To ask what should be being done about the economy and the country generally

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I’m fairly Keynesian in my economics (I’m not an economist) but there are so many problems in society at the moment that I’m not sure even a massive programme of work like in the 1950s would really help.
There’s another thread where people are expressing unhappiness at the levels of tax they’re being asked to pay and it’s easy to find lots of threads about benefit claimants and immigration.

If we take as given that (a) our birthrate means we need immigration; (b) we have a benefits system that’s both overly punitive and (apparently) overly lenient if you say the right things (I’m not sure I personally believe the second part, but it’s an opinion I see a lot); (c) climate change means more and more people from the global south moving north; (d) the days of good state services, free at the point of use may be over-

what would you do differently to the government? Could we get back to the kind of services provision we had in the post-war consensus era (up until the Thatcher government)? Is that a pipe dream? Is it even desirable?

The issue with inheritance tax is the people who pay it. It’s not the mega rich as it is easily avoided, it’s not the poor, it’s the middle classes in a valuable house. You pay it on assets in a couples estate over £1m generally, when exemptions have been added in. If that couple lived in a family home over £1m their estate will be subject to inheritance tax. It would have been hard for them to avoid inheritance tax as to do so they’d have had to move and they may not want to. The mega rich on the other hand can divest themselves of their assets and still be able to live well up to their death without those assets.

Its a poorly designed tax which could do with a redesign.

I agree fully with @EmeraldRoulette - the government is so incredibly inefficient with our tax money.

It has happened over decades through every government (not party political)

I know literally everyone on MN hates Trump, but I see an optimism in his economic policies and I am so interested to see if they work.

• Bringing back manufacturing into the UK - we have completely decimated our manufacturing base and it is INSANE for so many reasons - first and foremost our national security, but further down the line - jobs, communities, wealth.

• The Green Agenda - I fully agree with Reform and Trump - this is deliberate bankruptcy for no certainty at all that it will make any difference. We are currently IMPORTING energy that we have ourselves in the North Sea. It is so ludicrous you can't even fathom how it continues. The same with steel - we have closed down all our steel making plants (loss of jobs, wealth and community) and proceed to import it all from China. None of it makes sense. Our energy prices are literally the highest in Europe, yet we refuse to get it out of our own ground. WHY? We cannot thrive with such high energy costs.

• The NHS - I realise this is a religion for so many people in the UK, but face the facts - it is bad. It is inefficient, it costs every single one of us too much money and it just doesn't work in it's current context. Again, the US are taking an interesting approach. RFK Jnr is tackling the source of ill health - why are so many people so ill and obese? What is in the food environment? What is causing all the cancer? Diabetes? We too, need to get healthy again - that is the only way the NHS can survive in any form - it is not just the ageing population (we don't need to kill them all - pp) it is everyone - so many ill people in the UK.

• Tax cannot go up anymore, it is already very very high. I don't think people even realise there are states in the US where there is no income tax at all? We are so conditioned to think the solution is always to 'just tax more'. Tax stops entrepreneurialism and growth, it is too high already and you can see it in the economy statistics.

This!!

I agree with what you say. And I feel inheritance tax loopholes should be closed and the taxes themselves increased.

The reason though that no party will really try to deal with avoidance of it though is that as a tax it creates an amount of outrage completely disproportionate to the number of people that actually pay it. That makes it an easy political target.

Even people that stand zero chance of paying (the vast majority) it are very anti it, whereas if you asked those same people about "taxing the rich" they would be completely behind it.

People seem to see it far more as an issue of fairness and morality than they do in terms of the amount of money it raises and the section of society it impacts. I think that coupled with the fact that people who won't pay it are generally clueless about whether it will impact them or not.

I often wonder when people talk of economics if they have looked at what the government actually spends its money on.
That sounds snarky but not meant to be and by ‘people’ I don’t mean those posting on this thread but more people I know that I speak to.

Im no economist. But our top spends are 1. Welfare (of which pensions account for the most, then universal credit and then disability benefits) and 2. healthcare and 3. Education

With a still fairly sizeable chunk paying interest on debt largely accumulated during covid.

I don’t know what the answer is, but when people I know start talking about how much we spend on the asylum process for immigrants, whilst I don’t disagree it’s a problem, it’s dwarfed by the amount we pay out in UC or Pensions.

We are in a bad way as M Thatcher decided we would be a service economy (financials) which did benefit us wealthwise but mainly London. T Blair allows free immigration, low paid workers, further stuffed the working class, also emptied the coffers (as declared by the outgoing exchequer. Then we had the banking crash who I believe tax payer helped bail out, Then there was no money for anything so austerity. Austerity austerity. then Covid…….

No investment, no building anything and endless immigration.

We have to cut spending in an attempt to provide money for investment in jobs and businesses. So the wealth of the country to grow.

But this won’t happen cos everyone wants more spent on health, more on the elderly, more on Special needs, more on potholes, more on anything they use - we need an honest Gov to tell us to grow up, get real, stop whingeing and also that will sort out immigration.

So I see the downward spiral continuing.

Very well put. I agree with a lot of your points

Rather than universal basic income, I’d like to see a generous system of grants for retraining into job growth areas. Would make much more sense than cash handed out without work incentives. Agree AI will blow up the job market.

broadly I agree with @MidnightPatrol and I’ll chuck in short term policies and politics - politicians and the media talk up crisis and failure all the time and it’s become a race to the bottom.

Im no economist. But our top spends are 1. Welfare (of which pensions account for the most, then universal credit and then disability benefits) and 2. healthcare and 3. Education
With a still fairly sizeable chunk paying interest on debt largely accumulated during covid.

These are the numbers for someone on £50k salary: (Total £ 11,972)

Health (NHS, etc.) 20% £2,394
Pensions (State pensions) 12% £1,436
Welfare (benefits, support) 15% £1,796
Education 11% £1,315
Defence 5% £599
Police and justice 4% £479
Transport (roads, rail) 4% £479
Debt interest 6% £719
Local government 5% £599
Environment 2% £240
Other (incl. foreign aid) 16% £1,914

Obviously this does not include VAT, Fuel duty (52.95p per litre + VAT), Council Tax, Vehicle Tax, Stamp Duty, Interest and Savings tax. Which are estimated to cost someone around 7k a year. So the total for someone on £50k is around £18.7k in tax to the government - 37% of your £50k salary.

I personally think that is way way too much - if the government was working to keep the cost of living low, maybe it is OK, but they have royally messed up energy pricing and food costs and transport costs, so it is totally unacceptable imo

Well, there is scope for average earners to pay more tax according to the IFS relative to other eu countries but income tax rises seems to be one thing labour cant face and is dishonest over.

If you look at the numbers I have posted, do you really think there is scope to increase tax?

Yes, the IFS certainly does - not on 50k earners, but on people on average and low wages,
if you compare those workers to EU taxes. Will dig out the link @hamstersarse

https://ifs.org.uk/articles/how-tax-burden-high-when-most-us-are-taxed-so-low

‘Paradoxically that might well be because it is demonstrably true. 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.’

beleive IFS is still saying they should face the income tax facts, and reform pensions.

See the farmers moaning. The whole reason that IHT was slapped on farmers was due to the likes of Jeremy Clarkson swooping in to use this IHT loophole. He freely admitted he only bought up agricultural land to avoid IHT. Land values soared. Farmers were priced out of buying agricultural land and this was caused by IHT loopholes. But Labour address this and OUTRAGE! Mainly due to Jeremy et al being very well connected to sympathetic media outlets.

How would taxing average and low earners more work though, when a chunk of them need UC to cover the government calculated COL?

Rather than universal basic income, I’d like to see a generous system of grants for retraining into job growth areas. Would make much more sense than cash handed out without work incentives. Agree AI will blow up the job market.

I'd love a 'young persons grant/low interest loan' made available on leaving school. Currently there is only an option for student loans tied into the disaster that is waiting to happen at the universities (you can get a better education on YouTube). If young people had some capital available to set up businesses and get trained vocationally, I think it would help many more people get on than only having (crap) university available.

Workers are the last people we should increase taxes on. We need workers and more of them. We certainly shouldn't be penalising them. Taxes need to be increased on non-workers, i.e. those living in property income, pensions, interest, investment incomes, etc., who really are undertaxed at the moment because NIC is only on wages. Extend NIC to ALL income first - it's just another tax after all.

@Freeasa labour failed to do anything to differentiate between working farms with small annual profits and people using land as a tax dodge. Easily avoidable own goal.

Or do away with NICs altogether and just simplify the tax system…it’s a pov @Badbadbunny bht most rich countries fund most of their services from high taxes on average earners.

The issue you have is that the minority are net contributers and that the average tax payer only contributes net of £800 tax per year when you deduct all the publicly funded items they take. 60% of taxpayers aren't net contributors. That's why we don't have enough money even with record levels of taxation.
Middle earners are being clobbered from all sides and are close to saying "what's the point".

@Freeasa It would be great if you thought about the point you have made for more than one second.

Have you ever considered how important food security is?

Have you ever thought about how the economics of a farm work? The cash flow? The equipment required?

Have you ever thought about what knowledge and experience it takes to make farmland productive?

Agreed. They could have done more to reduce the IHT bill for those who have farmed for X number of years and produced X amount of produce. Their solution was simplistic, but they couldn’t have just done nothing.

I agree. "Student loans" should at least be available to everyone not just those going to Uni, so that they could be used to fund starting a business, or learning to drive, or learning get a PSV or HGV driving licence, or to operate machinery like a fork life truck, or to finance professional exams. But, yes, grants would be better. I remember starting work in the 80s in an accountancy practice and huge numbers of unemployed were starting small businesses backed by a weekly "grant" paid by the government to help cover their living costs until their businesses started to become viable - most of the businesses survived once the grants stopped so it was quite a success. Likewise the ETS, YTS and JTS schemes to get school leavers and unemployed into the workplace - again, lots of success - yes a few employers abused the scheme but most did actually provide on the job training/experience which led to proper permanent jobs.

Not sure how much of a difference it would make (as I said above, I’m no economist) but I wish something could be done about childcare costs. I know so many women that didn’t go back to work after having their children because it wasn’t financially viable. Whether they weren’t earning enough to begin with or whether they had twins. The state has to prop up their income in some instances (some work part time hours around school etc)

How to say you don't understand farming without saying it! That's the most ignorant and bigoted statement about farming, completely inline with Labour soundbites