to question if the squeeze on living standards will not be temporary?

[bindud]

"British families are facing the biggest squeeze on living standards for 30 years as surging prices and tax rises take their toll."

"The Bank of England forecast a 2pc fall in incomes after tax this year – the worst since its records began in 1990. In 2023, they’re set to fall 0.5pc."

Apparently things will get better in 2023, but will they?

We have the frozen income tax bands, ageing population, & most likely more wage stagnation after a decade of it after the 08 crash.

Is life just going to be more & more expensive going forward for the vast majority of people? or am i being too pessimistic?

Plenty of women worked fulltime in the 70s, I did and all the other young women/mothers I knew did.

Statistically

" Over the past 40 years, the UK has seen an almost continual rise in the proportion of women in employment. The employment rate among women of ‘prime working age’ (aged 25-54) is up from 57% in 1975 to a record high of 78% in 2017."

"This predominantly reflects an increase in full-time employment, from from 29% in 1985 (when data on hours of work began) to 44% in 2017"

"The rise has been particularly large among lone mothers and mothers of pre-school- and primary-school-age children."

"Overall, the proportion of couples with children where only one adult works has almost halved (down from 47% in 1975 to 27% in 2015) and the proportion where both work has increased from 49% to 68%."

What is a standard working week now 35 hrs? 44 was standard when I started work in the 60s.

But progress means we should work less doesn't it? As technology makes things more efficient & less labour intensive so we should see more of a reduction.

"Between the end of World War II and the 1970s, a steady increase in productivity was rewarded with equally consistent rises in both earnings and leisure time, the New Economics Foundation (NEF) found."

"But from around 1980 onwards, the decline in working hours slowed to a crawl, with no compensation through faster wage rises – even though productivity kept on growing apace until the 2008 financial crisis."

"“Hour by hour, day by day, we are giving an unnecessarily large proportion of our lives over to work,” said Aidan Harper, researcher at the NEF, noting that the average British worker spends 4,512 hours on unpaid overtime over their career. That amounts to over half a year of unpaid work."

"A study by the TUC earlier this year also found that the typical full-time employee in the UK puts in 42 hours a week – nearly two hours more than the average across the EU and equivalent to an extra two and a half weeks a year."

The problem is we are working more but not with increased productivity, what we earn isn't increasing & things are costing more.

It cannot be temporary cause how do you fix that?

Until someone finds a way to stop the runaway train that is capitalism, then this is just the beginning.

It will hit the wall soon. Economist is saying there’s too many savings floating around and not enough investment opportunities, and the American stocks are all seriously overvalued. It’ll crash, and it will be worse than 2008.

Those savings for the rich with nothing to do with them are what they made by refusing to pay tax and fund public services, and by forcing ordinary people to work ever more for ever less.

All traditional long term societies know that they have to limit the greed and power of the richest to maintain their longevity, but large scale “civilised” and hierarchical societies never learn.

A standard working week in the 70s and 80s was 9-5, with lunches and breaks. There is even a song about it. That’s 35 hours.

I’m old enough to remember the 70s e was nothing like the level of consumerism there is now. Prior to that there wasn’t either. It started in the 80s and has got progressively worse.

I remember my dad buying a vcr machine and it cost him a month’s wages and he was a senior teacher. Food was more expensive, didn’t eat out very often and didn’t buy so much “stuff”.

Maybe we will just go back to that, whether permanently or more temporary I don’t know. But back to a time where your wages pay your essential bills and not leave much over for anything else even if you’re “middle class” and used to a much higher standard of living. The really scary thing is that those people could be the lucky ones.

I hope I’m wrong and it’s just my anxiety thinking worse case scenario but it does worry me.

@ParsleySageRosemary

Until someone finds a way to stop the runaway train that is capitalism, then this is just the beginning.

It will hit the wall soon. Economist is saying there’s too many savings floating around and not enough investment opportunities, and the American stocks are all seriously overvalued. It’ll crash, and it will be worse than 2008.

Those savings for the rich with nothing to do with them are what they made by refusing to pay tax and fund public services, and by forcing ordinary people to work ever more for ever less.

All traditional long term societies know that they have to limit the greed and power of the richest to maintain their longevity, but large scale “civilised” and hierarchical societies never learn.

It's not going to be temporary. This is the beginning, sadly.

I agree with the poster above. I think things will start to crash. The impact could have been reduced significantly if things had been done differently.

But how do we go back to that? We used to manufacture, now we are a service economy.

I must have been on a parallel universe

I was there with you @ancientgran. Even the dippiest, hippiest people I knew - and I knew a lot of them - didn’t live like that. It sounds more like the 1940s. .

My mum bought me an automatic washing machine when my son was born in 1975 and it was on every other day. I bathed him and showered myself every day. And we were bloody poor - we lived in a flat with no central heating on a council groundsman’s wages, there was always too much week left at the end of the money.

@SerendipityJane

I remember the national problems of the 80s and the 90s recession and what we are facing now seems far worse.

You don't know you're born.

I can remember the 3-day weeks and blackouts of the 1970s. Plus the permastrikes that left the dead unburied, the roads ungritted, the schools closed, and the rubbish piling high.

Yes so do I.

Most posters were not born or were children in the 70s.
Inflation reached 20%.
Because of that people wanted wage increases.
Strikes in every business and industry.
There was nothing that was untouched by strikes. If you worked you were in a union and very few people disobeyed the call to strike.
My parents both worked in the same industry and were forced to strike. That meant no income. It went on for weeks and I was a teenager at the time. My part time job kept us in food.

Interest rates in 1979 were 17%.
So if you had a mortgage your outgoings were going up, even if you had savings at 17% they didn't hold their value against inflation of 20%.
Many people had their homes repossessed.
It was a vicious circle.
I never voted for Margaret Thatcher or the conservatives but it's a fact that inflation and interest rates fell after they were elected. At a cost.

It will hit the wall soon. Economist is saying there’s too many savings floating around and not enough investment opportunities, and the American stocks are all seriously overvalued. It’ll crash, and it will be worse than 2008.

What do you think a crash will look like this time?

Clothes and food were A LOT more expensive in the 80-90s. A pair of boots from dolcis was at least £60-70. Tops were £20-25 each. Imagine that now?

You don't know you're born.

What is the point of competing about who had it worse. At least in the past things seemed cyclical, that's what I think may change now.

Its not going to be temporary. Anyone who thinks it is utterly delusional.

It won't end anytime soon unless people refuse to accept this and start to strike rebel, ie generally cause problems. The government has spent 400 billion on the pandemic lock downs have destroyed some businesses forever. Now someone's got to pay for it and it won't be the billionaires banks or politicians.

Clothes and food were A LOT more expensive in the 80-90s. A pair of boots from dolcis was at least £60-70. Tops were £20-25 each. Imagine that now?

I'm not sure where you shop but I pay those prices and more. I have silk & cotton items from the 90s that you couldn't buy now for what I paid.

Besides nothing exists in a vacuum, you pay less for your cheap food or Amazon bits but more of your tax goes back into topping up wages or housing benefit & less into services & investment.

The facts are if I could never buy another top dress or pair of shoes again I would survive it’s the asset grab that’s the bloody problem the fact the house prices and rent are disproportionately rising. If we are then going to have shares crash which frankly is my only way of coping with all this currently, my shares are rising faster than house prices, quite honestly we are all fucked

What do you think a crash will look like this time?

I'd be interested too.

I can't see house prices crashing as it's been so propped up. But I don't think inflation is temporary & doubt they can control it without significant hikes, which then brings on more issues. It's a mess

it’s the asset grab that’s the bloody problem the fact the house prices and rent are disproportionately rising.

yep

@JackieWeaverHandforthCouncil

Just been on the DM comments under the standard of living crisis and someone’s managed to squeeze in a rant about too many non white people on adverts. As long as we have assorted racists and useful idiots willing to vote themselves all the way to the food bank over bullshit reasons then things will only continue to get worse I’m afraid. France’s fuel inflation passed on to customers =5%. U.K. =54%.

Was discussing the rising cost of living with FIL on Friday. He started whittling on about how the lads at the shooting club had collectively figured out the problem. "The coloured ones are claiming all our tax rebates, so they're being funded by us and they just get more to cover the higher bills." ...despite the fact that most of these men are in their 70s, many have had accountants helping them to avoid paying any tax at all, but they are quite happy to blame the non White, and non British. Could never be our government, could never be the vote to leave the EU, could never be the aftershocks of a global pandemic.

^ basically. I don’t know the USA. There have been a few pieces of writing about the USA potentially breaking up and I don’t really know what kind of threat that is or how it will be achieved. But here there’s no living space, there will be no way of making a living. That means hardship, death and violence. I wonder what headlines will say in Russia and China about the collapse of western capitalism.

If interest rates go up house prices will have to crash because a lot of people will not be able to afford their mortgages at increased interest rates. New buyers won’t get mortgages. 🤷‍♀️

So really inflation needs to be kept down. How successfully that happens remains to be seen.

Many people don't have mortgages or have lots of equity or have fixed mortgages.

So really inflation needs to be kept down.

Which they haven't been able to do.

There's going to be more inequality though and more burden on the young. High interest rates will benefit people with savings & no or low mortgages who are most likely to be older.

@bindud

Clothes and food were A LOT more expensive in the 80-90s. A pair of boots from dolcis was at least £60-70. Tops were £20-25 each. Imagine that now?

I'm not sure where you shop but I pay those prices and more. I have silk & cotton items from the 90s that you couldn't buy now for what I paid.

Besides nothing exists in a vacuum, you pay less for your cheap food or Amazon bits but more of your tax goes back into topping up wages or housing benefit & less into services & investment.

You might, lots of people don’t. Remember when supermarkets started selling clothes, that was late 90s and started driving prices down. Then primark , Asos. Now places like PLT and boohoo sell dresses for £3.

Absolutely take your other points. Mine is that younger generations are now used to extremely cheap goods

Mine is that younger generations are now used to extremely cheap goods

Agree, I just don't think £3 dresses are the norm. But cheap goods that don't last are the norm although young people today have less disposable income after housing costs I believe.