To wonder why the economy, and people are struggling financially when the government could just.. ‘print’ more money to plow into it.

[RisenWhine]

I just find it absolutely bizarre that businesses, NHS, education, benefits, taxpayers struggle so hard when money is literally a man made concept that we print and just ‘decide’ how much to have? Just ‘print’ more, if we created money and let’s be honest it’s just numbers, numbers are infinite.. put more into the NHS.. put more into education..

There is absolutely no reason anyone should have to struggle with money at it just baffles me that the UK is the way that it is because of some shite we made up 🤣

No wonder the country's in the mess it's in when it's citizens don't understand this basic economic stuff. I don't think OP is alone in her lack of knowledge and her 'I just want everyone to be equal' crap, it's a terrible indictment of our education system.

Some people are also clearly equating hard work with how much money they earn on this thread. The hardest job I have ever done was being a carer where I got paid the least. I certainly wasn't lazy either as it was heavy, exhausting work (you would only know this if you had been a carer)! I think this assumption is a huge problem for society. Some people doing this job now are being paid benefits because they are not being paid enough to do a tough job and housing is ridiculously expensive. That is a huge problem that needs fixing. Given that an elderly relative was recently quoted an advance of 150k to move into a care home, you have to ask yourself where that money might be going. There are people taking the piss at both ends of the spectrum, but I understand more why one end of the spectrum may be doing it.

After 2008 and Brexit and during covid they did just print more money, look up Quantitive easing. It wasn’t at the level of Weimar Germany but it is one of the main reasons house prices raised so significantly.

DH was working abroad in a country where they had hyper inflation in the 1990’s. He was paid in US dollars, but had all local expenses paid in cash. It was literally wheelbarrows a day for their group of contractors, it was so worthless they used it to light the fire to get rid of it.
Food and other stuff they had to buy from the shops doubled in price in a day sometimes.

Basic economics here! More money "printed"off has no meaning .what previously cost £5.00 will cost £10.00 and so on .Years ago the BOE was backed by a certain amount of gold reserves .As far as everyone earning similar amounts . thats communism Im afraid .Unless you want to stifle personal ambition thats why it doesnt work!

You're making me wonder if maybe Plato was right.

I tried to calculate how this would work out a few years ago, we were in lock down, I was bored. I think I googled total global wealth and divided it by 8 billion. Obviously it was a very crude calculation but I was interested in getting a very rough idea of what everyone's individual net worth would be if everyone had the same amount from the wealth available. At the time I think it worked out at 53,000 dollars for every human. That includes money and assets.

Skipped school then when they were teaching about hyperinflation in Germany and how it ultimately led to a war in which millions died?

Good grief. You think that if society and the monetary system collapsed we’d all just happily be hunter gatherers bartering nicely with each other in some Postman Pat type world? Too many people now for a start.

Jobs themselves aren’t equal though. Why would someone work in a ridiculously stressful job for the same pay as someone in a very low stress easy job? I’m a dental hygienist. It’s stressful and I wish on a daily basis I hadn’t gone into it. The risk of being sued. People complaining if I dare run 5 mins late (even when they can see the person before them was very elderly and took a long time to leave the surgery). And there are many many much more stressful jobs than mine! Like fuck would I keep doing this job if a much less stressful job paid the same! (To be fair I’ve only had a £2 per hour pay rise in 16 years so the rate its going I think that might actually happen) I mean I wouldn’t expect a brain surgeon to earn the same as me! I also think other jobs SHOULD earn much more than me that currently don’t.

OP it helps if you understand money is just tokens that society agrees represents the value of goods and services it is exchanged for. If money ceased to exist tomorrow we wouldn't have any less stuff but it would be very hard to work out how to get the things we need.

My employer values my skills and pays me for them but I can't go and offer them to Sainsbury's in exchange for the weekly shop. So my employer needs to pay me in something I can usefully exchange for things I need. That is money. Society is too complicated for a barter economy now

I think the actual real value of housing when adjusting for inflation hasn't really changed much, but we now have more dual income households now, and wage stagnation in the last couple of decades which hasn't helped.

We are still feeling the effects of 2008 now, but I was also feeling it beforehand when rents and houseprices rose a lot before the crash. I also remember some of my friends getting credit cards with thousands on their credit limit - at 18! It was a mad time.

I don’t do much of anything, I work part time, try to keep my kids healthy and basically just cook and clean. School was a terrible time for me so I didn’t take much away from it I must admit. I became a dental nurse but the pay was so ridiculously poor I had to leave after my first child was born for something that would actually pay the bills.

obviously, I can read. But I’m limited to only mumsnet and TikTok, which is where I get all of my fact based vital information 🙄

Everyone would stop trying. Why make any effort if there's no reward. I worked my arse off and watched friends cruise through on benefits and spend now worry later mentaluturs Now they are still working and I've taken a nice comfortable retirement. With your wealth sharing I've never have bothered working so hard through my twenties thirties, forties and fifties. The politics of envy don't and will never work.

Having read this I realise you are taking the piss and wish I hadn't wasted my time on an idiot.

On economics I preferred the new labour government a lot more. They didn't punish success at all. They believed in markets and capitalism. They ran a sensible budget and invested tax revenues into public services

Are you on benefits?

And what it led to.

I take it you're not an economist.

As for your ideas, I suggest you start with Animal Farm and work from there, stopping to consider Soviet Russia in the 1980s and hyperinflation in Venezuela.

Even the most left wing economists in the mainstream world don't advocate mass redistribution. Just higher taxes on income and a moderate wealth tax. Even Krugman says billionaires should exist, they just need to pay higher taxes. Not have all their assets seized.

Do you just come to mn to add comedy value?

That’s quantative easing and it’s what happened in the pandemic and it’s why inflation rocketed

And this is why the USA ended up with Trump and maga and why we will end up with Reform. I am not blaming the OP for their lack of knowledge but the education system is rubbish. We should all have to learn basic economics at school.

First I think you have to understand what money is. It's not the paper that makes it worth something. It's that we as a society have agreed to place a certain value on it but that value can easily change.

Before there was paper money there were gold/silver/copper coins etc. But then, why is gold worth more than silver? You can't eat gold, it won't keep you warm. Humans have placed value on it due to it's scarcity and the fact that it stays shiny.

Without paper notes or coins humans use a barter system. I'll give you a goat if you give me 5 barrels of potatoes.

Imagine you are a potato farmer. You have hundreds of barrels of potatoes, more than you could ever need. If someone offers to give you more potatoes in return for a goat, you'd say no because you really don't need more potatoes, they'd be worthless to you.

Imagine you are a goat farmer and you have thousands of goats but no potatoes. If someone makes you the same offer to give you potatoes in return for a goat, you'd say yes because you'd like some potatoes for a change and you've got so many goats that one single one is not worth much to you.

Going back to modern money, if everyone had a billion pounds in paper money but didn't have any food, what would happen? A person would be willing to pay 1 million pounds for a loaf of bread because they're really hungry and their billions in bank notes aren't worth much to them. That's basically what happens when inflation is out of control.

So during the Weimar Republic, a loaf of bread in Berlin that cost around 160 marks at the end of 1922 cost 200 billion marks by late 1923. People were literally loading armfuls of paper money into wheelbarrows just to go buy bread.

So that's why printing money and handing it out isn't a simple fix.

I'd suggest you look at his broader influence on politics before you decide he's a good thing.

Clean energy entrepreneurs can be found elsewhere, space exploration is not a priority for the world right now, I would say - and starlink extremely worrying for someone as prone to political interference as him.