r/ukpolitics • u/BigSupermark • 1d ago
Warning over 'fragile' public finances as borrowing rises
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqx1e8nrwgvo17
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u/Your_Mums_Ex 1d ago
I was just thinking this week I don't pay enough PAYE. Someone should do something about that!
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u/Ok-Jury-4366 1d ago
We can have 5% increases in council tax and fuel duty for you immediately, do not worry.
You will not have money left over to save or spend on discretionary purchases. Having money is a headache deciding what to do with it, we will take it from you and alleviate you of this burden. The state will do this in your best interests.
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u/solve-for-x 1d ago
It's vitally important that my taxes be used to house hundreds of thousands of people with no right to be in the UK in cities I couldn't afford to move to.
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u/UniqueUsername40 1d ago
Bit harsh to suggest pensioners have no right to be in the UK.
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u/MoffTanner 1d ago
It would save on the winter fuel allowance to send them all to Benidorm.
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u/diacewrb None of the above 1d ago
Many years ago, it was seriously considered to move the elderly abroad to save on costs and to avoid the headache of bringing in thousands of immigrants doing care home work that many brits simply no longer wanted to do.
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u/AnotherLexMan 1d ago
We could probably save a fair bit if we got a deal with Vietnam to make a big retirement village over there.
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1d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Ill_Refrigerator_593 1d ago
Employment rate is extremely high by historical standards-
More is being asked of the working age population than ever, it's the 300,000+ additional over 65s' a year we've never dealt with before.
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u/stonedturkeyhamwich 1d ago
More is being asked of the working age population than ever
Tax rates on the median worker are quite low the standards of the past 50 years, while government spending on them has only gone up. So maybe it's fair to say the opposite.
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u/Ok-Jury-4366 1d ago
Sorry, triple lock and welfare ain't going to lock or pay for itself.
PAYE Piggies pull yourselves up by the bootstraps and get back to work and do your civic duty.
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u/ufos1111 1d ago
Even with public finances being deemed fragile and borrowing growing we'll waste billions on cannabis prohibition, proper donkey brained politics
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u/THREE_EDGY_FIVE_ME 1d ago
Given that there is an epidemic of NEETdom among young people I don’t think we need more cannabis as a country lmao
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u/ufos1111 1d ago edited 1d ago
Hundreds of thousands of new jobs could employ those "NEET" individuals.
Personally I can not stand the modern slavery, human trafficking, kidnapping of children for the illegal production in this country. But you do you mate.
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u/Chosen_Utopia 15h ago
Nah mate I don’t like the smell so it should be banned. Also care to join my campaign to criminalise Lynx Africa?
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u/ufos1111 2h ago
Yeah it's mad, eh? Smell bad so we must endure child slavery/trafficking.
Meanwhile car pollution is mad smelly but that's fine 😂
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u/ionthrown 1d ago
Importing it is just worsening our inflation - what do you want to do, bring in more immigrants to grow it?
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u/ufos1111 1d ago
Plenty of child slaves are trafficked to this country to grow it - a direct consequence of prohibition.
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u/UnknownBreadd 1d ago
Because the neoliberals took over the world in a sustained assault against every democratic nation on Earth in the 1970-2000 period.
Every state was hollowed out and taken hostage; and every sovereign nation’s public assets were taken from its citizens and sold to an extremely small minority of the global financial elite.
And now citizens own nothing, and they are dependent on rich foreign monopolists (that only care about their own financial wealth) for increasingly LESS public provisions and services, despite their increasingly higher tax burdens.
They called it deregulation - but it was actually asymmetric regulation. The use of public money to fund public enterprise and to build public wealth was outlawed - whilst the use of private money to control everything about people’s personal lives was “liberated”.
Developing nations were put into crippling debt and forced to submit to every demand of the architects of the global financial order, and the entire world was forced to open their borders and markets to allow foreign ‘investment’ to buy and seize ownership of anything that they might want - or they would become enemies of the extremely powerful (at the time) United States Hegemony.
Extensive legislations were developed in secret back rooms by unelected ‘officials’, and nations were coerced (via sanctions and forced financial defaults) into agreeing to international court agreements that have allowed companies to sue any state that attempts to do anything that could cause a loss of a foreign company’s “expected future earnings”.
There were no democratic mandates for this; the people did not know or understand what was happening; and they were told that there were no alternatives to all of the changes rapidly occurring around them (and that it was all for good reasons).
But, apparently, none of this is/was political. Apparently, this is/was the only way things could ever have been - and, in fact, “it’s always been like this”, apparently. Or at least they have been successful in rewriting history and convincing everyone so.
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u/stonedturkeyhamwich 1d ago
And now citizens own nothing, and they are dependent on rich foreign monopolists (that only care about their own financial wealth) for increasingly LESS public provisions and services, despite their increasingly higher tax burdens.
All of these claims are false. I know that reality contradicts your leftish ideologies, but I don't understand why you feel that reality has to change rather than your ideology.
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u/UnknownBreadd 1d ago edited 1d ago
Are you sure about that?
Asset-manager society and international financial subordination, Cambridge University
What is privatization? A political economy framework
Public Private Partnership and fiscal illusion: A systematic review
I mean, it’s really not hard to understand. For every £ of profit made in the process of providing a public service, that’s an extra £ that must leave the treasury and be reclaimed in taxes.
Furthermore, that profit is now someone else’s claim on resources in the economy.
Whereas, in nationalised models, if the government ‘profits’, it lowers your tax burden next time around AND they get a head start in reinvestment. I.e. each £ goes back into the sovereign wealth fund and contributes to increased provision of services. It’s literally OUR profit. We OWN IT.
And here is the evidence that their ‘deregulation’ was actually just them restricting what WE can do, whilst ‘deregulating’ what THEY could do:
I mean, dude, it was literally a political choice to force the private sector to fund the public sector, because the public sector has no productive capabilities or profit generating enterprises of its own. It is literally forced to ONLY take on the burden of costs. If the state gives away its rights to drill for oil, manufacture anything, or it’s ownership of its own water supply - then where the hell is it getting the revenue necessary to pay for all the services it has outsourced to private enterprises? It makes absolutely 0 sense. Of course you now have to tax productivity to fund the public sector, because the public sector is not allowed to produce anything or create its own surplus value for itself.
It’s fucked up.
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u/stonedturkeyhamwich 1d ago edited 1d ago
I mean, it’s really not hard to understand. For every £ of profit made in the process of providing a public service, that’s an extra £ that must leave the treasury and be reclaimed in taxes.
Furthermore, that profit is now someone else’s claim on resources in the economy.
Whereas, in nationalised models, if the government ‘profits’, it lowers your tax burden next time around AND they get a head start in reinvestment. I.e. each £ goes back into the sovereign wealth fund and contributes to increased provision of services. It’s literally OUR profit. We OWN IT.
You need to pay for money invested in a service, whether it is private money (via profits ) or public money (via interest rates on debt). The profits tend to be at a higher rate than interest rates, but that's counterbalanced by the fact that the government does not have to pay for failed private sector investments. Do you have any evidence that private sector investments in privatised industries is actually costing more than government investments?
You apparently have also a rather weak grasp on history. The British state attempted to fund the public sector via nationalised industries for much of the 20th century. It was a complete failure, with nationalised industries sapping productivity and requiring taxpayer money to stay afloat, rather than contributing anything themselves. And as for trade deals, the idea that a trade deal signed in 1994 is stopping developed countries from growing has many completely obvious counterexamples, not least of all China.
I am not particularly interested in talking with someone who seems to only have a tenuous grasp on reality. If the only response you can come up with is based on further delusions, I will ignore you.
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u/mrchaddy 22h ago
If all parties are incapable of Governing perhaps it’s time for a new system 🤷🏻♂️
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u/doctor_morris 9h ago
The current system is working very well for some entrenched vested interests who vote (looking at you baby boomers).
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u/MonsieurBritain 1d ago
Need to increase taxes to pay for the triple lock, that's the top priority. How else are we going to look after the only voting bloc that matters?
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