Britain poorer than Mississippi

[BritishMississippi]

Our GDP per capita has now dipped to the level of America’s poorest state. It’s not dipped below due solely to London. We’ve been on a spiral for the last twenty years that means our children are facing not being able to find jobs and even the jobs they can find have miserable wages attached to them. AIBU that we need to engage quite seriously with how to bring the country out of this spiral in a meaningful way?

With a birth rate of 1.4 it's only going to get worse (this is common across Europe as well). Less tax revenue to support an increasing retired community.

@BreakingBrokenWe aren’t talking about total GDP we are talking about GDP per capita which is the most widely used proxy for standard of living enabling the comparison of countries of very different sizes.

Welcome to MN OP. Good to see your first thread is a positive one to kick off the weekend with 🥳🍻🎶

One word, Thatcher.

Sold everything, made everybody greedy. Paved the way for the Bullington Boys.

Well we shouldn’t be using the US as something to aspire to! They might have more GDP but that’s at the expense of workers, the environment and everything else.

Why? The last 20 years have been largely dominated by Conservative governments.

There are a tiny handful of thoughtful posts but mostly it’s just people bickering, insulting one another and generally being objectionable. Hardly the OPs fault, though.

So what you are really saying is the poorest Briton would still prefer Mississippi's healthcare and education system And presumably their employment and laws too ?

If only there was a phrase like "all things being equal". I think I shall devote my dotage to trying to sneak it into debates. Who knows, it may catch on ?

@TemperanceWest Maybe you’re the new one if you haven’t worked out name changing? Feel free to fact check what I’m posting. Per capita GDP has plummeted and it matters. We need to stop blaming and come up with sensible policies to move forward.

No it's not.

👏Well said. Farage wants a system of a handful of billionaires and millions of low paid worker ants slaving away for them.

Sorry, I was being a bit facetious. So much gloom and doom on MN these days. It feels as though there is a push to paint things in as grim a light as possible.

" austerity" was completely fabricated. A sort of collective belt tightening which would do good in the end.
Only it didn't.

Probably because our workforce are all claiming that they’re too ill to work. Look at the stats compared to the US.

I am not doubting what you've posted. See my post above. Apologies.

True

🙄

That little note on the bottom should be noted - "back of the envelope comparison"

It really isn’t just Brexit although that has exacerbated it.

We never recovered from the 08 crash & we made ever increasing house prices a key part of the economy.

Actually it's several words.

Brexit, the pandemic, the Ukraine war, the Iran war and the Labour govt (under whom we are worse off than we ever were under the Conservatives). Britain has become a nation of scroungers living off the state. The number of people claiming disability benefits has DOUBLED since 2019. How is that even possible? Answer: it's not. Our benefits system is open to abuse and millions of lazy fuckers are abusing it. That has to stop or we are doomed.

Yep, and no hope of an upturn. Too many people with ‘needs’ and not enough people taxpaying to support it all. We now have to choose between quality of life and length of life.

The jobs situation for young people should have been easy to predict. If we think about the 1960s, lots of women did not work outside the home. Now most of us do, so that is 50% more people looking for jobs basically than back then.

At the same time, the retirement age has been steadily increasing, so not only are there more people looking for jobs, but those that have them are not giving them up/retiring!

The governments (both Conservative and Labour) are conveniently blaming AI. Guess it must be cheaper to pay unemployment benefit than it is to pay a state pension.

@TheKittenswithMittens how much has it increased by & does this have nothing to do with an ageing population and increasing the state pension age which pulls more people into the “working” category.

I don’t think that she can be blamed for everything, but she certainly got the ball rolling and no government since then has done anything to improve the situation.

Just about every industry has been sold off so we manufacture very little, our utilities too so there has been no investment in infrastructure. Yet we continue to import huge numbers of people who offer nothing, give away huge sums of money to foreign causes and waste on domestic projects that never see the light of day (eg failed NHS project started in 2002 costing 10 billion plus, just one example).

Then there is the catastrophic Net Zero obsession, which no other country seems to be following, giving us the highest global energy costs, and so much red tape and so many disincentives to starting small and medium businesses, the backbone of our economy. Add to this the current determination of government to buy up prime farmland for solar farms, further reducing our food security and damaging the soil for generations, and in a country where the sun so rarely shines!

Anyone could be forgiven for thinking it’s deliberate, given the amount of bungling and waste by successive governments, despite expert advisors galore.

If you are ill in the US, there's a fair chance you will die though? Unless you have money.