Multi Millionaires Complaining Again

Rearming won’t help much if we buy American made armourments, which we do.

Neither dc did media studies. They are making their way in the world and one earns a great deal with a tax bill that’s huge. She raises vat too. However it’s not bad being an electrician or heating trades person. Not everyone will lay bricks but all sorts of trades are needed but we have many grads doing work in low paid jobs who could earn better doing something else.

Well, as "luck" would have it, the UK may well be on the way to re arming, that will improve growth.
I expect the 'rules will need to change, things aren't as they were even 4 months ago.
Mervyn King talked about this recently.

Sympathise with your DC, mine wanted to do similar, luckily, she saw sense and chose Occupational Therapy, she absolutely loves it and earns a very good salary too.

Building trades? yes fine when you re younger, the people i know now in their 50s, are physical wrecks, no pensions, maybe a BTL instead, which isn't the "pension" they thought it would be now.

Food imported from EU will have regulations (due to the CAP) just like ours used to.
We will have to modernise farming using methods that use a lot less land and water. It can be done as the Netherlands shows.

This government has exactly the same choice. Tax or cut services. If they stick to their own fiscal rules they have a massive dilemma as there’s no growth. It won’t just be Cons cutting services. If you keep taxing the people who generate growth you don’t get any! We know this. So we need a blend of policies. Continually blaming cuts in services for low productivity is not an accurate link. How does that affect car manufacturers? We have not had 0# pay increases for some years now.

Another reason for low productivity is not being able to get the staff we need from our own population. Dc prefer media studies to engineering. They study A levels and not practical skills we need to build houses. People don’t want to work outside and these are well paid trade jobs. We have high housing costs due to land prices - there’s a shortage of it. We don’t want to build more at all in many areas. So what we do build costs a lot. It’s basic economics. Germany has a lot more space.

We aren't taxing farmers, its a very small tax rise 20% over 10 years, with, for a most, a 3m threshold.

No one likes tax rises, personally, i'd have reversed the v stupid and unfunded NI employee cuts, one of the worst things the Tories have done and its a long list.

Slashing spending and infrastructure, 0% pay rises, with companies allowed to import workers to compensate, low wage growth in both public and private sector?
Of course austerity crashed productivity, other countries also went through the GFC but didn't see the collapse in productivity that we have had & uniquely, we also saw the average hours worked increase!

A former BoE chair blames Austerity, which whilst needed for 3 or 4 years, went on for the entire time the Tories were in office.
They then trashed us further still with Brexit, which, going back to Farming, has had a huge impact on their incomes and on food security, as we are now bottom of the list for food imports from mainland Europe, they serve their own markets first.

Your obviously pro famine or pro imported terrible low quality food.

Not sure where the bullet point came from land it’s not going easily! Here’s bbc link: so well known that it’s under schoolkids revision https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zspttfr/revision/3

Meanwhile the Equality Trust has just sent me a reminder of the social corrosion inequality causes, with a German comparison. https://equalitytrust.org.uk/news/blog/five-things-equality-activists-can-learn-from-the-german-election/

It’s those 200 families that need targeting with wealth taxes.

• What is strangling our economy is high land prices, inequality and the costs of poverty. The BBC says that on current trends If trends in income inequality continue, by 2035, the wealth of the richest 200 families will be larger than the whole UK Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

The amount the U.K. has to spend on housing is beyond a joke, both of the homeless and to landlords via housing benefit.

Productivity is not going to improve among poor people forced to work long hours for no rewards while this continues.

Austerity did not crash productivity. Productivity slowed due to the financial crisis. Our debt is 96% of GDP. So we cannot sit back and think taxing farmers is the answer to this. It’s like fiddling while Rome burns.

Until 2020, even allowing for the GFC, our debt to GDP was 65%, by the time of Covid in 2020, it was over 85%.

Austerity crashed our productivity and its never recovered.

Unemployment is on par with historic averages, we've a problem with sickness levels but the reality is we've millions of people in work but they stay poor, on working benefits, paying little in the way of tax.

Our productivity is a huge reason for our debts and the interest rates we pay now are down to Truss, we were on european interest rate averages before she came along, she trebled them! and they haven't gone down.

The UK's national debt is roughly £2,500 billion. Covid cost roughly £400 billion. So, no, it's not all down to covid. The UK has had an annual deficit virtually every year for the last 20-30 years. It all adds up and gets worse because we have to borrow to pay interest on prior year's borrowings!

Our debt is not just from covid!! As if. We have a huge liability for private sector pensions and servicing our debt that has mounted up. We need more people working, not retiring early and running out of money. We want the best services but don’t have enough paying taxes to pay for them. So we borrow. RR is at the borrowing limit, so what now?

I agree.

Yes this :-) in fact most people have actually been able to spin a positive on it, when there's nothing you can do about a certain situation you might as well make the most of it! Well done 😍

Well, I was in exactly the same situation as I had started my own business 6 months earlier when my husband died. I got no support from the government, but had the most amazing summer of 2020 and 2021 in the sunshine, with friends and family, walking, and reflecting on the previous 25 years. So, I actually enjoyed the lockdowns. I went back to work in 2022, then decided to retire for good last year.

Yes, as a country we are lumbered with a huge amount of debt but there wasn’t really an alternative at the time, was there? With hindsight there were things that could have been done differently…but we were in truly unchartered waters.

Il have to ask the farmer who told me that next time I see her. It’s pretty opaque to the rest of us outside the system, who struggle to find work that pays more than £25k pa while requiring qualifications that cost a lifelong £50k - £75k debt.

👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

@TizerorFizz

our bigger issue is millions not working at all

Nail on the head. If more people actually worked and paid taxes/claimed fewer benefits, then tax revenue would rise and we could start affording the public services we need.

We really can't keep having a smaller and smaller proportion of our adult population gainfully employed and paying taxes.

They wont insure after a second incident

Absolutely! Let them pay!
Mr Trump will send us his chlorinated chicken and hormonal beef whilst farmland will be covered by wind turbines and soil becomes dust in ten years time.
It's only fair after all.

UK winning!

The country is totally in debt mainly because of covid still, the government couldn't have possibly funded EVERYTHING for all that time, sounds like you did ok starting a new business n all :-)

Insurance companies.

Absolutely! Let them pay!
Mr Trump will send us his chlorinated chicken and hormonal beef whilst farmland will be covered by wind turbines and soil becomes dust in ten years time.
It's only fair after all.