The UK economy is circling the drain:
Investing.com – Britain’s public borrowing rose to £18.3 billion in August, nearly a fifth higher than a year earlier and the highest for the month outside the pandemic, underscoring pressure on the government’s finances ahead of next month’s Budget.
Our welfare spending matches income tax receipts:
Due to the composition of Parliament we can’t cut benefits
Tax increases don’t work (The Laffer Curve effect)
We can’t keep borrowing
Anyone any ideas?
I would say increase the labor participation rate, but when I looked it up, the UK has a MUCH higher labor participation rate than the USA has. So that’s not the answer. For some reason labor is worth much less in the UK than it is in the USA. I wonder why? Maybe not enough high-value-added jobs and too many menial almost zero value-added jobs? I’ve heard that the UK is basically one rich city surrounded by everyone else near poverty. Is that true?
Invest your money outside of the UK? Something like Equinor with a 4% yield and is outside the Euro-zone.
DB2
Pretty much the case. Unfortunate the left wing of the Labour Party is so strong that it wants to ‘attack’ this successful area of our economy.
Jamie Dimon was in London recently speaking to Burnham and advising against this. However, I don’t think that Burnham has much control over the Labour Party.
There are pockets of prosperity but most of the country isn’t doing too well:
Over the past year, pundits and columnists have been forced to keep asking why Europe’s economy is stagnating and falling behind the US economy. Many of those asking the question are Europeans. One European headline reads “Why Europe is falling behind the USA,” and Le Monde tells us that compared to the United States, “The gap with European living standards has never been wider.”
https://mises.org/mises-wire/britain-france-and-spain-poorer-mississippi
I’ve a background in economics and finance and the UK increasingly reminds me of the old USSR.
Get off the Climate Catastrophe bandwagon and fund a working wealth fund.
Ethical as it might sound, shifting the onus of survival to the state is guaranteed bankruptcy if the state can’t manage a productive wealth fund a la Norway. Venezuela wasted its oil revenue and Chavez was the result.
The Captain
Eat the rich.
Mostly tongue in cheek but not entirely. The Monarchy cost you hundreds of millions every year and they are worth something like $30 billion.
Obviously won’t entirely fix the problem but it would certainly cut your deficit.
Okay. That’ll fund about 2 months of borrowing. Then what?
(“eat the rich” never works)
Then they eat the middle class, they always do.
We’ve had 40 years of the rich bleeding the middle class, so…
UK (and quite a few other European countries) need more growth to cover the bills.
Brexit has cost the UK quite a bit of that growth - homemade problem. Reversing Brexit (I know, gasps across the room!!) might be a start.
Closing tax loopholes may help, too.
You read the part about mostly tongue in cheek, right?
Also the part about how it won’t fix the problem?
Is the growth in EU countries so much higher than in the UK? No, it appears to be only about 1% higher over the last 6-7 years total. A pittance.
Higher growth is only to be found in Eastern Europe such as Poland. As for the larger economies (Germany, France and Italy) there is no improvement to be had by switching, and Germany has been seeing economic contraction.
DB2
As I mentioned, quite a few European countries have their own problems, Germany being one example, for a variety of reasons. Everyone would do a bit better had the UK stayed though..
Still, the effect of the UK‘s choice on its own economy is considered sizable.
I’m not an economist. That said, I always thought BREXIT was a terrible idea. From what I could tell (correct me if I’m wrong), it stemmed from a nativist movement in the UK. But if a nativist movement has enough pull to get a BREXIT, they have enough pull to do a lot of other bad things. Nativists are wrong about almost everything, so I would expect that their other policies are dragging Britain down. Labour is struggling, even if they are in control, because the nativists haven’t gone away. They are opposing. Further, it’s a lot harder to fix something than to break it. Labour is probably trying to fix it. (I’m not up on the minutae of British policies.)
Also, I agree that getting rid of the monarchy would be HUGE. Make them work for a living (no stipends), and reclaim most of their assets that really belong to the British people (all the castles, the jewels**, etc). For example, I read that through a “crown estate” that Charles owns something like half of the British coastline (and the resources therein). He shouldn’t be allowed to keep that.
**Keeping in mind that many of the jewels, and much of the British museum, doesn’t actually belong to the British people. They were stolen from other lands, and probably should be repatriated.
The correct question is what do they get in exchange for those hundreds of millions? If they answer is “nothing” then it is straight foolish to support the lifestyle of billionaires who did literally nothing to earn the money.
Wild thought, but maybe things like this could just be a start. Maybe if we collectively stopped spending money on stupid stuff
And this is how crazy the narrative has gotten: If we collectively decide we no longer wish to subsidize the lifestyles of the fabulously wealthy, the rich people are the victims! We’re eating the rich if we don’t give them our money! Oh! What ever will the billionaires do if they can live off the generosity of taxpayers?? They might have to give up the G700. Never! We must give them more money! How foolish are we to think we deserve to keep our own money, when the rich people would enjoy it so much more!
As an aside, as a group the British royal family are horrible, horrible people. Just awful. But they deserve working people’s money more than the people who earned it? I don’t get the mindset.
Nativist = voter
Being in the EU gave 500 million people the right to come to the UK and did they come! Many came from the rather poorer areas of Eastern Europe. I don’t think that the USA would be very keen on this.
Problem is that they are still coming, mainly from the third world with no skills, many can’t even speak English:
At the other end of the scale young skilled people are leaving in ever increasing numbers:
The UK has seen a sharp rise in young people leaving the country, with new research suggesting that financial strain, housing insecurity and changing ideas about career success are driving a record youth exodus.
The long term economic effects of this are difficult to measure but I wouldn’t say that it is going to do the UK’s economy much good, quite the opposite in fact.
I’d be gone if I was quite a bit younger!
If you were younger, where would you choose to go?
Not sure where I would go. I quite like Malaysia/Singapore but would also consider New Zealand/Australia
My qualifications are recognised in all these countries. I know a few people who have gone and they have no regrets. They are a bit concerned about ‘the old county’ when they see where we are heading. I live in a nice quiet part of England where they country’s problems haven’t reached yet.
Forgive me for not having been focused on this, but a quick dive seems to indicate a fair amount of hype and not a lot of reality here. I’m sure there are instances where the immigration has been bad, but I can’t help but wonder if that isn’t being exploited for propaganda the same way as our “welfare queens” meme was here?
For instance, in terms of population: Britain has far fewer immigrants than many other countries; indeed it seems to be about average:
As for the effect of Brexit, well we can sure see it here, although it doesn’t appear to have been “to of control” particularly prior:
I have not researched this site for their leanings, it was just the first that came up in a search. You can investigate for yourself, if you like:
I am not sure what this means:
Most immigrants on temporary visas do not get standard welfare benefits in Britain, but those with permanent settled status or recognized refugee status can access them.
This one is fairly clear:
Only people who are British or Irish citizens, or citizens of a Commonwealth country who have the right to remain in the UK, currently have the right to vote in General Elections.
Again, not my area of expertise (or care, much) but it mostly sounds like nativist clap trap, the kind of thing Rupert Murdoch uses to sell his trash newspapers to a low information public.
