Anger at forth coming COL crisis

[MyCheekyEagle]

Of course I understand that the ME war is going to have an impact on oil prices & that will get passed onto the already struggling families; but when things stabilise again & maybe oil prices reset the greedy corporatez never pass this saving back to customers fo they. They just think as we've got used to these new higher prices we'll just keep them there. This thought has given me the rage most of today!
Just needed to vent somewhere, thanks if you listened..

Hang onto the knowledge and use it when they leave home.

Offer to cook a family meal now and again.

When we did cookery at school we brought the results home to eat, at a minimum cost.

Exactly so, and a lot of today's pensioners would have been in receipt of similar benefits that people today are.

This whole rose tinted 'pensioners worked hard all their lives and never took anything' myth needs to be stopped. In many cases a lot of them would have been on the dole, claimed tax credits, family allowance, carers allowance and so on.

I'm 50 and I've known since I stayed working at 17 that the state pension wasn't going to be enough to live on, people at pension age today have had the same information.

This isn't a dig at pensioners btw, just the argument that they were never in receipt of any financial support when they were of working age.

YANBU - Even the cheap shops are more expensive. I'm trying to cut down on the Meal Deals and takeaway coffees so I was in B&M for the first time in months to get some snacks. A 6 pack of Scampi/Bacon fries that were £1 the last time I bought them are now £1.69, same for a 4 pack of tiny Boost bars.

By the time I've bought bread, ham etc for a sandwich, there's barely any saving from the meal deal.

Some of the comments on this thread are so misinformed! How can people make rational decisions when they are constantly pumped lies and skewed truths? I have no idea if what I believe is true or not, but these points seem logical to me:

• Multinationals took advantage of shortages over the Covid period to hike prices and have not put them down since, just making greater profits.
• Britain has been decommissioning North Sea gas (there was never oil there) because it was becoming uneconomic to extract it. Poss due to depths of sea bed, gas seams, equipment renewal. (Renewables are a replacement for this).
• In the 2010s the British govt gave up our facility to store gas, so Britain is totally dependent on other nations (could previously buy cheap and store, like other European countries do). This is 100% fact.
• The self employed pay far lower taxes (esp NI) than all other working people, and overall our taxes are on a par with similar countries.

You make some good points but much of the problem is because the structure of society has changed.
Years ago you stayed with your parents until you got married then you bought a house and later, started a family. Then when your parents became old and infirm and one died, you took the remaining parent in to live with you.
This gave you a built in babysitter/childminder and hopefully a bit of help (either physically or financially) around the house.
My mother would never have been able to go back to work p/t if we hadn't had her dad living with us. He was able to pick us up from school and keep an eye on us until she got back.

@mugglewump Britain has been decommissioning North Sea gas (there was never oil there) because it was becoming uneconomic to extract it. Poss due to depths of sea bed, gas seams, equipment renewal. (Renewables are a replacement for this).

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/uk-government-ed-miliband-north-sea-rachel-reeves-government-b2873009.html

Is the pension triple-lock still affordable?

I don't know as I am not an economist but some info here - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9wdgk7ggezo

Schools still do this.
But if parents don’t lead by example at home on a regular basis some children will think that cooking from scratch is for a special occasion not what you do daily.

Schools can’t parent. I wish people would understand that.

We have teenagers, and I have taught them how to cook, their cooking lessons in school were way below their skills. We talk to them about the cost of making houmous versus buying it. They read ingredients on packets for nutritional content and compare different brands and supermarket own for (largely what companies try and replace with palm oil), they know about the environmental destruction of large food companies and the meat industry. They are more informed than a lot of adults. But we have taught them this. On the flip side you get people complaining in supermarkets that people take their children into them and get in the way.

Schools don’t have the time to cover all this and some parents would be raging if they taught kids to read packets and question their purchases.

I presume your children are perfect in this area?

The North Sea oil/ gas thing is quite complicated due to the high costs of extraction. Uk would likely be a marginal (highest cost) producer so if global supply increases or demand falls (so price falls), extraction is loss making. So to incentivise someone to drill it the government would probably have to guarantee off-take through subsidies (i.e. it guarantees the producer a price above cost of production ). The government then has to get that money from general taxation so although people feel they are protected from oil/gas prices, they could actually end up paying a lot more in total if oil/gas prices are lower than NS extraction costs for a prolonged period.

It's like Trump telling everyone to "drill baby drill" but the oil companies are saying "nah, not at those costs of extraction".

It’s fucking shit

I am all for people being rewarded for working hard and having millions and millions.
but individuals don't really need a billion - and certainly not multiples of billions. It's such a vast amount of money and they never earned it without support from infrastructure and public education of staff and employees..
It's this concentration of wealth that's stopping money fully flowing and circulating through economies.

@frozendaisy "Schools don’t have the time to cover all this"

Why not? It's part of domestic Science isn't it?

Maybe schools are too busy teaching kids about the 72 genders and how to change sex?

"I presume your children are perfect in this area?"

I don't have any children at home now.

Maybe Musk should have stopped building businesses when he left paypal and had the millions, rather than investing it to create jobs for another 127,000 people at Space X and Tesla.

All hail Elon

@Lilactimes "but individuals don't really need a billion - and certainly not multiples of billions."

And who are you to judge how much money anyone should have?

I can't find any figures for UK but here are some from USA which may be comparable.

Jeff Bezos employs about 1,000,000 people through Amazon, plus more in other unrelated business ventures.
Between them, Amazon and Walmart have a huge economic impact, because both businesses are retailers who take goods to market for manufactures. Between them, they have rewritten the rules of retailing over the past 20 years. Indirectly, by serving as a channel to market, they each easily indirectly employ 10 times as many people as they do directly.
Between the two most visible billionaires, US have direct employment of 3.5 million people, and indirect employment of closer to 35 million people. That's 10% of the population of the United States.

Dragon's Den would be shit if we didn't let people who had more than a few millions invest in businesses to make more money.

It would just be Sue pitching her idea to Bob down the road, but he'd be out because his benefits had been sanctioned.

People are literally celebrating in the streets whilst bombs are going off, that is how desperate the Persians are to get rid of Islam out of their country. If that means I have to pay a bit more for fuel then so be it.

Too true! Profiteering at its worst!!

Just because your children aren’t at home doesn’t mean they aren’t still your children. Grandchildren then? If you have, your teaching of your children will filter down to them.

And you sound like one of the lucky ones, as you mention in another post, your family look after each other and take care of their elderly so when it comes to you your children will look after you as that is how it is done in your family.

Nail on the head 100%.

There needs to be some massive pressure on Reeves to REDUCE fuel duties as she'll be raking it in as VAT is on the total price, so her VAT revenue increases when prices go up. In fact, there's VAT on fuel duty element too - so a tax on a tax! She needs to get a grip.

The UK is a country where it is very easy to start new businesses, almost anyone could do it. Yet still very few do and rely on someone else to give them a job in their business. Those that do create new businesses and are successful should be rewarded

Children leave home often because there are no decent jobs in their home town, especially in the regions, smaller towns, etc. Many go away to Uni and simply never return home as they either move to other cities for work or stay in their Uni city for work.

It's a very different employment landscape from a few decades ago when every town had big employers, banks, offices, shops, warehouses, factories etc.

Centralisation into a handful of big cities has massively changed the way families live.

If you've gone away to Uni to train as, say, an actuary, you're not going to return to your home town where the only jobs are in tourism and hospitality and become a waitress or hotel receptionists. You're going to go to London, or Edinburgh, or Leeds, etc where the insurance firms have their big offices. Go back a few decades and there were insurance firms with head offices in smaller cities and towns, especially the mutual societies.

Trump's stupid, ill-thought-out war that he's probably going to pull back from today/tomorrow, having just succeeded in replacing one Supreme Leader with another one exactly the same, will end up costing all of us loads of money. He's such a massive twat.

Those so-called greedy corporates will be funding your pension.