The Anything Thread that is Never off subject.

[Tony1951]

The problem about taxing corporations more is that in the end, it isn't the corporations who pay. Their customers - you and I are the ones who pay. They simply put up the prices.

At the last budget, Rachel Reeves taxed employers by increasing the NI they had to pay on every employee. But who really paid that tax?

They got £25 billion for the exchequer, but YOU and I are paying for it.

I listened to a senior executive of a large supermarket firm being questioned the other day about food price inflation and why it was happening when the price of food commodities is falling. He pointed out that their profit margins were incredibly low - around 3%. The reason food is galloping upwards in price is the budget.

Reeves through the tax on jobs and Rayner on the increase in wages she lobbied for.
They have also made unemployment rise.

The welfare state is a giant Ponzi Scheme. Benjhamin is dead right there. The promise of ever widening support guarantees that governments can't meet the bill. This is a strong reason why no government really has tried to lower migration. They NEED more mugs to come and pay taxes and hang the other consequences, such as social disruption, massive pressure on housing, and ridiculous levels of house price and rent inflation, pressure on public services and so on. Like all Ponzi Schemes, it can never work, unless you recruit more 'investors'. They can't get the money through taxation without destroying the economy. When I was born the UK population was 50 million. Now it is 70 million.

As Benjamin Franklin said a couple of hundred years ago - once the people can vote themselves money the republic is stuffed.

 

[Tony1951]

Oh dear....

Electoral Calculus

This is what happens when established parties take the electorate for granted and ignore and scorn their demands.

 

[Woosh]

massive pressure on housing,

They need to push house price or real estate asset value up. That will help bank to lend more money to the same people so they can spend more. When I was a little boy, the word 'consumer' was practically unheard of. Now it's the most powerful economic engine in all democracies.

 

[jonathan.agnew]

This is beyond politics because politicians (as are we all) are educated by and in the current system which is demonstrably failing. The answers do not lie within it because it is the architect of the very failure it is trying to fix.
Deficit spending only became openly possible with the dropping of the gold standard. It kept the banks and governments honest - sort of. It became necessary to drop the gold standard because governments were cheating and issuing more currency * than they had gold to back said currency.
(*Mostly to fund wars)
What we now call money is actually just currency. Each note says, 'I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of Ten pounds' etc. Tenpounds of what? I have a £10 note in my hand don't I? Well yes - just that, a note. It is not money. it is a promisary note, nothing more.
Remember it is called Pound Sterling because, originally, a pound note (remember them?) was representative of one pound weight of sterling silver. At todays quoted value, this would mean that £1 would have a buying power of £461, approximately. So it is that inflation robs all of us of the spending power of our hard earned savings.
Never mind left wing, right wing or whichever loudmouth self publicist of the day, protect yourself and your family. Then you may be in a position to help friends and loved ones.
This can only be done by holding tangible assests outside of the banking system.

This is not being said by some high net worth individual, but by some one who has worked since before leaving school, never been on benefits of any kind and is working still (as much as I can) in my 70's. But after much study I am sick of having the value of my earnings and life long savings robbed by officaldom and institutions in ways, that if I were to do it, I would be banged up for.
This had led me to a 15 year study of the ways of economics, banks and treasury. My conclusion is that it is all the biggest most stupendous ponzi scheme ever conceived. I have lost count of the amount of times I have found myself saying things like, 'No, they wouldn't' or 'That can't be right, I must be wrong', only to reapproach multiple times and to keep finding the same things.

agree with most of that, but not that system will ever change. It's based on exploitation, opportunism for reason. We're first cousins of homo erectus, carnivorous apes that extincted vulnerable species where it went, it's in our genes (like war and fascism). It's an odd post modern world, my neighbour (in London) made several million with crypto over the past eight months, by clicking a mouse a few times. More than i made in years. My perhaps naive solution is in epictetus' saying about true freedom being freedom from desire. One only need enough. It's easy to become obsessed with ever having more in the unhinged increasingly narcissistic reality were in, when one doesn't need it.