To ask where has all the money gone/where does it go

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DH and I are late forties.

It feels like the country is crumbling around us and there is just no money for anything.

I've just seen something showing the tax thresholds that have been frozen for decades and this got me thinking where does all the tax go.

Why does the country feel so poor these days? Is it a slow.decline due to Brexit or it is world wide events wars etc that are biting.

The ridiculous summer savings scheme is hardly going to help but what can the govt actually do to get the wheels of the economy turning again.

There must some money but where has it all gone?

This isn't political just a genuine puzzlement that we are paying more tax than ever but the country and lots of people in it are skint.

Government debt, as a % of GDP, increased after the financial crash but unlike other countries who only practiced austerity for a couple of years and brought down their debt, we carried it on.

We then increased debt even further with Covid

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But I do wonder at the amount of stupid shit we spend stuff on as a society. For example, managing volunteers has in recent years become rather expensive. At my parish church which is very average where I live they all need criminal record checks every three years. They need safe food handling if they will work doing hospitality or at the soup kitchen. They have to do two separate courses that the diocese mandates, which is to say the insurance company mandates.

😂😂so it now costs far too much to even have volunteers carrying out socially useful roles! Let alone to actually pay people to do the work, as actually used to happen.

When will our elite controllers admit that what they want is a bunch of desperate. serf/ slave class with no rights and no protections!

@WaryCrow the 08 crash did damage productivity & wages. Many people
did not feel it but it disproportionately impacted the young.

Prior to the 08 crash we had more boom & bust but the boom never came after 08.

Why the duck is billions being wasted on the HS2 railway and why was it even needed in the first place?
Happy to be educated on that.

If only there was something the Government could scrap to save £b's......oh wait there is.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c794xw7p2dqo

ETA. For anyone not wanting to click on the link, I'm talking about HS2. The most expensive "white elephant" in British history.

The security of the pension scheme is one of the top reasons I have stayed in the civil service instead of earning probably double in the private sector. If you made it less generous, you would have to pay more competitive salaries to match the market.

This.
Plus your water company is likely owned by a foreign organisation.
And your electricity company.
And even if your car was physically made in the UK, the company is owned by a foreign company that takes the profits abroad.

We have sold everything to foreign "investors" by which I mean foreign capitalists who take all the profit elsewhere.

It will cost almost as much to cancel as to complete.(recent research by Labour Gov)
i read recently (possibly in the FT) that the reason the channel tunnel was a success and HS2 isn’t is because the CT was done by private companies - sooo if some numpty comes along after and says -oh, you need to build a bat tunnel, you need to do on the job skills training for unemployed, you can’t put it there because …., -a private company would cost it out and demand the extra money, because if costs aren’t right they’d go bust. Unlike a Gov run thing which has bottomless tax coming in.
so when people demand we nationalises companies keep this in mind

Abroad - yes, we all pay for Amazon, Netflix, etc etc etc -so we are also to blame -and we don’t want to pay the higher High St prices so everything is also made abroad as they have cheaper labour there -so it’s not just rich foreigners or the Gov to blame it’s also us.

The salary thing hasn't really been true for years.

Its the very high earners who could earn more in private not middle & lower earners.

Yes, civil service and local government pay lower earners more than the private sector.

But the state still saves money because they don't have to subsidise the low wages with benefits to the same degree.

And the better pension scheme means they are less like to have to further subsidise those workers when they retire.

I work in software development and I think pretty much all grades could earn much more in the private sector.

A good example of all investment that has worked is Crossrsil. The gov should crack on with Cross rail 2 & 3 etc.

Yes it’s being hoarded by the top 1%. The investor class controls an increasingly disproportionate share of resources, while the rest of society gets comparatively poorer.

That is how the current (corrupt) global capitalist model maintains itself: the wealthiest individuals must continuously accumulate wealth at an accelerating rate to maintain their power, and that power in turn protects and reinforces their ability to keep accumulating more.

They will keep syphoning off more and more money and resources from everyone else.

@SpacesNotTabs perhaps but that doesn’t prove anything since the public sector employs more than just software developers…

I would earn maybe 10-15k more in the private sector but that doesn’t bridge the gap for my pension, holiday, sick pay & job security.

The problem is the world measures success by the amount of wealth someone has.

We need to replace the Forbes Rich List with the Forbes Philanthropy List, don't give honours to people who don't pay their taxes, take them away from people who move off shore to avoid taxes.

Stop letting people influence government policy because they can afford to.

If we stopped viewing wealth as a measure of success and focussed instead on contribution the billionaires would be falling over themselves to give it away.

Have a look at how Mackenzie Scott had used her wealth since her divorce from Bezos - she's done some amazing things.

But most people won't have heard about it - unlike Bezos's £50million wedding!

For their level of responsibility they certainly don’t.

I have worked as a supplier to central and local government for over 30 years and now as a customer of one of the biggest local authorities they have no interest in resolving my issues (I work in property).

It’s not as though I can use anyone else.

For years Britain has been far les productive per head of population than other countries, and that has really impacted growth of the economy overall. It's a mystery that economists argue over as to why this happens. The knock-on effect is that less taxes are collected, so there is less funding for public services. Add in the hugely distorted housing market, which sucks up money people might otherwise spend on goods and services, and the ageing / less healthy population, which requires every increasing spending on pensions and benefits, and it's easy to see why the UK feels so poor.

It's like a household where the income has increased a bit since 2008 - but prices of everything keep rising a lot faster than income has risen. You can't afford to upgrade the windows, redecorate the rooms or replace the boiler if instead you're now spending all your income on supporting the grandparents, paying for your kids to go to uni, covering an every-increasing mortgage, feeding everyone on groceries that are more expensive every month, and keeping everyone warm and clothed. So the house gets shabbier, things break or wear out, and they aren't fixed: temporary repairs are put in place to cover the cracks but that doesn't work forever. All the fun stuff gets postponed or cancelled. That's the UK these days.

The average person is being increasingly squeezed but at the same time the 1% are hoovering up assets and becoming more wealthy.

Labour think that taxing the average person more is the answer but it only makes the situation worse. There is no easy solution but it’s getting worse and has accelerated since Covid. Inflation is great for people with asset wealth but hurts average people relying on a salary.

We have now reached a point in the UK where, for many, working is simply not viable. Our benefits system is increasingly burdened and at some point, something will break. Everything in the UK is now a crisis.

The solution, if any, does not lie with one single party or policy a but rather a cross section to really strategise the future of the UK over the long term. Having plans constantly disrupted by the latest nut case idea by politicians is harming all of us. Burnham will find this out when he gets his couple of years to have a go.

As per usual on threads like this you get the “Public sector wastage” tribe. I’d be curious to know how many of the people slagging off public sector workers have ever had any real experience of working there. I doubt it. Managers in public sector roles work their asses off, quite a few I’ve known go under with the strain. They’ve got the skills, dedication and commitment to serve in those roles for probably about a third of what they could earn in the private sector.

But it’s their choice to work in a job where they feel they can be of help to others. That means they also are naturally the whipping dogs for people’s ignorance whenever an ugly politically-motivated incompetence issue arises. It’s easy to blame the public sector - and lazy as well.

Newsflash; not all societal and economic problems are the fault of public sector workers, or their managers. Try thinking harder

There are 157 UK billionaires in the UK.

In 1990 there were 15, in 2010 there were 53 in 2020 there were 147. Adjusted for inflation those figures would be 40, 90 and 160.

They have wealth that is equivalent to 22% of UK GDP. They own around 4.3% of UK houshold wealth.

Between 25% and 28% of them keep their wealth off shore to avoid paying tax on that wealth.

They pay around 1% of their wealth in tax. The tax that they pay equates to just 0.7% of the UK tax take.

Uk billionaires have the highest amount of non-productive wealth in the G7. This means they don't acquire their wealth through job creation and industry development but through passive means like rent and property portfolios.

They don't spend their money in the economy the same way that ordinary UK citizens do. Their spend is global so they are not contributing to VAT or the economy like ordinary people.

Wealth is not taxed at anywhere near the rate of work so even when it is kept on shore, they don't pay enough tax to appear on the list of top tax payers.

One of these billionaires is the King 🤯

Making ever increasing house prices the economy has fucked it.

The solution, if any, does not lie with one single party or policy a but rather a cross section to really strategise the future of the UK over the long term

Absolutely, any solution will take years & need cross party consensus but a lot of the electorate want which fixes.

We have a massive massive number of people "taking out" far more than they ever put in, and too few people working full time paying in.

Tax revenue is paying for

• schools/colleges/childcare funding
• the NHS & social care
• the armed forces
• the police & things like border services
• welfare
• infrastructure like HS2, roads, bridges
• welfare, including vast buckets on state pension, pension credit, pip & DLA, universal credit in all it's forms
• the environment - forestry, parks, national parks, coastlines, waterways including canals
• interest on national debt
• government employee wages, from MPs to civil servants

Its a huge amount of cost, and we need more people working to pay for it. Its no good assuming the money can come from corporates, loads of sectors have been hammered by the weak economy and are barely making any money.