To think there is no more money?

[Rainbowsponge]

And Labour have admitted this.

So many threads saying X or Y needs to be ‘properly funded’ (even though most of the time our spending is actually in line with comparable countries), but no acknowledgment of the fact there’s no money to spend.

And when you bring it up, posters completely ignore you or accuse you of being Jacob Rees Mogg

Wouldn’t the quality of debate be improved if we stopped burying our heads in the sand?

I think there is an awful lot of waste and money spent on inefficient and ineffective projects.

I think there is a lot of money locked up in poorly negotiated contracts.

I think that the tax burden on working people is already too high.

Unearned income (i.e. inheritance) should be taxed at the same rate as income tax (i.e. 20% on anything over £12,500, 40% over £50k etc). It's simply no fair that people who gain wealth via employment are taxed more than those who gain wealth via inheritance.

I also think that we need to significantly reduce our expectations of what the state can and should provide.

For example:

• The range of services offered by the NHS should be cut back
• There should be a small charge for all NHS services
• Unemployment benefits should be restricted and proportionate to what has been paid in (for example, in some Scandinavian countries I think you need to have contributed for at least a year before you can claim benefits).

There are also a proportion of the population who don't necessarily claim benefits, but who use public services and choose not to work (e.g. SAHMs who don't go back to work once their kids start school). Should these people be entitled to free nhs healthcare etc?

Politicans have been saying for years there is too much waste in syst ms like the NHS and have cut funding under the guise of "efficiency savings". We can also see the results of that.

We now have spiralled Numbers of people too ill to work, flat lining productivity exacerbated by Brexit which stalled exterior investment we used to benefit from as a gateway to EU and has reduced damaged economic growth, and continues to do so

Most likely the tax burden at a historic high as it is will likely need to increase going forward.

There are so many things that could be done to save money, why do groups of schools need superheads? Get rid of academies & put schools back under council control. Procurement for the NHS could be centralised instead of being managed with separate health authorities, stop things costing 3 or 4 times as much as buying retail from shops. There should be a government department to stop money being wasted, going through everything that is spent & identifying where money is being wasted. The Civil Service needs looking at, there is so much time wasted that could be cut down & reduce staffing without damaging efficiency, where I worked we had a daily meeting for the lowest grades, then the manager went to a meeting about the first meeting with their manager who did the same with their manager. Time lost 200 staff × 20 minutes equals over 66 hours, multiply that by 5 days & it adds up to the equivalent of 10 full time staff, work your way up the grades & it adds up.

I think the state should exist to serve the people and thatbincludes providing conditions for us to thrive financially. But I am a leftie ( dirty word on mn).

I'm afraid that is an utter canard. Unemployment is 4.4%. In the 80s it was nearly 12% - and the population hasn't fallen. Quite the opposite. "Dwindling pool of people" is what people who want to destroy the welfare state and resurrect the Poor Law use as an excuse. It's a lie.

*Midnightmeltdown I agree.
The working population should not be paying more.
Those who choose not to work should get less.
Those at the top should pay more.
Too many people expect things for nothing.
These people should receive less handouts.
The wealth is owned by a tiny minority. If you look very closely they have not earned this by hard work alone. It’s inherited.
Plus privilege.
There is also entitlement from those who do not contribute.
Stop handing out blue badges Willy nilly for example. Or charge for them.
why should the working poor subsidise them?
Cur back on free services. Charge for certain nhs procedures. Set conditions before free treatment is dished out.
Stop allowing landlords to own so much property, bring it under local authority control.

@AvrielFinch I think you are misunderstanding me. I’m aware of that but my point was everyone & anyone who pays NI & then discovers they wont get a state pension as it’s now means tested will be in a similar position as someone who didn’t work but paid a top up.

Why would you put away ££ every month for a pension, while your neighbour put away £0 and gets their pension provided by the state?

you wouldn’t.

I'm afraid that is an utter canard. Unemployment is 4.4%. In the 80s it was nearly 12% - and the population hasn't fallen. Quite the opposite. "Dwindling pool of people" is what people who want to destroy the welfare state and resurrect the Poor Law use as an excuse. It's a lie.

In the above context I think @MidnightPatrol meant dwindling pool of workers. The ratio of workers has changed eg there was 5 workers to 1 pensioner in the 60s, now it’s reduced to 3:1 & forecast to be 2:1. There are already more over 65 yrs olds than under 15 yr old. It’s why no government can stop immigration, we need it. Unless we change the economic model.

The working population should not be paying more.
Those who choose not to work should get less.
Those at the top should pay more

if you look at other EU countries with good public services & higher taxes it’s the average earners who tend to pay less in the UK whereas high earners are paying similar amounts and their burden has increased.

”average earners really are facing lower levels of direct taxation than they have in 50 years. And it is from average earners that higher-tax countries in western Europe get much of their extra revenue.”

“While average earners have seen their tax bills fall, the reverse is true of high earners. Someone just about in the top 1 per cent of income tax payers, on £200,000, say, will be paying a good £10,000 a year more than in 2009. Our reliance on top earners has continued to grow. That top 1 per cent pay 29 per cent of all income tax now, up from 25 per cent in 2010 and 21 per cent at the turn of the century”

What complicates things is wage stagnation for many & the fact so much income is now eaten up by housing costs. And of course the tax you pay will be very different if you are PAYE or not and many high earners are not PAYE.

Exactly. And the global economy has made it much, much harder to tax corporations as they just move their head office to a low tax economy and then charge the offices in a higher tax country a 'service charge' which reduces their tax burden in that country.

The EU were trying to work together to reduce that happening but Brexit has taken us out of this possibility which we could have helped drive.

The main issue is that we've been sold the myth that you can have decent public services and low taxation. You can't but the Tories have continually perpetuated that.

Ideally we would reduce waste and not have expensive vanity projects but every Government promises to do that and yet what usually happens is that they just cut services rather than reduce waste because cutting waste is really hard. For instance, they cut spending on mental health services or social workers. For a while no-one notices because it's not an instant problem. Then further down the line you get a crisis of a big rise of people on disability benefits for mental health conditions or you get an increase of knife crime. No-one puts it down to the earlier cuts years before but they are connected.

Did they ever get anything back?

What’s next? Means tested state education? Means tested libraries? Means tested NHS? Means tested emergency fire service?

I agree with you absolutely - same for us too - paying tax and council tax, just like everyone of non pension age. Also many of us help out our children and grandchildren, which benefits the economy. Elderly people who are self-funders in care homes are also subsidising those people who, for whatever reason, have no funds and haven't made provision for their old age.

I don't think the ways of finding more money for public services would be done. For example, I think that SUVs should be taxed a lot more because they are a luxury item and the impact on roads as they are heavier. I'd like to see higher taxes on alcohol sold for home consumption. I'd like to see stamp duty be paid by the seller, so there would be no exemptions for first time buyers.

Those are workers who payed NI as they earned each month through taxation. PP is talking about unemployed or underemployed people “buying” extra years of NI in a lump sum. I believe it costs about £800 to “buy” a year of NI, someone can correct me if I’m way off.

This. When the government spends money it can make money if it does it correctly. Look it up - multiplier effect. It's always been a conservative tactic to claim the pot is only so big and you have to take from one area if you want to give to another. It's when money is simply invested in a company that doesn't employ many people or make anything real (finance) or taken out of the country that you have a problem.

The money markets and IMF also agreed the money had to be spent, not just in the UK but most other developed countries too. That’s why it didn’t crash the economy, bugger our credit rating nor cause massive inflation nor exchange rate disasters.

But we’ve had a balance of payments deficit for a couple of decades so money does flow out of the country. That’s why other countries are happy to lend money to the UK!

People need to change their view on investment spending.

Debt to invest in assets that will support economic growth is not a bad thing. Funding for transport & infrastructure. Funding for universities & schools.

For a long time a lot of economic "growth" in the west has been fueled by:

• population growth. More people, more consumption, even though most people don't feel better off
• leveraging cheap labour from the east/3rd world

Neither of these are sustainable.

Good growth needs to come from innovation. In energy production etc. We need to invest to encourage innovation.

We should also fundamentally rethink how we value governments etc. Gdp is meaningless if most people can't afford to live, economic growth on a systemic level doesn't achieve anything if the value produced isn't well distributed.

We also need to actually stop buying in so much cheap crap from china. They don't even buy it themselves they only sell it to us.

They aren’t. They are focussing on growing the economy. That’s why they can’t just scrap the two child benefit cap. I’m sure they want to make changes to child poverty, and education is the current focus for that, but until they have grown and stabilised the economy, they can’t just borrow and spend. Things are such a mess, it will take two terms to get things sorted to any level that I’d be happy with. But with WWIII possibly on the horizon and the chaos and risk that will come with climate chaos, they are going to struggle. They are working in very uncertain and difficult times.

Totally. That is something we can change. We actually have a lot of power as consumers.

So true. We also need investment from overseas at the moment so they need to keep a steady ship and not spook any potential investments. They need to play the long game.