Don’t hold your breath. He’s moved on to homophobic slurs, and calling people wankers when they call him out on it.
Regarding where to go next, I think the government is going to have to raise taxes. They really don’t have any choice. There is a massive spending shortfall, worse than the Conservatives admitted in power.
Most of us called this years out from the last election. We knew the effects of Brexit, Liz Truss, Austerity, and general Tory mismanagement had fucked the country beyond repair, and we knew that the Tories had little interest in hanging around to deal with that.
Opinion polling suggests people would be happy to pay a bit more tax to improve public services, so it’s probably the right thing to do.
What I would like the Labour Government to do is aggressively go after wealth. That is where the money has gone, and it needs to come back. I don’t mean whacking a few percent on super high earners - we know the very wealthy are very good at hiding their money. We need taxes that attack wealth tied to the UK. The tax on public schools was a brilliant policy because it specifically targets wealth. You can’t offshore Eton in the Cayman Islands.
I would go after land in a big way. A land value tax would be really good sense, and Reeve did talk about this a bit per-election, fo what it’s worth.
Thanks for the half answer at least we know where you stand.
You do realise that to capture the required amount of government funding based solely on what you use you’d probably find that VAT goes to 50% say, road duty through the roof, train tickets prices through the roof, your health costs sky rocket etc.
Only if you are talking about already completed builds.If government own land in expensive areas,then the cost of building houses for all shouldn’t be any different.
Yeah, hence my question to them really. You’ve got three choices as i see it
Cut spending hard, the policy that partly got us in this situation in the first place
Increase tax
A bit of both.
Taxation is flexible, you can choose where and what to tax. I just hope that whatever they do is better thought out than the delivery of Winter fuel payment.
Personally, the way i see it is we need to generate cash and start massive investment into building and fixing things. Trust an engineer to say this but for me we’ve been putting too much on the back burner a building stuff is a great way of inceeasing GDP per capita. Ours really sucks. Investment in housing, water, clean energy, and rail for example.
But we’re literally starting from zero and you need a heap of work simplifying the whole process of delivery.
You missed borrowing. The UK fiscal rules are much tighter than those of other leading countries or that recommended by international organisations such as I think the IMF.
The FT has been running articles since September on how much borrowing could be possible by making these changes - and it appears the chancellor has already indicated publicly she will be adopting one of these more flexible sets of rules to help fund investment.
If the OBR agree that future growth may be higher than previously forecast, we might see even more scope for additional borrowing.
However, to offset the higher borrowing, some taxes will probably need to be raised to ease fears that any increase in public borrowing may cause.
Secondly, we’ve seen announcements since the new government was formed about its engagement with private sector to try to get them to help fund investment - whether that is for example, weight loss drugs, bigger discounts to energy bills for pensioners, investment by pension funds into infrastructure.
In any case, someone’s fudging something here because I believe none of the budgetary announcements nor rumours thus far include an increase in tax that an individual pays on remuneration for their labour, just on assets and the amount of tax that employers pay per employee.
I think the briefings over the weekend, including the whole “redefinition” of what a “working person” meant was solely to target that.
I haven’t been keeping up with the details but one thing that pops to my mind is that i think sometimes people have operated as companies and paid themselves mostly by way of dividends rather than draw a full salary - I wonder if this is part of what they are trying to address?
I don’t think anyone is discussing building anything, that’s part of the issue. They’re mostly using existing facilities, whether owned by the government (e.g. ex-military bases, Bibby Stockholm), or contracting to private sector entities (hotels and the like, an example being the Britannia in Scarborough I believe).
In any case, there’s no reason to want to build anything, because ideally you should have sufficient throughput in your system such that you don’t have to hold people for very long, it’s either approve and release, or deport.
I did you’re right.
One concern I have with borrowing is the already eyewatering cost of our debt and interest repayments. I think thats in no small part down to Truss but it remains an option no doubt.
I’ve noticed that people who argue for a tax system based on what they use, always without fail, wildly underestimate what they use. A good example is education. I was got into an argument with someone who was absolutely adamant that his taxes should not fund education, as he didn’t have children and felt he shouldn’t be paying for other people’s children to be educated.
I had to point out that as a business owner he certainly did benefit from education, and he might want to consider how his business would fare if he had to run it with employees who couldn’t read or write.
Yeah, but they were “veiled”.
If @mattyhurst for example, who I’ve never had a crossed word with finds my comment offensive or insulting, I’ll issue a genuine apology.
