We have the makings of a European Argentina - unnecessarily dirt poor through prolonged stupidity, albeit without the wine or the decent football team.
It is possible to waste lots of money on stupidity if you're making lots of money - so if we want to import every last third world criminal, we need to be concreting over every last scrap of green belt, and putting a coal power station beside every village.
The country's population has, as you mention, some deluded beliefs (we can always tax just people slightly richer than me, for example), and so get the politicians we sadly deserve. As a lifelong mostly Conservative voter, I really struggle to see why anyone would vote for them now - they have done the opposite of what they said, the opposite of what they should have done - why believe that next time will be different?
Any manifesto that doesn't have firing Ed Miliband into the sun as a key pledge shows a party that doesn't really understand the issues we face.
A stirring conclusion, much needed and appreciated!
"The Triple Lock is expensive. It cost £124 billion in 2023-24 - around 10% of all public sector spending." I think you mean "Pensions are expensive ..."
"Our economy is slugging" according to Google 'slugging' is a skincare technique. Maybe you meant sluggish?
> They believe that we can keep spending more without having to raise taxes on ordinary people, that we can consistently increase major budget lines such as welfare, pensions and the NHS by above inflation every year without consequence - and they become very angry when the government lets them down.
We *could* do this, but they probably wouldn't like the third set of tradeoffs -- having above-inflation productivity growth again would involve building homes, infrastructure, factories, and energy generation; letting companies go bust; and sunsetting cities.
We have a kind of trilemma -- low taxes, high spending, zero building: drop one. Personally, I think we should drop 'zero building', but that's just me.
A good first step would be abolition of “National Insurance” which is not “national” and has only a vague residual connection to pre WWII systems of social insurance. It remains now as an additional tax on employment and causes significant confusion with ordinary commercial insurance/assurance where someone’s contributions are directly linked to what they will eventually get. There would be ways of reforming this. In Germany, for example, the Rentenkasse is a separate fund itemised on salary slips, and it is clearly visible how the contributions being paid in are distributed at the same time to those being paid out (and the share of payment out is linked to what you previously paid in). The alternative could be abolishing NI and creating a “state old age benefit” paid out of general taxation (taxable if not means tested) designed to provide a minimum safety net and making it clearer that anyone wanting more than this in retirement should save privately
We have the makings of a European Argentina - unnecessarily dirt poor through prolonged stupidity, albeit without the wine or the decent football team.
It is possible to waste lots of money on stupidity if you're making lots of money - so if we want to import every last third world criminal, we need to be concreting over every last scrap of green belt, and putting a coal power station beside every village.
The country's population has, as you mention, some deluded beliefs (we can always tax just people slightly richer than me, for example), and so get the politicians we sadly deserve. As a lifelong mostly Conservative voter, I really struggle to see why anyone would vote for them now - they have done the opposite of what they said, the opposite of what they should have done - why believe that next time will be different?
Any manifesto that doesn't have firing Ed Miliband into the sun as a key pledge shows a party that doesn't really understand the issues we face.
A stirring conclusion, much needed and appreciated!
"The Triple Lock is expensive. It cost £124 billion in 2023-24 - around 10% of all public sector spending." I think you mean "Pensions are expensive ..."
"Our economy is slugging" according to Google 'slugging' is a skincare technique. Maybe you meant sluggish?
> They believe that we can keep spending more without having to raise taxes on ordinary people, that we can consistently increase major budget lines such as welfare, pensions and the NHS by above inflation every year without consequence - and they become very angry when the government lets them down.
We *could* do this, but they probably wouldn't like the third set of tradeoffs -- having above-inflation productivity growth again would involve building homes, infrastructure, factories, and energy generation; letting companies go bust; and sunsetting cities.
We have a kind of trilemma -- low taxes, high spending, zero building: drop one. Personally, I think we should drop 'zero building', but that's just me.
Definitely feels the one worth trying first!
A good first step would be abolition of “National Insurance” which is not “national” and has only a vague residual connection to pre WWII systems of social insurance. It remains now as an additional tax on employment and causes significant confusion with ordinary commercial insurance/assurance where someone’s contributions are directly linked to what they will eventually get. There would be ways of reforming this. In Germany, for example, the Rentenkasse is a separate fund itemised on salary slips, and it is clearly visible how the contributions being paid in are distributed at the same time to those being paid out (and the share of payment out is linked to what you previously paid in). The alternative could be abolishing NI and creating a “state old age benefit” paid out of general taxation (taxable if not means tested) designed to provide a minimum safety net and making it clearer that anyone wanting more than this in retirement should save privately
I think there's a further problem. People - individual human beings living in the United Kingdom - are just less competent than they used to be.
But I haven't noticed anyone talking about this in the media, or on Substack. Maybe it's just my subjective - wrong - opinion. What do you think?