Is The IMF taking Over perhaps just what the country needs

Oh give over and acknowledge that this particular thread has failed.

It's austerity.

Which of course is evil when the Tories do it.

But fine when Labour do it according to the flag wavers.

The hypocrisy of it is off the scale.

I heard that the IMF are going to invade and that the pound will be scrapped and the new currency will be an St. Georges flag for £5 and a Union jack flag for £10. Change will be issued in vape cartridges.

Then I changed channel.

It's austerity.

Which of course is evil when the Tories do it.

But fine when Labour do it according to the flag wavers.

The hypocrisy of it is off the scale.

Firstly it's government, which as gas panic rightly said elsewhere is wealthy. Most households in the UK are not wealthy. From that stand point, the two cannot be compared. Thatcher was wrong to compare the two.

I'm glad you can get a GP appointment. I used to be able to before I moved house. However you cannot deny the mess the NHS is in and the chaos that A&E has become.

Nobody has said that a GP shortage means IMF bailout.

What we have said is expenditure is outstripping income each month plunging us further into debt.

Somebody on here kindly enlighted me as to the GP shortage a few days ago. I thought our GP's was leaving the country for a better life for themselves. This is not the case it seems. They are not funding GP positions. So as the old ones retire they are not replacing them. Just because this has not hit your surgery yet does not mean it's not in the pipeline. They are phasing out the NHS already you just haven't noticed yet.

People who can't get a gp appointment and are realising their choice is private GP appointment or nothing are just further down the loop than you in awareness of the state of the country.

Enjoy your 'ignorance is bliss' while you still have it. Believe you me I remember when you could get a doctors appointment with no trouble and it was bliss. I just didn't realise it at the time.

@placematsthis. If you disagree there are constraints to borrowing can you say more than rookie or nonsense to say why?

Argh! Not working in your 50s is absolutely contributing to low growth. Jesus. What do you think happens to economic growth if 15% of the labour force withdraws their labour? But yeah, moan about the govt...

The idea that your only cost to the public purse is your prescription is fucking hilarious. Do you use streets, roads, benefit from the provision of police, military, libraries, street lights, education, and presumably you're planning on claiming your pension?

The absolute irony.

I'm glad you can get a GP appointment. I used to be able to before I moved house. However you cannot deny the mess the NHS is in and the chaos that A&E has become.

Nobody has said that a GP shortage means IMF bailout.

What we have said is expenditure is outstripping income each month plunging us further into debt.

Somebody on here kindly enlighted me as to the GP shortage a few days ago. I thought our GP's was leaving the country for a better life for themselves. This is not the case it seems. They are not funding GP positions. So as the old ones retire they are not replacing them. Just because this has not hit your surgery yet does not mean it's not in the pipeline. They are phasing out the NHS already you just haven't noticed yet.

People who can't get a gp appointment and are realising their choice is private GP appointment or nothing are just further down the loop than you in awareness of the state of the country.

Enjoy your 'ignorance is bliss' while you still have it. Believe you me I remember when you could get a doctors appointment with no trouble and it was bliss. I just didn't realise it at the time.

I think the statement "national economies do not run like household economies" is often used as a shutdown to deflection discussion on the issue.

The bottom line is that national economies and household economies are both constrained by external factors - both are not fully under control of the household/government if external borrowing is entered into (and becomes necessary).

And that to me is the important fact, not the fact that governments can print money and households can't.

FTR my belief is that an economy is only at risk when it becomes "stand out". That means that in comparison to other economies of similar size, it's financial stats start to look particularly bad. In terms of debt to GDP, at the moment the UK is someway off where similar sized and developed countries such as France and Italy currently stand, but there are other factors that weigh against the UK as the bond price demonstrates.

Recent developments in the bond markets show that the external markets are policing the UKs debt levels pretty closely with sharp rises in the bond prices being linked to specific events, so it is at least to me fairly clear that the appetite for lending to the UK from international markets is at the very least constrained and definitely not unlimited. In the same way lending from a bank to a household would be.

It is, but not much more.

At the end of the day you can argue that the UK has the ability to print money into it's own bank account. Which it literally does because it controls the currency.

However it can't do that without consequence. We can generate as much money as we want at the drop of a hat, there is a magic money tree contrary to what Teresa May would have you believe.

What there is not is a magic wealth tree. So printing money will trash the currency and make a lot of things a lot more expensive, particularly imports or anything that is sourced from abroad, like foreign holidays.

So yes, managing a government budget is a bit more complex than managing a household budget, but not much more. If you don't have the wealth generation to back money generation your money becomes worthless. And you can't print wealth.

I’ve heard this so many times before and it’s so clearly daft. Obviously everyone needs to pay more tax for it to make any difference. And I’ve already said I have no faith in the government making sensible spending decisions so no, I won’t be unilaterally giving them money I could spend on my kids so they can spend it on implementing some new civil service IT system through 100 layers of subcontractors that won’t work and needs to be replaced in 2 years anyway.

I don’t care if you think i’m virtue signalling. I’m simply stating my belief that more tax is the solution and i’m willing to be part of that solution if and when it’s sensibly implemented, rather than just “taxing the rich”. Whether you believe me or not I don’t care.

Maybe expanding your reading beyond one newspaper (which hates the Labour party and always has) might help your anxiety?

I’d do that if there weren’t so many people considerably better off than me cramming their pensions and cutting their hours to minimise their tax contributions. I’m not about to subsidise them.

Why don't you sign up to the HMRC voluntary additional contributions service then. You can choose the amount of extra tax you pay. That will ease your conscience.
Otherwise it just sounds like virtue signalling.

Why don't you sign up to the HMRC voluntary additional contributions service then. You can choose the amount of extra tax you pay. That will ease your conscience.
Otherwise it just sounds like virtue signalling.

It's a quandry to say the least...Bayrou's dump two bank holiday's idea isn't the worse in the world, especially given a lot of the time the date based hols such as VE day fall on a weekend so are lost anyway..but the idea gets an automatic red card from many.

As for Madame Le Penn and the RN...tbh in recent years they have adopted at least some policies that the UK Tories would think of as wet...the real problem down the road might be the charmers hiding in the wings, to the right of the RN.