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?

I'm trying to bring across that the main topics raised in the article are that the country is divided, and that this is what is causing economic harm; and that self serving (and incoherent, directioneless, and mismanaging) politicians are only adding to the issue.

I'm trying to imply this is wrong.

You're telling me to leave.

I'm asking you what party you vote? Presuming it's Reform.

I don't think I'm acting in a very cooperative way myself, and should probably practise what I preach lol. Sorry. What do you think would help?

I'm trying to bring across that the main topics raised in the article are that the country is divided, and that this is what is causing economic harm; and that self serving (and incoherent, directioneless, and mismanaging) politicians are only adding to the issue.

I'm trying to imply this is wrong.

You're telling me to leave.

I'm asking you what party you vote? Presuming it's Reform.

I don't think I'm acting in a very cooperative way myself, and should probably practise what I preach lol. Sorry. What do you think would help?

Not sure why that posted twice

You presume Reform? Fascinating!!

Hardly labour, they haven't been in power long enough.

That's fucked up!

Net zero costing £60 billion...and I'm stupid

But they have spunked the economy.... even so it's still one of the strongest in Europe

So was the one I responded to. Brexit... when we've had a world wide epidemic, war in Europe and the yanks being twats...how the feck could Brexit be the cause

Net zero con, chagos islands, benefits splurge, increase NI on employers, increase min wage so people can't afford to employ, soggy toast, wasted money already spent on immigration deterrent.. Not the cause of it all but certainly way to make it a lot worse not better

We need to get people off benefits and make able bodied people start working. We need to stop allowing so many people to arrive on dinghies and then just mooch off us, not even bothering to learn the language, let alone get a job (I’m aware that doesn’t relate to all of them but I volunteered at a charity for illegal immigrants years ago and the number that didn’t turn up to mandatory English lessons was shocking)

Agreed but pressure from labour and the left was a major contribution

Yep - London - forever wiping the rest of the UK’s arse. Unfortunately we can’t hustle enough tax for everyone these days, stagnant wages and a low growth economy are exacerbating an already dire outlook.

The number of sick note requests we get has also probably doubled. So hard to sort effectively.

Brexit has been a big part of it in terms of narrowing financial opportunity significantly. But we've been in a downward spiral for years in terms of productivity because government after government, since Thatcher, have failed to improve skills well. The only real success in skills building has been the improvements in functional literacy, with the base skill level for 80% of the population being several years higher now than it was 30 years ago. Pretty much everything else has atrophied or stayed constant - in contrast to most OECD countries.

Our education system is years behind most countries in things like making schooling compulsory to 18, keeping maths education to 18 and providing good routes into engineering. Our investment in university education has been a costly disaster indebting individuals and the country for poor returns. It stripped away the focus that ploytechnics had on producing industry ready graduates, and decimated the landscape of qualifications between A level/Btech and Bachelors, especially in engineering and other industry specific areas. And at the same time we've completely failed to maintain industry investment in training for those already employed.

We've squandered the good years we had since the Black Monday recession. So we will find it really hard to turn things around as this all takes investment over years to upskill the teaching professions so that our education and training can be properly improved.

They would just move to another country. A lot of UK suppliers had to
move their companies to a European country after Brexit. The delays and taxes stopped a lot of European trade. In my job we had to change our suppliers to one based in Holland.
I remember being caught out on eBay. I bought a nice ring and had to pay 70 taxes. I never bought anything from eBay again so it had to impact smaller businesses.

GDP per capita isn’t a good way to look at a country’s standard of living and can be distorted by so many factors. For example Ireland’s GDP per capita is almost 100k per person but the average quality of life is considered roughly similar to the UK, it’s just that there are quite a lot of big companies in Ireland due to low corporation tax.

Another sensationalist headline not being understood by the brainwashed masses…ffs.

Cost of living varies greatly between the US and Uk so it doesn’t really work to compare gdp per capita, any more than it would work to compare the average debt per capita in the US (103k USD) with the uk (34k GBP)

Yep all this, and scrap net zero then were sorted. Labour won't do anything though.

The US is an incredibly rich country. People like to pretend it isn't but it is. Even the poorest states are relatively wealthy globally. Mississippi's GDP per capita exceeds that of the UK, France, Italy, Japan, and many others.

Do people like to pretend it isn't? It's generally accepted to be a massive economy.
I think the criticisms of the US tend to be around it's homeless issues etc but I think it gets far more criticism for this than other countries with similar problems precisely because it's so rich.

But aren’t any jobs by definition done by the middle (even if upper middle) or working classes? Bankers, lawyers (I assume that’s the kind of thing you have in mind) - those may be predominantly upper middle class roles, but they’re still middle class. The upper classes don’t have jobs, they have inherited wealth and property which they manage. What kind of well paid roles is it you think the middle class children of today should be aiming for?

UK median income on a PPP basis is about $50k, lower than Mississippi at $59k.

Missisippi does worse on other important measures of life. But on wealth/income we are just a lot lot poorer than the US and it’s not because of billionaires skewing the stats.

Ok, so do it on a PPP basis. We still come out much lower GDP than Mississippi. Whether you look at median or mean.

Anyway. Depressing to see so many posters with one-word explanations. Brexit. Labour. Tories. Thatcher.

Truly I think there are a few big things we could do to make things a lot better. Energy policy and costs, housing and planning reform, infrastructure, tax reform. But these are cross party things that the public often doesn’t like in practice.