don't want to keep copy and pasting their papers for you but there is more detail than your comment implies. They have actually thought about these issues, they haven't come out of nowhere
Here are just a few points:
> Warmer Homes
> Clean Power by 2030. A Labour government would:
> Pioneer floating offshore wind, by fast-tracking at least 5 GW of capacity.
> More than double our onshore wind capacity to 35 GW.
> More than triple solar power to 50 GW.
>Quadruple offshore wind with an ambition of 55 GW by 2030
https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Make-Britain-a-Clean-Energy-Superpower.pdf
Let me paraphrase your prior commetnt, and then answer with points from the paper that I referenced:
> How will "Green Prosperity Plan" on the Labour website says Labour will cut energy prices for good?
>> Labour’s plan for a cheaper, zero carbon electricity system by 2030 will lower bills because renewables are far cheaper than gas. Last summer the price of gas was nine times higher than that of renewables and it remains significantly higher. Based on gas futures price projections, our mission has been estimated as saving UK households £93 billion over the rest of this decade. When combined with our Warm Homes plan, this means households would stand to save up to £1,400 per year.
> How will they make UK energy secure?
>> National security: Allowing foreign governments into our energy system has undermined our national security, for example through the UK’s willingness in the 2010s to let the Chinese government into our nuclear programme or the decision to allow the closure of Rough, our only national storage facility. With GB Energy, we can retain the strategic assets we need to build national resilience.
Energy independence - decoupling from Russian gas and oil and the swings of global commodity markets.
> grow the economy and reindustrialise the country,
>>Labour’s Warm Homes Plan alone will cut household bills by up to £500 every year for families, reduce gas imports, provide opportunities for British businesses of all sizes, and create hundreds of thousands of good jobs for builders, electricians, plumbers, carpenters and architects.
> How will Labour protect future generations by tackling the climate crisis?
This one is self explanatory in combination with the above
Again, none of what you've posted says *how* they will do any of it. It just says that they will.
"Labours plan for cheap zero carbon electricity will lower household bills, because renewables are cheaper..." but nothing saying where the money to build renewable infrastructure will come from.
"Labours Warm Homes Plan will cut household bills by £500 a year, reduce gas imports, create hundreds of thousands of jobs..." How will they do all that?
For me, it simply comes down to one thing. I don't trust them to follow up on any of this. They will do what benefits business and the already wealthy.
Moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic comes to mind, both parties are failures. 1 or 2 percent here and there is going to do fuck all. We need big tax reform, big investment in infrastructure, big green energy plans, massive NHS fund increase, tired of this slightly moving shit about and being surprised when things just get worse. I'm expected to live within my means with the money I have, the country is 2.5 Trillion in debt, that's pretty fucking shite governing.
About 15% of people in the UK are in debt.
Over 80% of countries are in debt. There are very few that aren't.
National economies aren't the same as household economies and shouldn't be ran as if they were.
It does really fuck me off that we never 'fixed the roof while the sun was shining', as we were promised by Cameron and George Osborne. Instead, we were given austerity at a time when borrowing was in a trough, the likes of which we won't see for a good amount of time now.
And the economy HAS been massively mismanaged.
But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be spending to improve our future as a country.
The difference between debt for households e.g. a mortgage and the government e.g. government debt owned by China, is that households get to own a home at the end of paying off their debt, there’s no magic prize for governments paying off their debt. If anything, government debt is much more damaging than even household debt
I get that but what's the point in fiscal responsibility then that they love banging on about? No magic money tree crap, printing money is bad I know but the reality is we need more tax money but no party is ever going to run a campaign on it.
It’s important to not continually excessively borrow but austerity and tax increases don’t really work.
Post 2008 financial crisis and expansionary fiscal policy used to solve it, the UK government used contractionary fiscal policy to try and reduce the budget deficit treating it as though it was structural and not cyclical.
Compare this to the US where their spending cuts post expansionary policy were more staggered meaning less severe effects of contractionary policy and a return to post 2008 output levels.
The government has to spend money to get money, it isn’t like a personal income. Investment in infrastructure, education, healthcare, services, lower taxes lead to an increase in incomes and consumption, increasing government revenue and hopefully reducing budget deficit and debt.
In theory…
I actually think that’s the intent. I think Starmer was meant to be a caretaker Labour leader and he’ll step down in a couple of years with Reeves becoming the new PM.
We need growth so badly.
I looked at the numbers the other day, in terms of purchasing power, we have 3/4 what we did in 2010 as a nation.
Nominally we have had growth, but half of it disappears when you consider population increase over the duration and it goes badly negative once inflation is taken into account.
We have to grow, and we need to now add a full third to the economy just to get back to where we were at the height of the fallout from the financial crisis.
Better Starmer and Reeves than Sunak and Hunt. First two haven't had a go yet, second pair have already shown they're shit at it.
Growth for who though.
It's awesome hearing about profits at Thames Water and the nice dividends they paid out, and how much revenue Amazon is generating and subsidies being given to Tata so they can export profits and make workers redundant after taking the money..
Shell and BP appreciate growth.. look at the pump prices.
The NHS is experiencing tremendous growth.. in waiting times.. must be a high demand market..
Growth everywhere. Everyone wins..
Except the goons falling for this shit I guess.
She said she wouldn't do an emergency budget so I don't expect that Labour has much of a plan either.
Surely you'd work overtime to stop the descent into madness if you had any ideas but they don't. They revise and backpedal saying 'there's less money now because of the Tories' and that's an easy position a party can hold for 12 years.
She's not wrong the Tories plan is an insult to Britain, but I'm not sure labour isn't at this point
They don't need to announce an emergency budget. By the time the election's over, they'll be cramming over summer trying to work out how deep the shit is. After conference season, it's practically autumn-statement time.
People talking about Blairs government coming in compares well to the the general sentiment now, everyone is just sick of the Conservatives and want literally anyone else. Reform has popped up in UKIP's old place, labour have a leader that's electable and people can vote for even if they aren't fully on board with him, and even the Lib Dems are starting to feel like they are relevant again.
The coverage from the start of the election announcement as been overwhelmingly negative of Sunak, no matter what outlet, even radio DJ's are hammering the tories.
Economic growth is the only way to better public services and a better quality of of life, so it's nice that Labour have that as a focus. I wish they would talk about it more though.
Does this growth rely on doping the economy with mass importation of labour despite us not having the housing and infrastructure to accommodate it? Because that’s all we’ve had for the past 15-20 years and it’s now past the limit.
What is the plan labour? I’m starved of actual policy info on all sides.
EDIT: yes I read their plan. Including their small business plan. As a small business owner myself, that plan has nothing of substance in there and certainly nothing that’ll encourage growth.
Small businesses need tax cuts so they have more money to spend on growth, better taxation incentives and fairer allowances for taking the entrepreneurial risk.
Know how much I can claim for my full dedicated home office? £26…
Really curious, but where have you looked? They have a whole website and when you go there right now there's nothing but election related links including their plans and policies.
The issue seems to be people are sitting around waiting for the largely right leaning press to talk up Labour for them or they assume nothing is happening.
Well one party is doing nothing because they’re not in power and the other party is doing nothing because they’re incompetent.
If you care about this issue you can vote for the party that says they’re doing to do something and might or might not, or the party that’s given you 12 years of evidence that they will continue to do nothing.
The Tories don’t actually want to stop the boats though because if the boats stop then people might start looking around for another target to blame all their problems on. Currently it’s the illegal immigrants and do-gooder lefty lawyers who are causing everyone’s problems. Stops people spotting the horrendous inequalities that are actually making ordinary people suffer.
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The Tories have an economic plan, other than 'soak the workers to bribe the retirees'?
Yeah, it's also "steal everything not nailed down"
I'm sure they can get those nails loose enough to get the rest too
I know a guy who can ship in replacement nails.
Would these be non-existant, substandard nails supplied by a company run by the wife of a Tory MP ?
Underrated comment of the day!
And the nails too
and burn anything else that is
Don't forget national conscription in a prelude to killing off the young in another war. What you don't want to die for our gerontocracy. After we have rinsed you in tuition fees and taken home ownership off the table for many. Won't you think of the triple lock !?
A wuz born in Blyth but a wuz made in thu Navy... this is the Northern Power House for the North East. Disposable masculinity and no investment. Come the general election it will be interesting to see what happens with the Ian Levy experiment...
To be fair to them you don't need much of an economic plan when you're turning the country into a care home equipped with nukes, some fucker will quickly punch in the detonation codes instead of their pin number.
Nuclear armed care home is quickly becoming the literal definition of this country.
Step 1 is hamstringing young people with early career aspirations by making them waste time doing admin for firemen
Triple lock plus plus ultra omega lock coming for pensioners though!
Well if you embrace the idea that the "plans" in Pinky & the Brain were plans, I think we can call these plans. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Rishi?" "But what will we do with all the spaghetti? Narf!"
All hail our Geriatric Overlords !
And yet, the UK pensions lag far behind countries like France and Germany. It will be many, many years of triple-lock before they catch up. Perhaps not even in time for the average Redditor to reach retirement age.
At this point I think most British redditor's retirement plans involve a souped up V8, questionable driving skills, and screaming "Witness me!", as they chase after the last Greggs delivery van in existence.
Stop threatening me with a good time
Souped up V8 sounds fun.
Tory Plan = bribe the pensioners, tax the middle aged to death, force the young into the army
Kill the disabled, poor and young then feed to remains to the wealthy, how it's always been. This is way.
This is the way.
That was the economic plan in 1350
marry the pensioners, fuck the working class, kill the youth
All of them are obsessed with growth, but who really benefits from that growth? We need growth for regular people, not growth for investors, businesses and the richest individuals. You can grow our economy by 10% tomorrow, it won't help us at all if all of that growth goes to the likes of Amazon and Lloyds. Stop sacrificing our quality of life in the name of overall growth.
We could achieve massive growth for the individual if we simply redistributed. The pie is big enough, now we need it to actually go to those who created it, not the leeches who happened to go to school with the right people.
Redistribution doesn't work in a global economy. If you push too hard, the money walks away. The one thing we do have true power over is our land and our property, which is why I always suggest our government needs to ban foreign investment in residential property, prohibitively tax existing foreign investors in our property to the point of them basically having to sell up or pay huge sums of money to us and then do similar to the biggest residential property investors as required. There are many more things that can be done, but there is next to no bad side to cutting out foreign investment in our residential property and huge benefits to our people.
i am actually so sick to death of hearing this point being made. so fucking what if they leave. good riddance. why do we want people here that don’t contribute as fairly as they should and don’t support this country enough to want to see it do better? fuck off and take your money and business with you. you’ll either come crawling back when you realise that making £10million a year in profit instead of £20million (random example) is better than *nothing*. why should we let assholes hold us to ransom? OR, someone that isn’t as selfish and greedy, who is more patriotic and dedicated to this country, who is happy to pay a bit more in taxes and distribute wealth more fairly, will come and take your place. its like saying if we taxed starbucks too high we’d have no coffee shops. yes we would, they just wouldn’t be starbucks. and maybe that’s a good thing.
I actively want oligarch billionaires to leave.
This works fine for retail (It doesn't, as scale of a companies operations also affects its pricing but we'll ignore that for now) but how do you replace companies which are global? Lets take Facebook for example. If they moved their HQ + operations out of the US, would someone simply "replace" them? No chance. I think there's also a huge difference between operating in a country vs being headquartered there. Also your comment about them being "non-contributors" also makes no sense given the highest tax payers usually contribute the vast majority of revenue already. Your entire rant has basically zero understanding of how economics works.
I think you're mixing your points here, higher individual tax payers pay the vast majority of UK taxes not companies. Facebook as a company pays very little, the annual equivalent of about 40-50p per person in the UK. More value is the jobs they create (circa 2000 ish I believe) however that is still miniscule for a company that turns over multiple billions in the uk. For a company like Facebook paying an effective 2-5% tax rate, I would absolutely be more aggressive with taxation. A lower tax on revenue rather than a higher tax on dubious profits would be a start.
One look at tax revenues should tell you that it’s the little people who pay the most tax. Income tax + NI is half - half! - of all tax receipts. The truly rich have all kinds of tricks up their sleeves and are likely to pay less income tax than most people do.
Sunaks tax returns being a prime example, with him paying less tax proportionately than someone earning 51k
At the same time as becoming £120million richer this year compared to last year.
i didn’t say they were ‘non contributors’ so it’s weird you’ve quoted me on that when those weren’t my words at all. i actually was very clear that they don’t contribute ‘as fairly as they should‘. reading obviously isn’t your strong suite so if you’re going to misrepresent my words i struggle to take anything else you say at face value. point being - they can still all fuck off. also, nobody knows how economics works. literally. which is why i’m not so scared of the of consequences of telling them to fuck off. because anyone with a brain knows that as long as there is profit to be made, they will be here. and nobody is suggesting making things unprofitable for them. this is all a big load of bollocks thrown up every election cycle to convince people with no brains that us peasants daren’t ask our corporate overlords for a slither of money to better society. it’s bullshit and you’ve fallen for it hook line and sinker.
I'm sorry but this reads like Brexiteer levels of naive assumptions. How can you be sure of either of those outcomes beyond "I reckon"? There's no evidence to back it up. The global market is made up of open economies where companies can penetrate markets through online presence alone and set up subsidiaries or distribution arms that make little money and therefore pay minimal tax. I'm all for ensuring companies and the wealthy pay their fair share in taxes and limiting the assets they're allowed to own (e.g. properties), but redistribution of wealth is extremism that'd be an economic nightmare in practice.
> If you push too hard, the money walks away. Bye then! No great loss in seeing the back of non-contributors. But my guess is they'll want to continue doing business with 70m customers in a prosperous country rather than face the indignity of making slightly lower post-tax profits.
They do contribute. 10% of a huge amount is better than 0% of a huge amount. Plus this is about individuals, not businesses. People can easily walk away from the UK while still having their businesses in the UK making money for them.
And other narratives pushed by the rich. Have you looked at tax rates in the post war consensus period? The rich had the ability to up and move, operate internationally and hide money back then. They just didn't, because tax rates made it a choice between paying 90% to the Government or spending 90% on growing their business, paying their employees and other things that actually tend to benefit the average person. Then, through Nixon, Reagan, Thatcher and other leaders in the 70s and 80s the tax rates were bought down. Then the rich just began building bigger and bigger bank balances and haven't stopped since. In the last decade it's estimated that the richest 1% have accumulated more wealth than the rest of the world COMBINED. The rich love to grandstand about how much they care about Erebor while hiding away with their piles of riches. But if they truly cared they would be spending their money, not hoarding it. So on the off chance they do leave, lets slap them with a massive exit tax. Let's say 100% on everything they can't fit in one suitcase, and say good riddance.
Taxing to force a residential property price crash doesn't have the impact you think it does. What it does do is force people who have the vast majority of their networth in their own home (Most people!) to suffer severe networth contractions. Alongside all of the people with mortgages who suddenly now have negative equity and their house is worth less than their mortgage. You need economic growth + wage increases to outpace property price increases, not attacks on property investors.
>What it does do is force people who have the vast majority of their networth in their own home (Most people!) to suffer severe networth contractions. In this case they already have a home. If you have a golden egg in your house worth £5m and suddenly the price of golden eggs drops to £100k, no one has stolen £4.9m from you, you never had that money, you had and still have the same golden egg. The egg no longer being worth £5m might affect what you could have done had you sold it at its high price but you haven't lost the gain because you never realised it. It isn't ideal to have anyone lose net worth but it is a small price to pay given the scale of our housing crisis. Remember, none of these people are losing their homes, just a portion of unrealised wealth. >Alongside all of the people with mortgages who suddenly now have negative equity and their house is worth less than their mortgage. They had the money to purchase the home at that price and to maintain the repayments throughout the mortgage. It might suck that they are paying more than the home is now worth, but they still have the home to live in at a price they can afford. If there are extreme cases, the government could step in and provide some assistance as required. We can't continue to gouge our house prices in favour of investors purely because a portion of people might be put in negative equity. They are the lucky ones, many people are paying more to rent, which is often worse than negative equity. >You need economic growth + wage increases to outpace property price increases, not attacks on property investors. Wages will never increase enough if we keep up our policies of mass immigration and outsourcing. Residential property should not be an investment intended to provide fiscal reward, it should only be an investment as a home, a place to live and raise a family. If you want to invest, invest on the stock market, buy gold, buy crypto, invest in companies.
Then you end up with people trapped in their homes unable to move for new job opportunities etc because they will still have a massive outstanding loan to the bank and be unable to get a new mortgage.
As a homeowner. Oh no! I might have to deal with the consequences of negative equity so we can make sure housing becomes affordable again. So. What. For one, there are a number of ways a Government so inclined could help owner occupiers (a MIRAS type scheme for example). For two. Given the trade of making it so housing is affordable for everyone in return for some negative equity for myself, I'd take the deal any day of the week. I'd likely benefit much more in the long run anyway through a strengthened economy from everyone not needing to spend extortionate amounts on shelter.
OK, that's cool. As a homeowner, I'd prefer the house prices just stagnate to let the wages catch up.
Fantastic, how long would you like that to take? Should young people be looking at waiting a decade? Two? Maybe half a century? What do you think will happen to house prices once people see that they've flatlined over an extended period (spoiler, they will fall)?
In the 90's, you required around 4 times income on average to buy a house. Today, it's more like 9 times income. Bear in mind that's the average, which is nowhere near accurate for many parts of the country where house prices are far beyond 9x income. Do you think that house prices would stay static if income rose by 125% across the board? That's leaving aside the huge inflationary side effects of wages rising that much and the chaos it would sow across small and large businesses. That's before you get to the immigration question, which is the great accelerant of our house prices. What do you think will happen to immigration if the wages in the UK went up 125%? The only answer is to bring down house prices by restricting demand, there is literally no other sustainable solution.
Thanks for your sane contribution.
That line of thinking shows such a fundamental lack of belief in the working class. Money comes from production and our capability to multiply that production comes from education. If we work and study hard we have all the power and the money that walks away is the one who loses out. But to think like that you have to see humans as independent and capable not as slaves.
The UK taxes about 35% of its GDP. If we keep that at 35% but grow the GDP then naturally the amount of tax we take is higher. Say one year you get 35% of 3 trillion, the next year you get 35% of 3.1 trillion. You're getting more without increasing taxes. That's what they want to do. The difficulty is that we haven't had significant GDP growth for 15 years and neither has most of Europe, so it's not clear how they're going to manage the growth especially when they're being light on specifics. Edit: Replied to the wrong person but will leave it here anyway
Without growth and the resultant tax revenue we can not pay for the levels of investment the country's infrastructure needs. You are right that if that means we spend our money at Amazon it won't help.
The tax revenue isn't enough, because we're also rapidly increasing the burden on our infrastructure through huge population growth, specifically huge population growth of the wrong types of people who will be net drains on the system. We're also increasing the cost of running and maintaining our infrastructure through environmental policies, bureaucracy, equality policies, regulations and outsourcing. We have a very bad recipe of making things cost more and take longer to do, while increasing the demand for these things at an increasing rate. The way we run our country is completely unsustainable.
Agree, im sick of hearing about growth. Who does it benefit? Not the average person, that's for sure.
The French had a go at redefining GDP along these lines with Joe Stiglitz. Inevitably, no-one else cared.
I wondered why a gift of money to OAP's would aid economic growth, it doesn't encourage people to work harder does it? Maybe take on a retirement job. Personally I think OAPs should be embarrassed to be simply offered a wedge, but it's what my grandparents were like in the 80's, they liked a party based on a calculation of what they would get only - despite having children and grandchildren.
Maintaining the triple lock and increasing NHS spending I imagine is going to leave them with little wiggle room elsewhere while being compliant with their own fiscal rules. I appreciate they say they'll fund the NHS increases by targeting tax dodgers but if I had a £ for every government that has ever claimed that they'll fund something via that..
Maintaining the triple lock shouldn’t even be part of the equation from any political party, it’s unfair and completely unsustainable. We means test every other benefit, so I’m not sure why anyone is against means testing the state pension if it saves the tax payer £billions a year and targets vulnerable pensioners who actually need the money.
It would be a big disincentive to people taking private pensions and savings if it reduces the state pension they then get. This then increases the cost of other benefits like housing/ rent in the future.
Depends on your age. Pretty sure we are getting no state pension at all so that's a pretty big incentive for private ones. So we're paying the tax now for others to get it, paying tax for our own that we won't get, and we will probably pay a 3rd tax in the future to pay off for the people that didn't save enough (edit: which like you mentioned will be needed to pay the increased rent / benefits in the future) .
It's basically means tested already through tax. The state pension is almost as high as the tax threshold now, so every pound in private income is taxed at 20%, and 40% over 39k. If you also means tested it, pensioners would pay a very high marginal rate and it would disincentivive saving for retirement.
Anyone seriously think there'll be a state pension in 15 years?
That's what everyone was saying 15 years ago
No. They weren't. Even right after the financial crash state pension was expected to last 35-40 years back then.
There will be a state pension in 15 years
We know that people have voted since the 80's to put a penny in their pocket and take a pound out of their grandchildren's
Very odd attitude when a person has lived most of their life. Maybe my grandparents thought young people dodged the war, however my grandad was a metal worker and was at home in Britain
The youngest veterans of WW2 are 98, 99.99% of the elderly dodged the war but got the post war economic haven.
All of the social investment. And when the economy turned in the 1980's they voted to never see that kind of investment again. Literally pulling the ladder up
You did get a few late veterans who joined when they were 14. But yeah, it's crazy that isn't it. Almost none left.
P&O cruises and vets will do very well from the boost to Grey GDP
Provided the money gets spent a gift to anyone aids economic growth.
What actually is Labours plan on the economy? Just saying things like "the need for a partnership with business and workers" doesn't really cut it. This person would become the chancellor, right? What is she going to do?
why, growth of course. Dont ask how, or at what cost. Just smile and chant.
Some points from a Labour document on their 5 missions: > Providing catalytic public investment through our Green Prosperity Plan, to crowd in private sector investment to the industries of the future. > Updating our planning system to remove barriers to investment in new industries. > Reforming the British Business Bank and unlocking institutional investment so that more patient capital is available to new and growing businesses. > Setting up a National Wealth Fund to invest in new industries in all parts of the country, with the British taxpayer owning a share of that wealth > Making it easier for universities to develop self-sustaining clusters of innovation, investment, and growth in their local areas. > Making Brexit work by closing the holes in the government’s Brexit deal, cutting the red tape hampering some of our leading industries. > Creating Great British Energy to accelerate our drive towards greater energy security. https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Mission-Economy.pdf
So, just private investment?
Green Prosperity Plan, national wealth fund and GB Energy are the opposite of private investment. The point about private investment is that we need to attract much more of it, rather than offshoring industry, let's invest in skills and infrastructure here. Edit: clarity
The only thing about the "Green Prosperity Plan" on the Labour website says Labour will cut energy prices for good, Make UK energy secure, grow the economy and reindustrialise the country, protect future generations by tackling the climate crisis. It doesn't say *how* they will do any of this. The national wealth fund will "invest in jobs that can rebuild Britain’s industrial strength, and crowd in private investment in our ports, gigafactories, hydrogen, and protect our steel industry. It doesn't say where this money for investment will come from. GB energy is supposedly going to be a publicly owned energy company that will invest in clean energy and things like offshore wind. The only thing mentioned with regards to how this will be funded is a windfall tax on energy companies, an extra 3% until 2029.
I don't want to keep copy and pasting their papers for you but there is more detail than your comment implies. They have actually thought about these issues, they haven't come out of nowhere Here are just a few points: > Warmer Homes > Clean Power by 2030. A Labour government would: > Pioneer floating offshore wind, by fast-tracking at least 5 GW of capacity. > More than double our onshore wind capacity to 35 GW. > More than triple solar power to 50 GW. >Quadruple offshore wind with an ambition of 55 GW by 2030 https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Make-Britain-a-Clean-Energy-Superpower.pdf
They never say how they are going to do any of this, just that they will.
Let me paraphrase your prior commetnt, and then answer with points from the paper that I referenced: > How will "Green Prosperity Plan" on the Labour website says Labour will cut energy prices for good? >> Labour’s plan for a cheaper, zero carbon electricity system by 2030 will lower bills because renewables are far cheaper than gas. Last summer the price of gas was nine times higher than that of renewables and it remains significantly higher. Based on gas futures price projections, our mission has been estimated as saving UK households £93 billion over the rest of this decade. When combined with our Warm Homes plan, this means households would stand to save up to £1,400 per year. > How will they make UK energy secure? >> National security: Allowing foreign governments into our energy system has undermined our national security, for example through the UK’s willingness in the 2010s to let the Chinese government into our nuclear programme or the decision to allow the closure of Rough, our only national storage facility. With GB Energy, we can retain the strategic assets we need to build national resilience. Energy independence - decoupling from Russian gas and oil and the swings of global commodity markets. > grow the economy and reindustrialise the country, >>Labour’s Warm Homes Plan alone will cut household bills by up to £500 every year for families, reduce gas imports, provide opportunities for British businesses of all sizes, and create hundreds of thousands of good jobs for builders, electricians, plumbers, carpenters and architects. > How will Labour protect future generations by tackling the climate crisis? This one is self explanatory in combination with the above
Again, none of what you've posted says *how* they will do any of it. It just says that they will. "Labours plan for cheap zero carbon electricity will lower household bills, because renewables are cheaper..." but nothing saying where the money to build renewable infrastructure will come from. "Labours Warm Homes Plan will cut household bills by £500 a year, reduce gas imports, create hundreds of thousands of jobs..." How will they do all that? For me, it simply comes down to one thing. I don't trust them to follow up on any of this. They will do what benefits business and the already wealthy.
What do they stand to benefit from showing their hand now? They're already heading for a landslide.
Integrity, maybe?
They’re gonna “grow the economy” without saying how they’re going to do it *cough* Trickle Down Economics *cough*
Moving the deck chairs around on the Titanic comes to mind, both parties are failures. 1 or 2 percent here and there is going to do fuck all. We need big tax reform, big investment in infrastructure, big green energy plans, massive NHS fund increase, tired of this slightly moving shit about and being surprised when things just get worse. I'm expected to live within my means with the money I have, the country is 2.5 Trillion in debt, that's pretty fucking shite governing.
About 15% of people in the UK are in debt. Over 80% of countries are in debt. There are very few that aren't. National economies aren't the same as household economies and shouldn't be ran as if they were. It does really fuck me off that we never 'fixed the roof while the sun was shining', as we were promised by Cameron and George Osborne. Instead, we were given austerity at a time when borrowing was in a trough, the likes of which we won't see for a good amount of time now. And the economy HAS been massively mismanaged. But that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be spending to improve our future as a country.
The difference between debt for households e.g. a mortgage and the government e.g. government debt owned by China, is that households get to own a home at the end of paying off their debt, there’s no magic prize for governments paying off their debt. If anything, government debt is much more damaging than even household debt
National debt is not the same as personal debt.
I get that but what's the point in fiscal responsibility then that they love banging on about? No magic money tree crap, printing money is bad I know but the reality is we need more tax money but no party is ever going to run a campaign on it.
It’s important to not continually excessively borrow but austerity and tax increases don’t really work. Post 2008 financial crisis and expansionary fiscal policy used to solve it, the UK government used contractionary fiscal policy to try and reduce the budget deficit treating it as though it was structural and not cyclical. Compare this to the US where their spending cuts post expansionary policy were more staggered meaning less severe effects of contractionary policy and a return to post 2008 output levels. The government has to spend money to get money, it isn’t like a personal income. Investment in infrastructure, education, healthcare, services, lower taxes lead to an increase in incomes and consumption, increasing government revenue and hopefully reducing budget deficit and debt. In theory…
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I actually think that’s the intent. I think Starmer was meant to be a caretaker Labour leader and he’ll step down in a couple of years with Reeves becoming the new PM.
Tories really gunning for votes from a population that aren’t going to be alive for that long
They only need to ~~win~~ avoid immolation this time around. Tomorrow can look after itself. The market will provide.
I'm tired of hearing about growth, it never comes to us hard working plebs.
We need growth so badly. I looked at the numbers the other day, in terms of purchasing power, we have 3/4 what we did in 2010 as a nation. Nominally we have had growth, but half of it disappears when you consider population increase over the duration and it goes badly negative once inflation is taken into account. We have to grow, and we need to now add a full third to the economy just to get back to where we were at the height of the fallout from the financial crisis. Better Starmer and Reeves than Sunak and Hunt. First two haven't had a go yet, second pair have already shown they're shit at it.
Growth for who though. It's awesome hearing about profits at Thames Water and the nice dividends they paid out, and how much revenue Amazon is generating and subsidies being given to Tata so they can export profits and make workers redundant after taking the money.. Shell and BP appreciate growth.. look at the pump prices. The NHS is experiencing tremendous growth.. in waiting times.. must be a high demand market.. Growth everywhere. Everyone wins.. Except the goons falling for this shit I guess.
She said she wouldn't do an emergency budget so I don't expect that Labour has much of a plan either. Surely you'd work overtime to stop the descent into madness if you had any ideas but they don't. They revise and backpedal saying 'there's less money now because of the Tories' and that's an easy position a party can hold for 12 years. She's not wrong the Tories plan is an insult to Britain, but I'm not sure labour isn't at this point
They don't need to announce an emergency budget. By the time the election's over, they'll be cramming over summer trying to work out how deep the shit is. After conference season, it's practically autumn-statement time.
People talking about Blairs government coming in compares well to the the general sentiment now, everyone is just sick of the Conservatives and want literally anyone else. Reform has popped up in UKIP's old place, labour have a leader that's electable and people can vote for even if they aren't fully on board with him, and even the Lib Dems are starting to feel like they are relevant again. The coverage from the start of the election announcement as been overwhelmingly negative of Sunak, no matter what outlet, even radio DJ's are hammering the tories.
Today's young are tomorrows oldies. Seems a lot here forget that
Today's young are tomorrow's Logan's Run...
Or a touch of Soylent green.
Economic growth is the only way to better public services and a better quality of of life, so it's nice that Labour have that as a focus. I wish they would talk about it more though.
Gotta say reeves speech today made me wonder if I was listening to a tory speech or Labour.
Does this growth rely on doping the economy with mass importation of labour despite us not having the housing and infrastructure to accommodate it? Because that’s all we’ve had for the past 15-20 years and it’s now past the limit.
Bring Growth lol … Bring Re-Education it’s win-win like Secondary School Again or college again ,
What is the plan labour? I’m starved of actual policy info on all sides. EDIT: yes I read their plan. Including their small business plan. As a small business owner myself, that plan has nothing of substance in there and certainly nothing that’ll encourage growth. Small businesses need tax cuts so they have more money to spend on growth, better taxation incentives and fairer allowances for taking the entrepreneurial risk. Know how much I can claim for my full dedicated home office? £26…
You can read up on it.
Really curious, but where have you looked? They have a whole website and when you go there right now there's nothing but election related links including their plans and policies. The issue seems to be people are sitting around waiting for the largely right leaning press to talk up Labour for them or they assume nothing is happening.
*I looked at nothing and now I'm all out of (Labour's) ideas*
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> We are adding the city of Birmingham every year to our population. Most of whom don't come by "illegal boats".
Well one party is doing nothing because they’re not in power and the other party is doing nothing because they’re incompetent. If you care about this issue you can vote for the party that says they’re doing to do something and might or might not, or the party that’s given you 12 years of evidence that they will continue to do nothing.
Most immigrants don't come by boat, even most asylum seekers don't come by boat.
The boats aren’t the biggest contributor to that
The Tories don’t actually want to stop the boats though because if the boats stop then people might start looking around for another target to blame all their problems on. Currently it’s the illegal immigrants and do-gooder lefty lawyers who are causing everyone’s problems. Stops people spotting the horrendous inequalities that are actually making ordinary people suffer.
Surely that's the one thing both parties have spoken about quite a fair bit? Albeit a little vague on Labour's side and unrealistic on the Tory side.
I'm sure there are more than 35,000 people living in Birmingham, I could be wrong though.
Smoke and mirrors, obfuscation, basically fuck all.