Where do people think money comes from?

[MrsBlobbyOnLockdown]

Everyday we are hearing pay the NHS an extra 30% pay them £26 per day extra is the latest one.

I’m not disputing they deserve it of course they do & if we had an endless supply of money it’s the first place it should go.

But seriously, where do people think all this money is coming from?

What are your thoughts

Sure the brexit bus money will cover it, its grand!

we ve had very low inflation rates across the world,

Largely because China and other such counties sell us things cheaply, manufactured at their wage rates. Food prices kept low by Eastern European's working harder for less money than we're willing to.

It's unsustainable.

@ErrolTheDragon you are speaking a lot of sense I think

I took the sodding apostrophe that autocorrect wrongly inserted into Europeans and it sodding well put it back again.

It’s a real shame we can’t make the real fat cars pay the tax they should pay. There are too many loopholes, too many places to hide money, move headquarters to etc etc. The government has to tread a very careful path to being attractive to business investment, but not too tax heavy. Basically your average pleb needs to be in employment and be paying taxes and VAT.

*fat cats

@flowerycurtain well this is where government borrow from.

Sure, the likes of amazon need to pay taxes in the U.K.

We wouldn't be so reliant on them if we still had more of our own industries. There are and various reasons why we lost those with blame in many directions.

I was going to say pretty much the same thing as Jason.

97% of money isn't actually money - it's theoretical credits backed by nothing other than hope and confidence (often misplaced), but which you have to pay back with real money.

If you had a friend pleading poverty, telling you that they were about to starve because they had no money whatsoever - but then showed you the new Ferrari and Rolex that they'd bought that day, nobody would take them seriously.

If you had a government (of any colour) telling you that they couldn't do anything to eradicate child poverty and were forced into making radical health choices as to who would get their treatment and who would be left to die - but they then had a literally unlimited amount of billions tucked away to spend on willy-waving nuclear weapons that could never realistically be used and on lopping 20 minutes off the journey from London to Birmingham - what would you think of them?

Of course there's a limited supply of money and choices have to be made. I just don't agree with all the choices that have been made recently.

Let's get rid of HS2 for a start.

@ErrolTheDragon

I don't agree, QE hasn't caused any of the issues you said it would, inflation is low, borrowing is cheap.
Our exchange rate has been v low before QE (against the euro/$/yen) or indeed Brexit, its been falling against a basket of countries for 70 years.
China is an emerging economy, so of course produces things cheaper, eastern europeans work for the same money as a UK worker earns, 3m EU workers here VS 30m UK ones, i think EU workers account for around 12% in the food industry, evidence suggests they aren't responsible for low wage growth.. greedy company bosses are though!
Food is cheap because of what goes in it & productivity/supply improvements.

As i said, if the whole world is in crisis, then who are we (all countries) borrowing from? and if everyone prints money, then all currencies fall or rather don't.

I’m not disputing they deserve it of course they do & if we had an endless supply of money it’s the first place it should go.

But seriously, where do people think all this money is coming from?

That suggests the OP thinks there is a fixed amount of money available to the UK. That's the "the economy is just like my household budget scaled up" fallacy. It's a myth conservatives and labour are both happy to peddle for different reasons, the first because it justfies reducing public spending "there's no money to spend", and the second because it implies the reason some have money and some don't is because people with money have taken more than their share of the pot.

What's missing in that concept is (a) that the government can print money. Yes, I understand about inflation and why the government doesn't just print away happily, but the government does slowly expand the money supply and that's a key difference to a household budget (b) the government borrows money, ie Gilts, Premium Bonds etc. And it's very comfortable it can pay them back with interest, because (a). So public spending isn't just today's taxes, it's today's taxes plus borrowing that will be paid back from tomorrow's taxes, helped with a bit of inflation. (c) public spending gets re-spent into the private sector. So each pound spent by the government (including local government) goes to support more jobs than just the one it directly funded

Money supply is a fascinating subject.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply

The Nurses in your country are woefully underpaid.

@Elieza who are "the liberals" we're going to be tricked into voting for? UK politics isn't really split into conservatives and liberals.

We wouldn't be so reliant on them if we still had more of our own industries

We tried that before and produced total crap, our economy is 80% services, Germany's is 70% not the huge difference some imagine.

Trident. And politicians. And the House of Lords. I’m sure they won’t mind. Also, we’re not paying for Harry or Meghan now, that’s got save a few bob.

Our exchange rate has been v low before QE (against the euro/$/yen) or indeed Brexit, its been falling against a basket of countries for 70 years.

Well, yes... the same period over which our manufacturing and exporting industries have declined.

@firstimemamma NHS workers aren’t taxed any more than anyone else, if your fiancé was taxed £2000 in a single month that’s means his basic must have been approximately £7500 for that month. (£95000 a year)
I’m guessing he’s on the wrong tax code or paying back a previous underpayment.

I really recommend reading The Bitcoin Standard by Saifedean Ammous. But be prepared to go down the rabbit hole......

Money itself is mostly created by the banks lending. If a bank is told they must keep, say, 10% reserves they don't lend £90 for every £100 they take in - they lend £900 against that £100. That's 800 they've conjured out of thin air, encouraged by governments as growing the economy.

Money is a shared dream, and it's about bloody time it was used to reward the real key workers, rather than shovelled in millions to the gamblers playing the stock market.

Elves or Goblins ? Pretty sure it is Goblins but abiding by non googling rules for online quizzes

Seriously though, and I have said this many times before, people in the UK want a Volvo XC90 and want to pay for a Fiat 500. It is not going to happen, you get what you are willing to pay for. The NHS provides a shed load of stuff for not a lot of your average wage, you want more, you have to stump up more. If you are not happy to do that, stop moaning and go private, which will cost you a lot more if you are lucky enough not to need it. But don't bitch about having to pay taxes for something you might well need at some point. Especially in the current situation.

I get annoyed at the numerous posts on social media saying that nhs workers and footballers should swap wages. They mean it too 🙄

..but QE didn't cause inflation, we ve had very low inflation rates across the world, borrowing rates too, been like it for a decade.

So printing and borrowing isn't sooooo bad after all.

It's not caused wage inflation because Chinese/FE manufacturing, increasing automation and digitisation, globalisation of knowledge labour, migrant workforces, and technological advances enabling the gig economy have pushed wages down.

Instead QE has caused massive asset price inflation, which in my opinion will unwind and history will record as bubbles caused by QE. Pre-C19 we were seeing new highs in Equities but ultra-low yeilds, forcing money into riskier asset classes and inflating prices there as well. Private Equity buying companies and loading them up with cheap debt. House price inflation. It actually started with the emergency rates after 9/11 to protect the economy which was already suffering from the dotcom bust. Those low rates fed into the house price bubbles and enabled the sub prime market and associated debt products that eventually exploded and triggered the 2008 GFC, which lead to QE. We've basically had a zombie economy in the West for 20 years now.

In 1923 Germany printed money it caused massive hyperinflation. Hyperinflation is really not good. So no you can't just print money.

Since we're about to go into a pretty serious depression, as well as having huge debt to repay for the furlough scheme and so on, there won't be money growing on trees for anything, let alone the NHS.