Rishi Sunak no more bailouts

[Elpresidente29]

He said government cannot go on like this...

I hope the chancellor is aware that some people will 'cash in ' and the appropriate bodies that deal with it can make sure they pay it back!
Name and shame those exploiting this.
As for those saying that the ones on furlough are loving it might not be. They may not have jobs to go back to at all and are worried ( plus not their fault it's happened either) and most public sector workers are still at work as well!

For a start, a lot of people that are still working....are on above this pay packet. (National Minimum Wage)

Almost all carers, cleaners, kitchen staff in nursing and residential homes are on minimum wage. HCSW's in the NHS aren't on much more than this. Shop workers in corner shops are NMW. Shop workers in supermarkets aren't on much more. Most are on NMW.

Whilst it will be distresssing for people to be madd redundant, they will be in the same boat as a self employed person whose profits were an average of £50,001

Yes, someone with 2 years’ service in a minimum wage job entitled to 2 weeks notice pay and 2 weeks redundancy pay is in the exact position of someone raking in £50k a year. Ffs

Hasn't the BoE agreed to increase QE to over 200 billion? meaning we've basically borrowed our own money?

I think there may come a point where furlough will be reduced to UC level.

That will force companies (Those who have opted to clam when they don't need too - B&Q for one) who can afford it to top up their staff wages or risk losing thier entire workforce.

Then the companies who are not going to be financially sustainable long term will fold rather than at another date when the furlough packages end.

I think a lot of people who are on furlough atm are going to end up on UC because the businesses they work for are going to fold. I guess the treasury have to decide how long to put the sticking plaster on the economy tanking for, and when to rip it off and we find out exactly how bad the damage is

Turn the light off - does UC not take rent into consideration? I imagine you’d be able feed your children on Uc otherwise how are the people already on UC feeding theirs ?

If public sector workers were taxed at 90 percent? They would still be a drain on the treasury

Public sector workers are in general no different to private sector workers, with regard to being a "drain." (I deliberately left out "on the treasury" because I think that qualifier causes people to only look at part of the overall picture, resulting in wrong conclusions.)

I think your statement is based on the idea that the private sector pays for the public sector. This idea is wrong.

Let's divide public sector into two parts, public spending and public employment.

Dealing with employment first, we can imagine two extreme hypothetical scenarios: one where the government nationalises all businesses, becoming the only employer, and another where the government outsources all government functions to private companies, and directly employs no-one. We assume that in both scenarios everyone carries on doing what they do now, for the same pay as now. Economic output in all three scenarios, current, all-public and all-private is the same. Tax revenues from employees are the same. Whether a job is the public or private sector has no bearing on how much it's contributing to the economy, and a pound of payroll tax from a public sector employee is worth exactly the same as a pound of payroll tax from the private sector.

Turning to consumption, public spending is just a part of overall spending, and (ignoring redistribution for now) one level isn't particularly more virtuous than another. All our spending (public and private) has to be paid for by all of our outputs (labour) and the amount of public spending we decide to have just moves the slide control up/down so we spend more/less collectively and less/more privately.

Our total economic output determines what we can afford to buy, and our political preferences decide how our buying power is split between public and private spending. The extent to which people are directly employed in the private sector or spending is done by the public sector does not necessarily make a fundamental difference to economic output or overall consumption..

And to add to my previous point, most carers in domiciliary (home care) are on less than minimum wage when you take into account the driving times between calls. Many companies don't pay driving times or adequate fuel allowance. And some work a 16hr shift for what amounts to about 8hours of minimum wage pay per day.

I'm glad I'm not in home care any more.
Hopefully this will be looked at going forward.

For local government, many have some of their functions outsourced e.g. HR, call centres, various support bodies, traffic wardens, environment wardens are a few

Yes they do, but as with DVLA and the rest the problem lies in them still being overseen by government drones; they simply can't let go of their little empires even where it would be appropriate, so those being funded know there's no accountability for them either

That's how we finished up with a community managed library, where a dubious local "charity" negotiated twice the funding that it cost the LA to do it themselves ... and have done nothing at all except convene meetings, issue questionnaires and leave everything else for the volunteers to do

Needless to say this has been raised repeatedly, and the response is ... tumbleweed

Many EU countries pay unemployment benefit to levels similar to the 80% the Govt is paying atm.
So haven't needed furlough schemes.

These countries outperform us across a wide range of economic and social measures inc productivity.

Rather than saying put furloughed workers on UC etc, why aren't we questioning the UK's derisory benefits package?

Dealing with employment first, we can imagine two extreme hypothetical scenarios: one where the government nationalises all businesses, becoming the only employer, and another where the government outsources all government functions to private companies, and directly employs no-one. We assume that in both scenarios everyone carries on doing what they do now, for the same pay as now. Economic output in all three scenarios, current, all-public and all-private is the same. Tax revenues from employees are the same. Whether a job is the public or private sector has no bearing on how much it's contributing to the economy, and a pound of payroll tax from a public sector employee is worth exactly the same as a pound of payroll tax from the private sector.

Under the former scenario, there is no market so there would be enormous misallocation, corruption, and forgone incentives to create wealth.

Assuming, if you like, that you can somehow control for these factors, then theoretically you are correct.

Good.

When did he say this? Will rtft

This gave some companies the chance to pivot. For example switching to drive through and take away coffee, or product lines switched to production of PPE. It gave other companies time to put social distancing measures in place - spaced out work benches/acrylic panels/sanitizer stations/deep cleans/vehicle allocation etc.

Agree with this. And time to end furlough, so much £

PHE and the procurement arm actually have blood on their hands and I sincerely hope heads will roll

I agree totally, but have no confidence that it'll happen; the necessary mindsets just aren't in place and avoidance of responsibility is everything
A few "reviews" and "public consultations" might be set up to provide roosts for the otherwise unemployable, but I suspect that will be all

80% of the public think it's 'too soon'

I suspect large amount of them will change their mind very quickly when their funding is cut off. Or if faced with deregging their kids from school to keep them home.

At that point I suspect many of them will be baying to go in.

Teachers are always berated. They are seen as a drain. TAs were not a thing in 'my day ' but I can see why they are needed more than ever in today's world. Many would rather you had one teacher one class and save the wages! No wrap around care at all ( unless it's privately owned and financed)
No free school meals at all. Packed lunches all the way. I can see why some might think this is a good idea but again it would affect the poor worst of all.
However a lot of office admin staff are paid well and could be trimmed down a lot but a bit like the NHS managers they probably would not agree etc. Overhauling any public sector department is never easy.

I suspect large amount of them will change their mind very quickly when their funding is cut off. Or if faced with deregging their kids from school to keep them home.

I completely agree, of course, BUT THE FUNDING IS NOT CUT OFF!!!!

(sorry for shouting)

Rather than saying put furloughed workers on UC etc, why aren't we questioning the UK's derisory benefits package?

I'd hazard a guess that it's because there are still a lot of people who think benefits is something that happens to other people

There has been a lot of talk since this started about how furloughed people can't possibly be expected to live on UC becuase they've "worked hard" and all of the other bullshit that comes up when people's actual opinion of benefit claimants shows through

I am amused that someone seems to think after the sheer volume of austerity aimed at the public sector that we actually still have ludicrously overpriced final salary pension funds.

Hilariously untrue for at least 95% of us.

Shame they didn’t call furlough “lockdown benefit”. That would certainly shut up some “benefit scroungers” vitriol from those very hard workers.

MPs taking a 10 percent pay cut next month might restore some people's view of them but I doubt they would do this somehow!

Not only that, we also spent most of our working lives paying for the loans to compensate slave owners when their slaves were liberated. Particularly annoying for DH being the descendent of slaves to be paying the loan to compensate the people who exploited and abused them. The loans weren't paid off until 2015 so plenty of younger people also paid but not for 50 years

This is a nice fantasy but not reality in any meaningful sense.

The 1835 loan was £15 million and the interest paid was 3% per year until such time as the government chose to repay the £15 million. In general it didn't make sense to do so, as the government would need to pay more to repay it. The 1835 loan itself was refinanced in 1957 so no longer existed at that point and indeed holders of 1835 stock had the opportunity to redeem or take new loans at that point

The 1957 perpetual loan which consisted of some money held since 1835, in 2015 because interest rates were so low was repaid by the government and refinanced.

It's not really accurate or meaningful to describe the slavery reparations as being paid in 2015 since the original loan no longer existed and since the loan was never designed to be repaid - in the 1980s, for example, the value of the 1957 paper would have been far below the 1957 value of £218.4m (made up of multiple earlier loans including the 1855). Even by the late 60s the bank rate was double the 4% of the 1957.

Hence since inflation averaged 5.5% between 1957 and 2015, it follows that the loan cost nothing at all - we paid less interest (4%) then the money cost.

The loan was paid by the generations between 1835 and 1914 when inflation was zero. Interest was real interest and with no inflation, then by 1914 that would have been £35.5 million in REAL money i.e. more than double the original principal.

WW1 cut the value of the loan in half, and by 1957 it was worth less than half again.

So essentially the loan was paid from 1835 to 1914 and from that time inflation ravaged it so that we were paying far less in interest than we were saving in the reduced value of the loan.

So it really isn't accurate to say we were paying the slaveholders loan in 2015, firstly because it no longer existed in 1957, and secondly because perpetual loans had for decades effectively become a profit centre in the government accounts (if you have £1 billion face value debt and next year it's worth £900 million real and you pay £50 million interests you made £50m profit)

At the point it stopped being profitable due to low interest, we refinanced in timed debts which are refinanced over shorter periods. Therefore in that sense the debt still exists and will never go away ever ever till the universe no longer exists, in as much as it was meaningful to say we were paying until 2015.

But in any case let's be clear that the descendents of Norman invaders still own vastly more of the country than they should by chance, 1000 years on, which is why people complaining about the Queen are wrong - it really is her land, unless you want to confiscate and redistribute all private property....

My DM was a teacher for 40 years in Inner London. She chose the sector because of the school holidays and also chose to just work with Reception. There were no extra hours, a few parents evenings (which only half of the parents/parent turned up to despite all their child's work being on display).

She would often bring in a loaf of bread in the morning as some parents just chucked their children out in the morning, no breakfast, no giving them a wash. They knew the school would help out. These feckless parents were very often not working, couldnt budget with their benefits and constantly letting their children down.

Its time we started to pull these lazy so and so's up on their behaviour. Just because they have made poor choices often around their latest 'man' doesnt mean they can carry on like this. For people like this the pandemic wont really affect them. They will be the ones pulled up in parks because they are having picnics, letting their children run around, setting up b-bq's, their benefits wont stop, they dont even need to get out of bed these days and a number of the local food banks in the area are not asking that people are referred. They are taking people's word for it.

I honestly dont think that the teachers want to go back until Sept. They are being paid regardless.

I suspect large amount of them will change their mind very quickly when their funding is cut off.

I have been wondering what the level of 'too soon' people would be if so many were not currently getting a quite decent deal out of this. I get itm, I really do. DH is on 80% wage currently and is getting to spend time at home with his kids for the first time in many many years. However, obviously it cannot go on forever. Near all of the 'no, its dangerous' people I see are those currently 'off' work on near full wage. Along with a lot of 'working from home' who quite honestly seem to be doing little working from what they post! (though WFH will presumably carry on for a while anyway)

Some seem to have utterly deluded themselves into thinking things can conitnue as they are until a vaccine is found! Ridiculous. Apparently if this doesnt happen, then the government is purposely chosing the economy over lives...seen a fair few claiming they absolutely will not go back to work if this scheme ends, who then kick off when people suggest the only way not to is take no pay, or go on UC...then it becomes 'UC is pennies, I couldnt live on that!!!!!' from the same people who months back were kicking off that UC is apparently far far too high and allows a luxurious lifestyle

In short, it would be interesting to do another poll on if its too soon...after it is announced furlough is ended. I suspect massively different numbers. Cannot blame many people for wanting to keep thingds how they are now, especially those who barely see their kids and have had no time off in years, like DH. But, its unrealistic to think it can go on much longer at all. I just hpoe the government deal with the shitty economy by spending this time ,instead of the ridiculus 'austerity' plan.

Also all you idiots who want to force people back to work now, you do realise if we all go back to work now, the government won't only have mismanaged to the extent that we now have the highest deaths in Europe but we'll be back to square one and just have to do it all again?