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.

@BIossomtoes did you read the link? Doesn’t sound like it. Perhaps you could link to a report that proves assisted dying will be cost effective for the NHS? Such a report doesn’t exist though….

@Tel12 How many billionaires are there? It’s a joke if you think this. There’s hardly any! It’s just jealousy and poor info.

@ladyrinths Plenty of evidence suggests choice regarding dying would cost less! More old people in the future for a start. The stupid bill restricting it to the terminally ill would be extensive to administer as it was way too complex. Those of us ego don’t want to have a horrible end just because we are old and our bodies give up could die earlier. That would definitely save money.

Oxfam says the world’s richest 1% amassed about $42 trillion in new wealth over the past decade. �
Oxfam GB +1
Billionaires alone gained around $6.5 trillion since 2015, according to a 2025 Oxfam analysis. �
The Washington Post
Total global billionaire wealth reached roughly $15–18 trillion by 2025–26, depending on methodology, after accelerating sharply post-COVID. �
Oxfam International +1
Oxfam reported billionaire wealth increased by 81% since 2020 alone. �
Oxfam International
The number of billionaires has also risen substantially:
around 1,800 globally in the mid-2010s,
nearly 2,800–3,000 by 2025. �

There are "only" 157 billionaires in the UK. The UK population is 70 million people. If you took another million from every billionaire, it would only amount to £2.60 per person! To make any noticeable difference, you'd need to take a billion from each billionaire which is still only £2.6k per person, still not enough to "solve" the country's financial problems. If you took a billion of every billionaire every year, they'd soon all beggar off abroad.

All this "tax the billionaires" is a spurious argument as there are so few of them and huge numbers of people who aren't billionaires. Like all the "noise" about MP pay rises and cheap booze/meals - do the sums and it works out at just a few pence per each person if you took it away and redistributed it to everyone else.

Disingenuous. Nobody’s suggesting taxing the uber wealthy with a view to redistributing the money. £2.60 per capita spent on improvements to public services could be transformative.

We spend £13.5k per capita on public spending. There's no way another £2.60 could be "transformative". It'd be a drop in the ocean, more like a rounding error.

£157 million is more than a rounding error. Even in government spending.

In Labour's manifesto they put the cost of the free school breakfast club programme at £315 million

https://ifs.org.uk/articles/free-breakfast-clubs-schools-what-labours-plans-would-mean-pupils-and-families

I don't think your 'tax the billionaires' idea pans out. What will continue to happen is that every day working people will be taxed more and more until everything falls apart.

I think you need to look a lot more closely at how these billionaires are making money. Far too much of their wealth is taken directly from the public purse. Thats money that could be going elsewhere.

Heres an example from the Equality Trust
”Graham King used to run a caravan park in Essex. Today he’s worth over a billion pounds. He lives between Mayfair and Monaco. He races Porsches across Europe and flies by private jet.

His company, Clearsprings Ready Homes, is paid by the Home Office to house asylum seekers. They rake in £4.8 million of government money every single day.
This rotten contract was originally valued at £1 billion. It has since ballooned to £7.3 billion.
…
Graham’s profits rose 60% in a single year to £119 million. He owns 99% of the shares. He paid himself £90 million in dividends. And when MPs asked questions about this, he wasn’t even in the room.
…
When asylum housing was privatised, it handed a public duty to private profit. Contracts worth billions are today awarded to just three companies.
…
Graham King’s company alone now accounts for more than one in every twenty pounds the Home Office spends. That includes spending on police and fire services.
The same pattern repeats across our economy. Billionaire wealth in the UK has grown by over 1000% since 1990.
Inequality costs us at least £106 billion a year compared to the average developed country.”

There’s an awful lot of people making an awful lot of money from services that were once run a hell of a lot more cheaply by the public sector, and which still pay the actual staff doing the work bugger all.

Why are there so many apologists for billionaires on here? If you’re all paid then you’re being paid for a reason. Do you not realise how close this country is to collapse due to their greed?

That’s a very good point @WaryCrow. Friday’s The News Agents podcast was about taxing wealth. It was essentially an interview with an innovative economist called Gabriel Zucman. It’s an instructive listen for people who think wealth taxation doesn’t work.

@WaryCrow

I think you need to look a lot more closely at how these billionaires are making money. Far too much of their wealth is taken directly from the public purse. Thats money that could be going elsewhere.

I think this is what needs to be done, i.e. control and reduce the excessive public sector contracts rather than faffing around trying to tax the recipients. That way we'd keep 100% of the cost savings rather than 40/50% of the excess profits that are making some people far too rich.

I wonder how many millionaires/billionaires have been created from the ridiculous HS2 that's cost £100 billion!

SEN education is another classic example of how the public purse being overcharged to supply services that were once run more cheaply by the public sector. And of course housing. Housing benefit is a major cost for the whole country: mostly paid straight to individual landlords. Whereas once it would have gone to the council to spend on other services and re-circulate through the system.

Really it’s amazing the system hasn’t already gone bankrupt. Of course many councils already have.

I wonder how many millionaires/billionaires have been created from the ridiculous HS2 that's cost £100 billion!

Hmm. If you have a Times subscription - I don’t - this came up in Google, it may be informative, according to the headline:

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/transport/article/hs2-money-train-revealed-who-made-billions-t32mbvnpf

Apparently the head of the project is the uk’s highest paid “public servant”, on 4x the prime ministers earnings. On Google from the Telegraph.

Benefits honestly.

HS2 could have been built cheaply and effectively. A fast train line from London to Birmingham to Manchester could have been built. But we have such nonsense planning laws and public consultations in the UK that nothing gets done.

Hmm again, yes the bbc seems to regard the project’s claims about planning costs etc as a bit of an excuse, to put it mildly. Or a lying farce, if you’re less polite.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98486dzxnzo

@BiffandChipsThats not what the report just published has said! Yes, us poor folks along the route wanted to be listened to, but not a thing was changed! The big costs are; too high speed, over designed as a result, far too little pre design done to accuratiy know costs and poor management.

The thing was this project was started pre covid - I think it was a sop to the red wall voters in the N to include them in the London boom -I think I remember BJ pondering whether to go ahead or not, — then we had covid -everyone working from home -so it is not needed at all - if they had only STARTED with the northern link (was it Manchester -Leeds -can’t quite remember) but of course not - we start with the most expensive bit in London. Cos that’s the only part of the country that matters to Gov.

The planning started LONG before that, by Gordon Brown in the late noughties.

You think the rest of the EU was unaffected economically by having the 5th largest economy in the world leave the block? Brexit was devastating for the whole of the EU and many countries other than the UK continue to suffer the consequences. Germany has many of its own problems but Brexit (and Covid, and Ukraine) contributed hugely to the economic downturn of the entire block.

Brexit,covid,Liz truss.
Decades of mismanagement.

Plus some of highest energy costs in the world destroying manufacturing.

The EU can compromise and reduce frictions.

We are projected to be overtaken by India though and GDP per capita matters. We are experts at spending more than we generate though, hence out of control borrowing.

The Indian PM is driven and has a vision for growth