2022 mini-budget discussion

[chrcoluk]

Yes but who's going to lend the UK money to build them?

No need to borrow money for it, go ahead with the plans to raise corporation tax, amd scrap HS2. The houses eventually pay for themselves as currently we spend 10s of billions pe ryear paying private landlords to cover poor people's rent.

Did you ask this question when we borrowed to fund tax cuts?

 

[chrcoluk]

Now you're just being silly. You can't seriously suggest we should be paying people circa £31K a year to wait on tables, deliver someone's post, empty some bins, stack shelves, sell you a train ticket etc etc. I thought you lot said you didn't want inflation lol.

Are you really looking down on people who do that type of work? Their wages get topped up as they deemed too low. So society has already accepted they dont get paid enough.

 

[Devilman]

No need to borrow money for it, go ahead with the plans to raise corporation tax, amd scrap HS2. The houses eventually pay for themselves as currently we spend 10s of billions pe ryear paying private landlords to cover poor people's rent.

Did you ask this question when we borrowed to fund tax cuts?

Which is precisely why mass-building of social / affordable housing will NEVER happen under the Tories... To quote their messiah Margaret ... "Social Housing breeds Labour Voters"
Plus maintaining the current "status quo" continues to funnel everyones taxes into the hands of private landlords via the various benefits that are having to be used to supplement the income of those on or close to minimum wage.

They have absolutely ZERO interest in helping those who actually need it, instead choosing to funnel public money into the hands of a few, very wealthy donors.
And I have to laugh about people like @thenewoc wailing about how "unskilled workers" should not be paid an appropriate living wage for their efforts, while completely ignoring the fact that they are currently given exactly that, only out of everyone's taxes, via Universal Credit / Housing Benefits / Council Tax Benefits etc.. etc.. etc..

So, which would you prefer @thenewoc ?

Make the employers pay a living wage and as a consequence of that be able to reduce the need for benefits to only those who are actually unable to work due to physical / mental disability etc...

Or continue to subsidize those on minimum wage via your taxes?

 

[Trusty]

You should in a modern wealthy society like the UK expect to earn a living wage for a full time job IMO. At the moment people do because peoples wages are topped up by the Govt (taxpayers) so they are on a living wage.

And I dont mean change it overnight, but over the course of several years and ahead of inflation.

But we have such a massive gap or earning inequality in this country which has been getting bigger and now with the current govt even bigger still that it would be a struggle.

We should be more like France. The average wage of the bottom 50% earners is 25% higher than here and the average income of the top 1% is 20% lower so their gap is only 20 times. We are at 33 times and rising.

We could tax our higher earners more and give more top up benefits to the low paid or move towards a system where the employer pays a decent wage and we dont have to top it up to a living wage. Then the govt would have more money to spend on the NHS and other services or could even drop tax rates.

errr...perhaps you should look at the private and gov debt to gdp levels. Do you know what they are in comparison?

 

[thenewoc]

Well unfortunately money doesn't suddenly magic up staff. As others have pointed out its been massively underfunded for years and the pittance pay rises over the past 10 years for the majority of roles means there's hardly people queuing up

Having worked for several NHS trusts I can tell you it's not just a case of throwing more money at the problem. The problem as with public services in general is the people running them have no idea how to run something to a realistic budget and in a commercially viable way. I say that because when they've spent all the money they throw their hands in the air shouting that they didn't get enough money to run the service and expect to be bailed out with even more tax payers money. Never and I mean never do they look inwardly at cutting out the fat of unnecessary posts that should have largely been replaced by computers years ago. We currently pay each NHS trust millions for their executive and management teams who are just not good at managing money. It needs some KPI's developing to steer it in the direction of patient care first and foremost and not spending unnecessary amounts on IT systems etc. Sure they need IT systems but they don't need the most all singing all dancing option that each trust then spends loads of extra money bespoking for their own trust rather than one UK wide bespoked version of software being used by all.

The same would happen with Starmer's idea for a UK owned energy company. The people placed in charge of it wouldn't likely be industry leading individuals and the workforce would regard themselves in safe jobs and become inefficient and worse, realise they could hold the country to ransom through their union for greater pay.

We had the same problem with the railways, it was a national joke that they were getting there, where, no one knows because they never succeeded against the back drop of lazy, unproductive unionised workforce.

Education is no better either, no company would ever set up training centres which schools are a form of and then tell teachers to manage their own lesson plans, duplicating inefficiency across the whole system.

What we should also be doing is holding council's feet to the fire and getting better value local services so that council taxes don't have to be so high. Somewhere I suspect a lot of those council taxes are being wasted for bills to be so high. In part this comes back to over paying people to do unskilled jobs such as refuse collectors.

 

[thenewoc]

You should in a modern wealthy society like the UK expect to earn a living wage for a full time job IMO. At the moment people do because peoples wages are topped up by the Govt (taxpayers) so they are on a living wage.

And I dont mean change it overnight, but over the course of several years and ahead of inflation.

But we have such a massive gap or earning inequality in this country which has been getting bigger and now with the current govt even bigger still that it would be a struggle.

We should be more like France. The average wage of the bottom 50% earners is 25% higher than here and the average income of the top 1% is 20% lower so their gap is only 20 times. We are at 33 times and rising.

We could tax our higher earners more and give more top up benefits to the low paid or move towards a system where the employer pays a decent wage and we dont have to top it up to a living wage. Then the govt would have more money to spend on the NHS and other services or could even drop tax rates.

It would kill our ability to export our goods around the globe. We already have a problem with low productivity and overpaid unskilled workers so I don't agree that your suggestion is sensible or attainable.

 

[mid_gen]

Pretty hilarious watching Tory supporters going full pants on head insane trying to defend this shambles.

 

[thenewoc]

Are you really looking down on people who do that type of work? Their wages get topped up as they deemed too low. So society has already accepted they dont get paid enough.

I'm not looking down on them, but it's an unskilled job that IMO doesn't deserve paying more although I think in some areas of the country we should have different rates of NMW so that more expensive areas are bolstered up.

Everyone also has the same access to state funded schooling which some people apply themselves more than others to get a decent education behind themselves. Individuals need to take responsibility for their own education and make sacrifices to prioritise going to night classes and college to train for better paid jobs rather than demand more money for doing the same unskilled work.

 

[chroniclard]

It would kill our ability to export our goods around the globe. We already have a problem with low productivity and overpaid unskilled workers so I don't agree that your suggestion is sensible or attainable.

Hang on, didnt we want Brexit so we could boot out johnny foreigner and improve the wages of the low skilled Brits......

 

[StriderX]

It would kill our ability to export our goods around the globe. We already have a problem with low productivity and overpaid unskilled workers so I don't agree that your suggestion is sensible or attainable.

This government is killing our ability to function as a country but ok.

 

[Uther]

I'm not looking down on them, but it's an unskilled job that IMO doesn't deserve paying more although I think in some areas of the country we should have different rates of NMW so that more expensive areas are bolstered up.

Everyone also has the same access to state funded schooling which some people apply themselves more than others to get a decent education behind themselves. Individuals need to take responsibility for their own education and make sacrifices to prioritise going to night classes and college to train for better paid jobs rather than demand more money for doing the same unskilled work.

If your pension had dissapeared today in the carnage you'd have been ok with that yeah? A price worth paying for Brittania Unchained?

 

[Devilman]

I'm not looking down on them, but it's an unskilled job that IMO doesn't deserve paying more although I think in some areas of the country we should have different rates of NMW so that more expensive areas are bolstered up.

That "unskilled job" that you seem to value so little are what keeps your life so cushy and sweet.

How you gonna feel when there is nobody to empty your bins, deliver your groceries or do any number of other "unskilled" jobs which keep our society functioning?

In fact, here's a better idea... Instead of talking about it on the interwebs, how about next time your binman turns up, you go outside and tell him that he's doing an unskilled job and does not deserve a living wage.

Be brave for once and actually say it to the face of one of these "unskilled workers" you seem to look down on so much and see what their reaction is.

Better yet, film it for us.

 

[Murphy]

You've not heard of remote workers then. Some skills aren't available here in sufficient numbers at times so those technical skills could be bought in from someone working overseas and not paying UK taxes.

If that's the case then why don't they move to some tax haven and pay no taxes whatsoever.

Seriously you're hilarious, even after all that's been happening in the last week you still desperately hang on to an old tired dogma of trickle down economics, next you'll be suggesting we can deal with the food bank issue by sending all the food to obese people.

 

[neocon]

No need to borrow money for it, go ahead with the plans to raise corporation tax, amd scrap HS2. The houses eventually pay for themselves as currently we spend 10s of billions pe ryear paying private landlords to cover poor people's rent.

Did you ask this question when we borrowed to fund tax cuts?

They won't pay for themselves if they get filled with people on benefits, you'll just need more and more.

 

[Uther]

They won't pay for themselves if they get filled with people on benefits, you'll just need more and more.

Who'll be on benefits in the new Tory paradise? I think 'work or starve' will be the new motto. Unless you mean all the people who work and have to get benefits too as their wage is too low to survive otherwise.

 

[thenewoc]

Which is precisely why mass-building of social / affordable housing will NEVER happen under the Tories... To quote their messiah Margaret ... "Social Housing breeds Labour Voters"
Plus maintaining the current "status quo" continues to funnel everyones taxes into the hands of private landlords via the various benefits that are having to be used to supplement the income of those on or close to minimum wage.

They have absolutely ZERO interest in helping those who actually need it, instead choosing to funnel public money into the hands of a few, very wealthy donors.
And I have to laugh about people like @thenewoc wailing about how "unskilled workers" should not be paid an appropriate living wage for their efforts, while completely ignoring the fact that they are currently given exactly that, only out of everyone's taxes, via Universal Credit / Housing Benefits / Council Tax Benefits etc.. etc.. etc..

So, which would you prefer @thenewoc ?

Make the employers pay a living wage and as a consequence of that be able to reduce the need for benefits to only those who are actually unable to work due to physical / mental disability etc...

Or continue to subsidize those on minimum wage via your taxes?

We shouldn't have let so many people in over the years and then we wouldn't have a chronic shortage of freebie housing. Although of course it's not free, it costs the tax payers driving up demand for higher pay.

If someone isn't prepared to for example work in a ticket office selling train tickets for NMW then they should have been told to get on their bike at whatever point we decided to instead subsidise such workers with top ups from the tax purse / countries borrowing.

We should also have done away with unemployment benefit other than a maximum of about 6 months. Then people would have done those unskilled jobs on NMW because they wouldn't have skills or choice to do anything else.

 

[Devilman]

They won't pay for themselves if they get filled with people on benefits, you'll just need more and more.

Yeh, far better to keep funneling people's taxes into the hands of private landlords via Housing Benefit, rather than having a state-owned asset (social housing) which directly reduces the tax expenditure going into private hands, right?

 

[Devilman]

We shouldn't have let so many people in over the years and then we wouldn't have a chronic shortage of freebie housing. Although of course it's not free, it costs the tax payers driving up demand for higher pay.

If someone isn't prepared to for example work in a ticket office selling train tickets for NMW then they should have been told to get on their bike at whatever point we decided to instead subsidise such workers with top ups from the tax purse / countries borrowing.

Aaah right, a classic "it's those damn immigrants" excuse again.
Of course you completely gloss over the fact a vast swathe of the social housing was sold-off under "Right to Buy" and NEVER REPLACED, which has directly impacted the availability of social housing (Note the word SOCIAL, not "Freebie" as you like to call it.)

But of course, it's far easier to blame those "darkies on the dinghy's coming across the channel"

Put down that Tory pamphlet you're reading from and try forming your own opinions for once, instead of just parroting what you've been told to think.

 

[Dirk Diggler]

That's twice today I've seen Kier Starmer grilled about his budget proposals. The media in this country are bonkers.

 

[thenewoc]

If your pension had dissapeared today in the carnage you'd have been ok with that yeah? A price worth paying for Brittania Unchained?

But that is what will happen if people keep driving up salaries.