> Mr Johnson ought to have resigned for lying repeatedly to Parliament about whether he broke his own laws
There seems to be a problem developing across many western democracies that a large segment of voters have developed a tolerance for lying by their leaders. Perhaps it's just me getting older and more cynical but I really feel like this was not how it was 30 years ago.
I'm not sure where it will lead but it feels like this is one of the hallmarks that you would expect to see at the beginning of the breakdown of a civilised society.
30 years ago was the end of George H W Bush’s era, who among other lies was wrapped up in the Iran Contra affair under Reagan; and the beginning of the Clinton era who famously lied about his personal life but certainly had his fair share of political lies as well. In American history it feels like we’ve had more lying leaders than not for a long, long time.
One disconnect for me is the divergence of worker productivity metrics and very low GDP. How is it that workers can be twice as productive as say 2 decades ago but last decade's GDP growth is only +1.7%? People are doing more, but getting less. It doesn't really matter which government presides over the phenomena. Of course government can influence the outcome, but it's like holding the president accountable for gas prices: effective as screaming at clouds. The low growth is a problem, but the public figurehead doesn't control each economic agent's decisions; they can only maybe steer the trajectory. Growth wasn't >7% YoY 8 decades ago because we had more tenacious leaders. The secret sauce for high growth is likely more complicated than that.
Also see Burnham, “The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom” or Hayek, “Rules and Order” section “Principles and Expediency”.
In general it’s the elites who have to care about norms and principles, and hold each other accountable. Voters care about expedient matters such as gas prices.
Nah, I think it is the opposite. All power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We’ve had lying leaders in direct proportion to their powers. What we might be seeing instead are journalists actually reporting on these lies and the public having less tolerance for them. I consider that good news for the future of society.
Ray Dalio’s Principles framework calls this out as an indicator of a society in decline. When political groups start to care more about winning than they do about the integrity of the system.
> this is one of the hallmarks that you would expect to see at the beginning of the breakdown of a civilised society.
People have been crying wolf at the breakdown of society since the romans. Obviously sometimes there is a wolf, but if everything looks like a wolf, we're really bad at identifying the real ones.
Here's a theory:
The hyper-connected modern society create a new ecosystem that our ancient brains are easily affected by media , disinformation, marketing strategy, manipulation supported by big data etc. In the ecosystem the more electable candidates happened to be good actors that are very good at acting , and deception not only to the public but also to themselves.
Dishonest is a feature for having a better odds to win the elections in modern time. Not a bug. Statistically people get more dishonest politicians who are very good at being elected. It happened to accompanied with other traits. Dishonest is one of them.
Another one , a more dangerous one then dishonest, is that they cause more conflicts and wars by inspiring "good" people fighting against "evil" with illusions that they stand in a high moral ground. The victims of this feature are in none-western countries. So the perceived impacts are less then dishonest.
If the theory is true, then complaining about individual politicians doesn't work. The root cause of the problem which is reflected in statistics would be ignored.
The thing is it wasn’t about anything important. The entire Covid thing wasn’t as serious to most people as the media wants to believe. No one believed in those rules.
If he did something serious then fine. But who actually cares about this? It’s a fake outrage.
Honestly it feels like the floor is about to fall through.
On waiting for services: I was actually (and still technically am) on an NHS waitlist which I've been on for the last 5 years, my new employer is just paying a private doctor to handle everything which begins next week. Just wanted to put that out there to give an idea to the non-UK HN audience of how bad things have got.
The only other state that comes to mind where typical service delivery times were measured in years was the DDR in the late 80s, and we all know how that ended.
One other thing few talk about is the recent noticeable drop in the ability of the state to enforce it's laws (especially when those laws are seen to be morally wrong), for example there's been multiple documented instances now of immigration raids being stopped by hundreds of people surrounding the vans until the police leave (https://news.sky.com/story/peckham-man-arrested-for-immigrat...) and jury nullification is starting to become a noticeable thing even for those who are arrested (a prominent example being the Colston Four: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colston_Four) - the fact the state can't even consistently enforce its laws anymore speaks to its rapidly diminishing power, even domestically.
Maybe I'm just mad and have read too much into everything, but it feels like the British state is a few mistakes away from putting itself into a slow and irreversible collapse. Maybe it will take a few years so that a noticeable disparity forms between the UK and it's neighbours like Ireland and etc, but it feels it's slowly marching that way.
"On waiting for services: I was actually (and still technically am) on an NHS waitlist which I've been on for the last 5 years, my new employer is just paying a private doctor to handle everything which begins next week"
Presumably you've connected the two. If there is a supply side shortage of doctors - and there is - yet if you have the money you can jump the queue, then all that does is increase the delay to those without money.
It's like the priority queue at Alton Towers, which in itself is an affront to one of the core British values - that we are all the same really and we all stand in line awaiting our turn.
The solution is to abolish the fast track option and reorder the priority queue based upon need, not ability to pay. That is, and remains, the founding value of the NHS.
It's how we get the rich to pay more. They wait the same time as the poor person with the same issue, but their time is more valuable.
Private medicine doesn't increase the capacity of the system. It tilts the system towards those who can afford a FastTrack Pass at the expense of those that can't.
If I was a politician and I wanted to get rid of the NHS, I would first starve it for resources then use the resulting anger as an excuse to privatize it and sell its assets to some waiting American corporation for pennies on the dollar. I would expect that's what is about to happen.
The Coulston Four outcome wasn't the result of jury nullification, the defendants were acquitted because they had a lawful defence.
I suppose it's possible that the jury found that they found the defendants guilty of breaking the law but returned a "perverse verdict" anyway (jury deliberations are secret after all), but their behaviour certainly had the possibility of being lawful and the jury were directed to decide whether or not it was lawful.
> On waiting for services: I was actually (and still technically am) on an NHS waitlist which I've been on for the last 5 years, my new employer is just paying a private doctor to handle everything which begins next week.
Don't you pay something like 60% taxes for this?
> of immigration raids being stopped by hundreds of people surrounding the vans until the police leave
I suppose illegal migrants are ineligible for public healthcare. Else it's a little counter productive for people to block immigration enforcement isn't it?
In my opinion, mostly formed from personal experience in the UK the biggest issue is the extreme cultural and political centralization around South-East England. The gulf between London and the rest of the country, particularly the North of England is immense. There is incredible potential wasted in large parts of the UK.
The tone of the article itself reflects that culture, one particular government or set of policies cannot be responsible for malaise that is so generalized. I think the UK needs much more devolution of power, autonomy and less financial and political dependence between its regions.
> When it comes to growth, Britain’s politicians will the ends but not the means. They run scared of the homeowning elderly, who turn up to vote and make up a growing share of the electorate. So tax rises are heaped on businesses and workers instead, further harming the economy. The government has likewise watered down its plans for reforming the planning system—because elderly homeowners object.
This is it - over taxing and over regulating productive activity eventually leads to less growth and lower standards of living.
There really is no economic growth in Europe, outside of Germany. If you look at the largest market-cap companies in UK and France, for instance, they are all petroleum based. Since these businesses have done poorly for the past 20 years, you get the phenomenon of their stock indices not growing even a little in 20 years[1][2][3]. This would be disastrous, but luckily there is the US stock market present for their citizens and institutions to invest in.
The US will show you how bad it is if a country focuses too much on the stock market to measure economic success. The performance reflects monetary policy more than anything. In the end stocks going up doesn't mean people are getting richer.
As your first article points out: The "stagnant" stocks pay dividends. That's how it's supposed to work. How is a system healthy and sustainable if you expect share prices to double every 5 years? Tesla's valuation has nothing to do with reality anymore, it's a wet dream.
For information indices like cac40 are price of stock without dividends reinvested. If you want something that represent the gain of an investor you have to look at "cac 40 gross tr". The difference between the standard index and the reinvested index is less visible in USA because a lot of companies chose to buy stock instead of paying dividends.
So using the mains indices like you do to compare economic growth or investor gains is meaningless.
What's the structural problem at play here? Brexit is definitely isolating, which promotes "comparative disadvantage", i.e. doing things domestically that are more efficient to achieve through trade.
Maybe there are demographic problems? Too many elderly, not enough youth and skilled labor?
They allude to democratic inefficiencies, i.e. voting blocs that receive more than they pay, creating poor allocation and disincentive.
But all of the above don't seem to be solvable. UK won't re-enter the EU, demographics can only be tweaked by immigration, and voting blocs are part of democracy.
The challenge for the UK is that the flywheel of the City of London corporation and its offshore wormholes were at the core of globalization. Ironically the nation state the CoL coexists with (the UK) is as large a casualty of this as the many colonial nation states ravaged by globalization. This was compounded by the globalists - which the Economist exists to promote - forcing the merger of the UK into the european union.
The vote to leave by the proletariat demonstrated massive dissatisfaction, but sadly there are subsequently no credible political parties or leadership that are not closely aligned with the CoL and/or the EU, resulting in a becalming.
'Michael Oswald's film The Spider's Web reveals how at the demise of empire, City of London financial interests created a web of secrecy jurisdictions that captured wealth from across the globe and hid it in a web of offshore islands. Today, up to half of global offshore wealth is hidden in British jurisdictions and Britain and its dependencies are the largest global players in the world of international finance'.
The neighboring EU is not doing any better and maybe heading to the crumble of Eurozone - though not immediately.
Italy is now living basically on the debt funded by Northern European countries and soon this might come to the end with the widening spreads and markets not believing Italy’s ability to serve its debt. Either the money printer must brrrr, with massive inflation, or Italy, maybe Greece and Spain to default their bonds.
"For all that, debt sustainability is not an imminent risk."
The UK is in far worse shape because Brexit has nuked a huge hole in the economy. 4% is about £80bn a year.
But the real problems are systemic and political. The UK has been taken over by a far right cabal of criminals and opportunists who think nothing of wasting tens of billions of government - in addition to Brexit - while demonising asylum seekers and those on low earnings as a distraction.
Britain has the potential to be a powerhouse, but its political class is one of the least competent and credible in all of the G20.
Curiously, in this case the people of the UK actually wanted to be lied to in order to 'get Brexit done'. The previous prime minister (Theresa May) was honest about Brexit, saying that it would involve putting a customs border down the Irish Sea, cutting off Northern Ireland. She was removed for voicing this inconvenient truth and replaced by Johnson, who said that he would 'get Brexit done' without any border. Hence his famous, 'we'll have our cake and eat it' comment.
So the upshot is that the UK purposely voted for a shifty character, and that's what they got!
Yes, why not? We continue to discover new things, make things faster and cheaper, become more efficient and automated, and scale globally. Why wouldn’t we continue to see economic growth? We aren’t anywhere close to tapping out, if that’s even possible.
Yeah, I think the focus on economic growth as some magic thing is BS. What matters is making people happy. Of course that requires a certain material standard: decent size house, car, food, health care etc. But it doesn’t have to mean having the latest iPhone of biggest new flat screen every year.
I think it makes more sense to figure out what sorts of services needs to be grown to achieve the goal of society in terms of happiness and well being.
A lot of growth is kind of fake. It doesn’t really improve anything other than on paper.
I live in the UK and I had a chat with my partner about an hour ago about quitting our jobs and going on benefits. I was 60% joking, but I'm absolutely fed up with this country.
Things are extremely difficult here if you're working for a living and are not ultra wealthy. Just last year I brought a house which put in me hundreds of thousands of pounds of debt because of how ridiculous house prices are. I've worked and saved my whole life since I was a teenager (32 now), yet there are 20 year olds on benefits in my family who live in houses that are worth more than mine and have never worked. I'm so stressed out right now because interest rates are obviously rocketing up so I'll be paying a much higher rate when I go to remortgage next year and at the same time house prices could potentially crash. The reality is if I lose my job over the next few years I'm probably going to be screwed and the last 15 years of work was probably all for nothing. Fun.
At the same time significantly more than half my income goes on taxes when you consider taxes like VAT, council tax, TV license, car tax, fuel taxes, stamp duty tax, and all the others I'm forgetting on top of the income and NI tax that comes out of our wages. For the hundreds of thousands of pounds of tax I've paid over my career I have the benefit of getting literally no help whenever I need it because I work and I also get to enjoy our barely functional public services.
I'm not complaining about my situation, but it does upset me when I've struggled my whole live to get where I am, yet single mums in their 20s in my family still get to live in nicer houses than me, get free cars from the government while not having to work a day in their lives. I'm driving a Fiat Punto with 90,000 miles on the clock while several people in my family on benefits have gotten new BMWs because of government schemes.
The low growth we have in this country doesn't surprise me at all. Last week I was looking for a weekend job to help with the bills, but given my tax rate it's basically pointless looking for extra work. People in my family on benefits are also routinely advised not to work by the job centre because it would leave them financially worse off. But we're not just disincentivised people from working, we're also massively over regulated. It never ceases to amaze me just how difficult it is to do anything here. For example, my girlfriend likes making bath bombs she wanted to sell some so I looked into helping her set up an online store, but I found out you have to pay hundreds of pounds to have every product you want to sell reviewed and approved first making the whole thing pointless at the scale she would be operating at. Another example is something I'd love to do which is sell cakes, pastries and pizzas as a delivery service from my home kitchen because I love cooking and always have too much food. But I can't sell food because to do that I need to have health and safety inspections, and again at the scale I'd be operating at it makes no sense. And it's like this with everything here. Unless you're super rich or know someone in the industry who can get you through all the regulatory hope I don't really understand how anyone starts any business without being terrified that they're operating in violation of some regulation. Apparently I can't even cut the tree down in my own garden without telling the local council because it's over a certain width. It's a beyond a joke.
I very much agree that Britain is heading for a crisis if we're not already in one. The core problem we have is that people here truly believe the government can fix everything by spending more money and increasing taxes, and until that attitude changes nothing will get better. So instead of cutting taxes and incentivising people to work, I can almost guarantee the public will demand the government fixes this problem by increasing taxes on people who earn more than them while spending ever more money on various inefficient wellfare schemes. And if you want an example of this then just look at what's happening right now with the energy bill crisis... No one is asking for tax cuts to help people with affordability, they're asking for handouts to pay for their bills while increasing taxes on the energy companies.
One possible solution to lying politicians is to recognise they lie (mostly) not to hide a scandal but to appeal to everyone.
This is the big fear behind facebook / cambridge analytica - the problem was that a computer could generate different policies for each cohort of voters, essentially lying to everyone so that the same politician seemed to be on everyone's side.
There are two solutions - a clear single manifesto that everyone has to read, or we stop voting for politicians manifestos together - instead we vote for dozens of individual policies and then vote for the people to implemtnthen
>When it comes to growth, Britain’s politicians will the ends but not the means. They run scared of the homeowning elderly, who turn up to vote and make up a growing share of the electorate. So tax rises are heaped on businesses and workers instead, further harming the economy. The government has likewise watered down its plans for reforming the planning system—because elderly homeowners object.
Introduce an ageist voting system. Your vote is worth 1/(how many years you've been eligible to vote). I'm only half joking of course.
> When it comes to growth, Britain’s politicians will the ends but not the means. They run scared of the homeowning elderly, who turn up to vote and make up a growing share of the electorate. So tax rises are heaped on businesses and workers instead, further harming the economy. The government has likewise watered down its plans for reforming the planning system—because elderly homeowners object.
This is the crux of the matter. The UK has entered the same trajectory Italy entered a few decades ago. The old have become the most important constituency, if not the only that really matters and their economic objectives are at odds with growth and with the welfare of younger generations. From cutting taxes on work and increasing taxes on property, to building new houses and making the life of private renters less miserable.
While the cost of childcare and education goes to the roof, pension increases are financed with tax hikes that only affects workers younger than 65. Even the push against remote work, I think, should be analysed in this light: the home owning elderly don't want the price of their property to go down due to reduced demand.
Johnson and Cameron are equally incompetent and equally damaged the country and its character in ways that I’m not sure are reversible. Cameron was just, let’s say, more composed. The Conservative party is in a power for power’s sake game that doesn't have precedents in this country, at least since the 80s. Here I’m not saying that Thatcher and Blair didn’t have personal ambitions, but they certainly had a vision for the country and they left it in a better shape than when they found it. The current strain of the Conservative party handled the financial crisis so badly, that one may argue that the UK never came out of it. The country became poorer and, so, uglier and nastier, xenophobia has been totally normalised, especially against eastern and central Europeans. Those, that like me, moved to the UK in the mid-2000s, were promised Love Actually and ended up in the Jeremy Kyle Show.
Johnson now is in the process of buying consensus with fiscal transfers and gifts of all sorts, not much differently from what the worst Italian governments of the past 30 years have been doing. 30 years later, we know where this journey ends.
My economic situation is rather comfortable: I own my flat and I should be able to pay off my mortgage with next year’s bonus in my mid-30s. But I’m wondering if I want my child to grow here, to live in a country where, from the 11+ exam, people are in a never ending rat race just to get what the average EU resident takes for granted. Do I want him to be a renter at constant risk of eviction and, so, homelessness? Do I want him to spend 10K a year in tuition fees? Do I want him to participate in the most classist school system in Western Europe?
If the population isn't growing then there shouldn't be concern about the economy not growing. Unlimited growth isn't sustainable and shouldn't be expected.
[+] [-] zmmmmm|3 years ago|reply
There seems to be a problem developing across many western democracies that a large segment of voters have developed a tolerance for lying by their leaders. Perhaps it's just me getting older and more cynical but I really feel like this was not how it was 30 years ago.
I'm not sure where it will lead but it feels like this is one of the hallmarks that you would expect to see at the beginning of the breakdown of a civilised society.
[+] [-] dwater|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 88913527|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmeister|3 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/davidshor/status/1522341844960436224
Also see Burnham, “The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom” or Hayek, “Rules and Order” section “Principles and Expediency”.
In general it’s the elites who have to care about norms and principles, and hold each other accountable. Voters care about expedient matters such as gas prices.
[+] [-] runarberg|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] molsongolden|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wnevets|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] int_19h|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gibbon1|3 years ago|reply
Thing I learned from O. Henry, the easiest mark is someone that thinks he's in on it.
[+] [-] sudosysgen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vineyardmike|3 years ago|reply
People have been crying wolf at the breakdown of society since the romans. Obviously sometimes there is a wolf, but if everything looks like a wolf, we're really bad at identifying the real ones.
[+] [-] whimsicalism|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jjcc|3 years ago|reply
Dishonest is a feature for having a better odds to win the elections in modern time. Not a bug. Statistically people get more dishonest politicians who are very good at being elected. It happened to accompanied with other traits. Dishonest is one of them.
Another one , a more dangerous one then dishonest, is that they cause more conflicts and wars by inspiring "good" people fighting against "evil" with illusions that they stand in a high moral ground. The victims of this feature are in none-western countries. So the perceived impacts are less then dishonest.
If the theory is true, then complaining about individual politicians doesn't work. The root cause of the problem which is reflected in statistics would be ignored.
[+] [-] nemo44x|3 years ago|reply
If he did something serious then fine. But who actually cares about this? It’s a fake outrage.
[+] [-] intunderflow|3 years ago|reply
On waiting for services: I was actually (and still technically am) on an NHS waitlist which I've been on for the last 5 years, my new employer is just paying a private doctor to handle everything which begins next week. Just wanted to put that out there to give an idea to the non-UK HN audience of how bad things have got.
The only other state that comes to mind where typical service delivery times were measured in years was the DDR in the late 80s, and we all know how that ended.
One other thing few talk about is the recent noticeable drop in the ability of the state to enforce it's laws (especially when those laws are seen to be morally wrong), for example there's been multiple documented instances now of immigration raids being stopped by hundreds of people surrounding the vans until the police leave (https://news.sky.com/story/peckham-man-arrested-for-immigrat...) and jury nullification is starting to become a noticeable thing even for those who are arrested (a prominent example being the Colston Four: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colston_Four) - the fact the state can't even consistently enforce its laws anymore speaks to its rapidly diminishing power, even domestically.
Maybe I'm just mad and have read too much into everything, but it feels like the British state is a few mistakes away from putting itself into a slow and irreversible collapse. Maybe it will take a few years so that a noticeable disparity forms between the UK and it's neighbours like Ireland and etc, but it feels it's slowly marching that way.
[+] [-] neilwilson|3 years ago|reply
Presumably you've connected the two. If there is a supply side shortage of doctors - and there is - yet if you have the money you can jump the queue, then all that does is increase the delay to those without money.
It's like the priority queue at Alton Towers, which in itself is an affront to one of the core British values - that we are all the same really and we all stand in line awaiting our turn.
The solution is to abolish the fast track option and reorder the priority queue based upon need, not ability to pay. That is, and remains, the founding value of the NHS.
It's how we get the rich to pay more. They wait the same time as the poor person with the same issue, but their time is more valuable.
Private medicine doesn't increase the capacity of the system. It tilts the system towards those who can afford a FastTrack Pass at the expense of those that can't.
[+] [-] fallingfrog|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] M2Ys4U|3 years ago|reply
I suppose it's possible that the jury found that they found the defendants guilty of breaking the law but returned a "perverse verdict" anyway (jury deliberations are secret after all), but their behaviour certainly had the possibility of being lawful and the jury were directed to decide whether or not it was lawful.
[+] [-] 908B64B197|3 years ago|reply
Don't you pay something like 60% taxes for this?
> of immigration raids being stopped by hundreds of people surrounding the vans until the police leave
I suppose illegal migrants are ineligible for public healthcare. Else it's a little counter productive for people to block immigration enforcement isn't it?
[+] [-] seibelj|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Barrin92|3 years ago|reply
The tone of the article itself reflects that culture, one particular government or set of policies cannot be responsible for malaise that is so generalized. I think the UK needs much more devolution of power, autonomy and less financial and political dependence between its regions.
[+] [-] kapuasuite|3 years ago|reply
This is it - over taxing and over regulating productive activity eventually leads to less growth and lower standards of living.
[+] [-] mjfl|3 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/diyinvesting/article-810...
[2] https://www.google.com/search?q=ftse+index
[3] https://www.google.com/search?q=cac40+index
(click max on the google searches and look at 20 year history).
[+] [-] wewxjfq|3 years ago|reply
As your first article points out: The "stagnant" stocks pay dividends. That's how it's supposed to work. How is a system healthy and sustainable if you expect share prices to double every 5 years? Tesla's valuation has nothing to do with reality anymore, it's a wet dream.
[+] [-] Rexxar|3 years ago|reply
So using the mains indices like you do to compare economic growth or investor gains is meaningless.
[+] [-] avidiax|3 years ago|reply
What's the structural problem at play here? Brexit is definitely isolating, which promotes "comparative disadvantage", i.e. doing things domestically that are more efficient to achieve through trade.
Maybe there are demographic problems? Too many elderly, not enough youth and skilled labor?
They allude to democratic inefficiencies, i.e. voting blocs that receive more than they pay, creating poor allocation and disincentive.
But all of the above don't seem to be solvable. UK won't re-enter the EU, demographics can only be tweaked by immigration, and voting blocs are part of democracy.
So what does that leave in terms of solutions?
[+] [-] WalterBright|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] puranjay|3 years ago|reply
Doesn’t matter whether you’re Japan or Portugal - demographics seems to doom any notion of “growth”.
[+] [-] formerkrogemp|3 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/ZuXzvjBYW8A
[+] [-] Proven|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] olivermarks|3 years ago|reply
The vote to leave by the proletariat demonstrated massive dissatisfaction, but sadly there are subsequently no credible political parties or leadership that are not closely aligned with the CoL and/or the EU, resulting in a becalming.
The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire | Documentary Film https://youtu.be/np_ylvc8Zj8
'Michael Oswald's film The Spider's Web reveals how at the demise of empire, City of London financial interests created a web of secrecy jurisdictions that captured wealth from across the globe and hid it in a web of offshore islands. Today, up to half of global offshore wealth is hidden in British jurisdictions and Britain and its dependencies are the largest global players in the world of international finance'.
80 minutes, well worth watching imo
[+] [-] miohtama|3 years ago|reply
Italy is now living basically on the debt funded by Northern European countries and soon this might come to the end with the widening spreads and markets not believing Italy’s ability to serve its debt. Either the money printer must brrrr, with massive inflation, or Italy, maybe Greece and Spain to default their bonds.
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/some-european-state...
[+] [-] TheOtherHobbes|3 years ago|reply
"For all that, debt sustainability is not an imminent risk."
The UK is in far worse shape because Brexit has nuked a huge hole in the economy. 4% is about £80bn a year.
But the real problems are systemic and political. The UK has been taken over by a far right cabal of criminals and opportunists who think nothing of wasting tens of billions of government - in addition to Brexit - while demonising asylum seekers and those on low earnings as a distraction.
Britain has the potential to be a powerhouse, but its political class is one of the least competent and credible in all of the G20.
[+] [-] jacobolus|3 years ago|reply
https://www.cer.eu/publications/archive/policy-brief/2022/co...
[+] [-] Zigurd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tlocke|3 years ago|reply
So the upshot is that the UK purposely voted for a shifty character, and that's what they got!
[+] [-] int_19h|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nemo44x|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] socialdemocrat|3 years ago|reply
I think it makes more sense to figure out what sorts of services needs to be grown to achieve the goal of society in terms of happiness and well being.
A lot of growth is kind of fake. It doesn’t really improve anything other than on paper.
[+] [-] barry-cotter|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kypro|3 years ago|reply
Things are extremely difficult here if you're working for a living and are not ultra wealthy. Just last year I brought a house which put in me hundreds of thousands of pounds of debt because of how ridiculous house prices are. I've worked and saved my whole life since I was a teenager (32 now), yet there are 20 year olds on benefits in my family who live in houses that are worth more than mine and have never worked. I'm so stressed out right now because interest rates are obviously rocketing up so I'll be paying a much higher rate when I go to remortgage next year and at the same time house prices could potentially crash. The reality is if I lose my job over the next few years I'm probably going to be screwed and the last 15 years of work was probably all for nothing. Fun.
At the same time significantly more than half my income goes on taxes when you consider taxes like VAT, council tax, TV license, car tax, fuel taxes, stamp duty tax, and all the others I'm forgetting on top of the income and NI tax that comes out of our wages. For the hundreds of thousands of pounds of tax I've paid over my career I have the benefit of getting literally no help whenever I need it because I work and I also get to enjoy our barely functional public services.
I'm not complaining about my situation, but it does upset me when I've struggled my whole live to get where I am, yet single mums in their 20s in my family still get to live in nicer houses than me, get free cars from the government while not having to work a day in their lives. I'm driving a Fiat Punto with 90,000 miles on the clock while several people in my family on benefits have gotten new BMWs because of government schemes.
The low growth we have in this country doesn't surprise me at all. Last week I was looking for a weekend job to help with the bills, but given my tax rate it's basically pointless looking for extra work. People in my family on benefits are also routinely advised not to work by the job centre because it would leave them financially worse off. But we're not just disincentivised people from working, we're also massively over regulated. It never ceases to amaze me just how difficult it is to do anything here. For example, my girlfriend likes making bath bombs she wanted to sell some so I looked into helping her set up an online store, but I found out you have to pay hundreds of pounds to have every product you want to sell reviewed and approved first making the whole thing pointless at the scale she would be operating at. Another example is something I'd love to do which is sell cakes, pastries and pizzas as a delivery service from my home kitchen because I love cooking and always have too much food. But I can't sell food because to do that I need to have health and safety inspections, and again at the scale I'd be operating at it makes no sense. And it's like this with everything here. Unless you're super rich or know someone in the industry who can get you through all the regulatory hope I don't really understand how anyone starts any business without being terrified that they're operating in violation of some regulation. Apparently I can't even cut the tree down in my own garden without telling the local council because it's over a certain width. It's a beyond a joke.
I very much agree that Britain is heading for a crisis if we're not already in one. The core problem we have is that people here truly believe the government can fix everything by spending more money and increasing taxes, and until that attitude changes nothing will get better. So instead of cutting taxes and incentivising people to work, I can almost guarantee the public will demand the government fixes this problem by increasing taxes on people who earn more than them while spending ever more money on various inefficient wellfare schemes. And if you want an example of this then just look at what's happening right now with the energy bill crisis... No one is asking for tax cuts to help people with affordability, they're asking for handouts to pay for their bills while increasing taxes on the energy companies.
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|3 years ago|reply
This is the big fear behind facebook / cambridge analytica - the problem was that a computer could generate different policies for each cohort of voters, essentially lying to everyone so that the same politician seemed to be on everyone's side.
There are two solutions - a clear single manifesto that everyone has to read, or we stop voting for politicians manifestos together - instead we vote for dozens of individual policies and then vote for the people to implemtnthen
it's a terrible idea inthink
[+] [-] MafellUser|3 years ago|reply
Introduce an ageist voting system. Your vote is worth 1/(how many years you've been eligible to vote). I'm only half joking of course.
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] swayvil|3 years ago|reply
If the bills are paid and the people are fed then it's ok to keep things at their present size. Right?
[+] [-] rayiner|3 years ago|reply
By “laws” do they mean covid regulations?
[+] [-] anothernewdude|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmarq|3 years ago|reply
This is the crux of the matter. The UK has entered the same trajectory Italy entered a few decades ago. The old have become the most important constituency, if not the only that really matters and their economic objectives are at odds with growth and with the welfare of younger generations. From cutting taxes on work and increasing taxes on property, to building new houses and making the life of private renters less miserable. While the cost of childcare and education goes to the roof, pension increases are financed with tax hikes that only affects workers younger than 65. Even the push against remote work, I think, should be analysed in this light: the home owning elderly don't want the price of their property to go down due to reduced demand.
Johnson and Cameron are equally incompetent and equally damaged the country and its character in ways that I’m not sure are reversible. Cameron was just, let’s say, more composed. The Conservative party is in a power for power’s sake game that doesn't have precedents in this country, at least since the 80s. Here I’m not saying that Thatcher and Blair didn’t have personal ambitions, but they certainly had a vision for the country and they left it in a better shape than when they found it. The current strain of the Conservative party handled the financial crisis so badly, that one may argue that the UK never came out of it. The country became poorer and, so, uglier and nastier, xenophobia has been totally normalised, especially against eastern and central Europeans. Those, that like me, moved to the UK in the mid-2000s, were promised Love Actually and ended up in the Jeremy Kyle Show.
Johnson now is in the process of buying consensus with fiscal transfers and gifts of all sorts, not much differently from what the worst Italian governments of the past 30 years have been doing. 30 years later, we know where this journey ends.
My economic situation is rather comfortable: I own my flat and I should be able to pay off my mortgage with next year’s bonus in my mid-30s. But I’m wondering if I want my child to grow here, to live in a country where, from the 11+ exam, people are in a never ending rat race just to get what the average EU resident takes for granted. Do I want him to be a renter at constant risk of eviction and, so, homelessness? Do I want him to spend 10K a year in tuition fees? Do I want him to participate in the most classist school system in Western Europe?
We are lucky enough to be dual nationals.
[+] [-] troon-lover|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] usrn|3 years ago|reply