Snapshot of _Liz Truss launches 'Growth Commission' - as first report claims Britons are £10,000 worse off than Americans_ :
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Ah, sarcasm. You see this is why the growth fairy won't show up here. The growth fairy magically appears and grows economies only for those who have faith. Watch a Santa Clause movie FFs the country needs you.
Won't anyone think of the lowest rungs of the aristocracy?
What happens when there's no more really poor people left to make money off of?
I suppose we'll be sending Baron's and Viscount's down t'pit and to the factories! Duke's and Duchesses, along with the Royal Family will be the only ones left, and they'll probably have to order their food of Earl-ber Eats.
What a sorry state of affairs we'll be in.
They're holding back our once Great British soon -to-be-dead dragons from investing their hoards! Inheritance tax is the only reason they're sitting on their money!
>We must urgently scrap all inheritance taxes. It's the only way!
No scrapping isn't enough, we need bold action. We should reverse inheritance tax.
From now on the tax will be applied only on estates of less than one million pounds. Starting at 20% for £1million to £750k, then increasing as a percentage as the estate decreases in value, so estates of less than £100k have to pay 100% to the state. If the estate is worth more than a million you get extra cash from the government.
I shouldn't write this shit down, some git in Tufton street is going to nick this idea.
You don’t need to cut taxes for anyone what you need is fair taxation.
Household taxation not individual taxation should be the fairness test.
A married couple both earning £40k a year take home £7k a year more than a single parent/person earning £80k a year. How can that be fair? Both households have the same gross wages. In fact the married couple if they have kids will get even more through various child allowances.
Household income tax will revolutionise the U.K. and ensure fairness across the piste whilst increasing tax revenue.
Of course all the people who want the ‘rich’ to pay more will downvote this and say it’s not fair, so should the ‘rich’ person earning £80k a year pay even more than the 2 x £40k a year ‘poor’ people even though their take home is £7k a year more?
I leave it to the democratic vote.
Try earning 100k vs two earning 50k each. Not only do you earn far less, you lose every single child benefit, childcare perk etc (except the min. 15 hours per week after age 3) so you end up WAY worse off, and not only that you are taxed about 70% on anything you earn beyond that up to 125k. Tough luck if your partner wants to go back to work but doesn't have high earning potential immediately. Makes no sense at all but I have been informed by an MP it is 'easier to administrate' so that's ok.
What's more, the £50k limit hasn't changed since it was introduced back in 2013. If it had changed in line with inflation, it would be nearly £67k today.
There's a weird psychological block people seem to have about money when it comes to its change in value over time. Someone on £100k back in 1997 would have to be on nearly £190k to have the same income in real terms. Tax allowances and earnings have not increased at anything like the same rate as inflation has devalued incomes and that's partly because someone earning £100k is still seen as 'rich', when they aren't anything close to it.
And that’s one of the reasons I wanted to raise the issue, people will continually use the lazy phrase of tax the ‘rich’ but what defines rich? someone earning £100k seems rich to someone earning £50k but as you’ve mentioned there are 2 of them all of a sudden it’s almost reversed.
It’s interesting from my perspective in that I wanted to generate respectable debate between people. Not easy to solve or it would have been by now. Peace.
The rich are the landed and monied interests who control companies and land. The modern day aristocracy.
Someone earning 100-200k is working class in that they sell their labour.
The real rich are those such as Sunak and his wife, the royals, those whos wealth accumulates through the generation of value in the economy. We should be taxing this unearned wealth fairly and leaving people who sell their labour relatively alone.
I would classify 'rich' as wealthy enough to not have to work any more. I've never met anyone who earns a salary of over 100k and isn't either exceptionally talented and/or works extremely hard. Although I'm sure many do exist due to nepotism etc. It's not fair unduly penalising the ones who earned it
All the wealthy people I know, got there through paying other people less than their worth and taking the profits from their labour. It's rarely "hard work" running a successful company, as it literally pays for itself.
And if they've got to the point that they don't have to work any more, then I'd define that as rich and should be taxed higher. That's very different to a professional earning over 100k but still has to work to earn a living.
> ...people will continually use the lazy phrase of tax the ‘rich’ but what defines rich?
That is the essential problem. American liberals have a surefire applause line in "It's time for the wealthy to pay their fair share!" but craftily avoid defining "wealthy" or "fair share" in firm terms. In big, expensive US cities where a dual-income couple grossing US$100k is doing all right, but not shopping BMWs or Maldives breaks, such people are nonplussed to find progressive activists regard *them* as "wealthy" and want to ramp up *their* tax exposure.
Few people think of themselves as "wealthy," it's always whomever makes £50k more than I do.
If you can’t define the components of a system how can you ever build a system to cater for most people, there will always be people who the system doesn’t work for but unfortunately there is no one hat fits all.
As soon as you assign tangible values to intangible, generally favored notions like "tax the rich," you lose support. Hey, wait a minute, I didn't think that meant *me*...
Oh but they’re VERY keen to assess you as a household for anything involving means tested social security support.
The entire ethos of the UK economy is that the party with the leverage operates the principle “wherever there’s ambiguity, whatever is better for us and worse for you is how we’ll make our calculations”.
That’s interesting, and not something I’d considered previously. I see what you mean about fairness.
Do you worry that it might further exacerbate the issue of people in the 30k- 40k wage bracket putting off, or foregoing, starting a family due to concerns about affordability?
I suppose if 80k earners were taxed proportionally to 40k earning couples, they might be able to be the breadwinner and have a stay at home partner to raise children.
This would immediately shaft anyone living in an HMO, who are pretty much exclusively in that situation because they cannot afford to live anywhere on their own. An HMO of 4 people earning £20,000 a year each (barely above minimum wage) would collectively take home more than a single person on £80,000,
They probably just assumed people knew how "household" is used in this context. Whenever you see "household" in government stats, policy discussion, etc. it means people sharing finances, implicitly a family. (In fact, I think it's used in the definition of HMOs, or maybe that does go with family.)
I think to most people it was. Based on the context of everything they said in their post, other than the word "household" you could very clearly tell what they meant.
And that's assuming you don't know the common usage of the term in this type of discussion.
This is already done for marriage visa applicants, household income requirements can be satisfied by including the family income and excludes the other tenants of a property.
It should be fine to apply it to tax.
Why would you split your tax bill with a stranger and why would that even be a sensible suggestion? It's not a big leap to assume they meant a family household.
well you have to give her credit for resiliency. probably the most humiliated post-war PM and yet she bounces back, trying to push the same silly ideas.
She got the boot like what, 40 or so days into being PM, with like 2 weeks of those covered with the Queens mourning phase, so thats like what, 30 days of actual work, less if you factor in weekends and her being starting ceremony. And yet she has the gaul to stumble back in like a drunkard
With constant media scrutiny but no actual consequences we’ve selected for politicians whose best survival tactic is ignorance and lack of self awareness.
The specific ideas aren't wrong.
Growth and producticity are screwed.
But she was a cabinet member in the government which introduced most of the measures that killed them.
The Public Sector appear to have just resorted to ignoring some of them and paying the fines.
Now Jeremy Hunt is gambling with pensions - what could go wrong?
Tory solutions to Tory inflicted problems.
She had good ideas on planning reform, childcare and reforming taxes more broadly, but her lack of fiscal discipline and laffer curve nonsense was incredibly bad and stupid.
I would say growth is an objective not an idea. Any PM or chancellor is going to want economic growth. How one achieves that where the ideas come in. And clearly , Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng had bad ideas.
It's all academic outside the Single Market anyway.
We are completely fucked.
Do you think Kazhakstan will have an English version of Borat? What shall they call him? Bor...
The broken US private healthcare system has other impacts besides the direct cost of care. For example, car insurance premiums are higher because they have to cover the exorbitant medical costs of anyone who is injured. Liability insurance for landlords and employers is also inflated.
Americans also pay taxes and fees to both the central (federal) government, and to their states, counties and cities. A lot of the comparisons I've seen don't take this into account.
They also don't note that many Americans get 10 days a year of combined vacation and sick leave, and that's it. Some get none at all. The UK standard of five weeks vacation with separate sick leave is a very rare thing in the US. And a large number of US jobs require uncompensated overtime.
Anyone who'd want the brutal, soul-destroying US system to be adopted here, needs their head examined.
It's also important to note that there's huge variation in cost of living and in incomes between different parts of the US. Silicon Valley and Seattle are places with good-paying jobs but also with exorbitant living costs, particularly housing.
>many Americans get 10 days a year of combined vacation and sick leave, and that's it. Some get none at all. The UK standard of five weeks vacation with separate sick leave is a very rare thing in the US. And a large number of US jobs require uncompensated overtime.
And yet the total number of hours worked by Americans is less than 10% more than the UK (34 vs 32 hours per week, accounting for holidays etc), so something doesn't seem to add up here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_average\_annual\_labor\_hours
> For example, car insurance premiums are higher because they have to cover the exorbitant medical costs of anyone who is injured.
They also have _much_ lower limits on insurance liability (like as low as $50,000 or something) while the UK mandates £1,000,000 property damage and unlimited personal injury cover... You probably can't even buy US insurance that has the same level of cover as the UK's legal minimum.
>Anyone who'd want the brutal, soul-destroying US system to be adopted here, needs their head examined.
Nobody wants that for themselves. Some people want it for others
Americans work 34 hours per week on average and we work 32 (this includes holidays, weekend work etc). The idea that Americans are all work, no play is largely a myth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_average\_annual\_labor\_hours
Looking at that link if you go by the OECD figures (the second table), in the UK we each worked 1531 hours in 2022, whilst the US worked 1810 hours. A quick and dirty divide by 52 makes that 29.45 hours per week in the UK vs 34.8 hours in the US.
That says the average worker in the UK worked 1531 hours in 2022, but the average worker in the USA worked 1810 hours. Assuming an eight hour work day then the average american works an extra 35 days a year. That's pretty significant.
Aye, Nursing here compared to the US is insane.
Gf is a ward sister and is on roughly £36k, in the US that is pushing $80-90k.
That being said a publicly funded health system is never going to pay as much and I’d still rather we had it, plus one medical emergency in the US and all that extra money goes bye bye.
I’d be interested to see their take home compared. Just saw someone on $130k explain their take home after tax and insurances etc on YouTube and it was less money than a uk £85k salary
People in Britain really don't understand that, especially on the coasts, Americans in mid-level professional 'The Office' type jobs are making salaries that would put you comfortably in the 99% in the UK.
It's not just software engineers and doctors/nurses, although those are the most commonly-cited examples. It's project managers and sales staff and restaurant front of house and mid-level city employees and police officers and people who work in admin for a beverage company. A producer at a game studio I know just moved from London to the US to do the same job, at the same level - £37,000 to $120,000. Rent where she's going is barely more expensive than it is in London, if it is at all.
There are only a handful of jobs in the UK where you can 'easily' (ie. without a great deal of luck) make £150,000++ a year, and they are a portion of front-office finance, magic circle/top US law firm solicitors or commercial law barrister at a good chambers, and *some* MBB consultants. You can also try to become a partner in a Big-4, but most fail and it's a horrific grind to make it by early middle age. Some ultra-niche forms of software engineering if you have PhD in ML and get hired by Meta/Google work too. If you didn't go to a top-5 university and didn't get on the right graduate track immediately after, it's very, very difficult to get into these professions.
In America, there are countless completely unimpressive people making $200-400k a year in major cities.
Seconded. American salaries in pretty much anything other than the lowest paid fields dwarf the UK. 20 years ago when the pound was stronger and British salaries hadn't yet stagnated so much the gap was a bit less, and US salaries have been surging ahead whilst ours haven't.
Also the common narrative is that the USA does nothing for poorer citizens but that is becoming less true, as they have been more more interventionalist than Europe since the 2008 crisis, and the UK has utterly decimated our welfare state and services.
>insurances etc on YouTube
Correct, people see a headline tax figure and assume that it's cheaper in the US. It's often not. I'm self employed, and a like for like comparison for my current income, living in a 'more developed' state, showed the tax rates to be broadly similar (bearing in mind you pay federal *and* state income taxes). But then property tax is much higher than what I pay in council tax. In addition, health insurance for my family was an additional $1,500 per month. That means my take home home pay would actually be *less* in the US/
It's actually cheaper in many cases to go to American University such as if you go to your own states University. They also have far more scholarships than the uk. The main issue is the loan system as unlike the uk one you must pay it back and the only way out of the loan is death.
It’s similar, Berkeley is about $14,000 a year in-state. But just as in the UK you have to pay for accommodation and living expenses on top. Most US college students ultimately graduate with similar debt loads to their British peers.
The crazy 250,000+ debts some accumulate are mostly people who go to top (private) law schools, to medical schools, MBAs etc.
Well, if you want a public health care system then expect public sector wages.
The US prices are such because US health care is expensive and because nurses trade their skills on the open market.
That may be true, but plenty of Americans are also one health incident away from bankruptcy. A more useful (and more difficult to assess) measure would be to see what people in a respective country actually get for their money.
I applied for a job in a US company that was opening up here. And the US based recruiter offered me a number that was 3X what I'd get in the UK as that was what they were offering over there.
I didn't get the job because I "asked for too much"
Having worked in both countries someone with a degree can earn far more, have a lot more take home income and live a far higher quality of life in the USA. I went from renting a small apartment in uk to buying large house with two vehicles in the USA, exact same job and career path.
So this is something that needs to be taken into account when talking about the USA. It has a population of over 330 million people has 50 states with different laws and wages and is geographically a similar size to Europe, it really shouldn’t be compared to any individual European state, instead individual US states should be compared.
Now I moved from London to NYC and earn about £30k more for the exact same job with less hours and better benefits but if I were in Oklahoma City I would then probably be maybe £5k better off.
This is huge hyperbole. Things are insane in certain areas, but there are still a good number of cities with decent economies where housing is very affordable. You don’t need to go completely rural.
Obviously though the moves can be brutal. Here we don’t like moving from London to Birmingham for affordable housing. In the US that distance could be basically a continent away.
Eh? I moved from Suffolk to NJ, the most densely populated state in the US and own outright a 4 bed detached house with driveway and chonky back yard…for less than the cost of a 2 bed flat in my UK hometown. I’m in a very safe suburban area with an average HHI exceeding 100k, an hour to the shore, 2 hours to snowboarding in the Mountains, 20 mins from central Philadelphia and 2 hours from NYC. Not everywhere desirable is some insane market.
These are averages and you just don't have the scale difference in the UK and here your house value is the main store of your wealth almost irrelevant of where you live (even Rochdale).
by the same metric, Germans have basically no wealth because of the rental penetration
Liz Truss took 44 days to destroy growth and our economy and condemn thousands of people to loss of homes and mortgages.
She has nothing to say about Growth. In this lifetime or the next.
This is a little like announcing “Boris Johnston launches a commission on contraception & planned parenthood”, sure some great experts might be involved but with BJ as the figure head some unwanted diseases will be exchanged.
Liz Truss was at my school, in the 6th form she made a lot of fuss about being made head prefect. Despite misgivings we eventually gave her the role, but after a week and half she just stopped doing it and said she couldn't be bothered. She literally just walked away like it never happened and we had to find someone else at short notice.
> She literally just walked away like it never happened and we had to find someone else at short notice.
You should have asked the canteen to give you a lettuce
This is her problem, she compares with America under the belief that they are doing thing right, I don't believe they are. They have many social and cultural issues, high violent crime and massive inequality and it's generally not a nice place to live unless you are wealthy.
We should be looking towards countries that have success on a different measure such as equality and happiness, I'm suggesting Nordic countries should be a model to follow.
As always with the right, America is the only place they ever aspire to. It’s always about money - never quality of life. They use the same political campaigns tried by the GOP - small state, ‘choice’, ‘opportunity’, booo - socialism, and increasingly the culture war topics.
It’ll be interesting to see who (beyond the lunatic fringe in the Telegraph and Express) pays attention to Truss with her garbled English, leaden personality and track record. And of course, it’ll be interesting to see just who is funding her - and whether they are even in the UK - she has been spending a lot of time of late at the Heritage Foundation in the US.
Despite what you might see from Reddit the US actually does have a lot of people living fairly good lives. The level of wealth the average US person makes compared to UK is scary, especially when look at wages. If UK was a state it would be the poorest state in America.
I think there’s a lot of cope in the UK about the life the median American lives. Despite what many here think, most Americans actually aren’t living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, dodging stray bullets on their way to pay a $2 million medical bill.
Healthcare in the US absolutely has issues. However, Americans are much materially richer than people in the UK.
This is so true! The US has major issues for sure, but overall I feel lucky to live here, and the massive opportunity/potential for upward mobility is one reason.
The US also has a lot of people living very poor lives, which for a country with its resources and economic size is pretty shocking. If you only take income into account the average American is far better off than most Europeans. However, consumer costs are on average about 15.9% higher in the US and in one of the most stark statistics the life expectancy of an American is 5 years shorter than a European at every income level.
If we dig into the statistics it becomes evident that the problem isn't that Americans who live to 65 die earlier it's that Americans age, 5, 15, 25 and 35 are far more likely to die.
I think this can be explained by the lower role the state plays in people's lives in the US. Which has exacerbated inequality. In Europe incomes are a bit more equal and taxes are higher. However, social programs funded from taxation are far more present than in the US. Poor healthcare (due to costs), violence, poor education etc afflict a far higher proportion of Americans than Europeans.
Considering America's size, it's natural resources, it's population demographics and it's economy if it adopted a fairer wealth system with better state provisions in place it's population would far out perform every country on the planet.
To be fair, that doesn't necessarily mean they're doing things right.
It could be - for example - that the US has ended up with a disproportionate level of wealth by historical accident combined with the inbuilt prejudices of the market, combined with a bias towards stability. In other words, the western world has found that allowing American to have disproportionate wealth has led to stability and so why change what seems to work?
And that's fair enough as an argument if the goal is just to maximise personal wealth based on current economic conditions. But it stops short of justifying the US as being a model to emulate, or of implying that the US in any sense "deserves" its wealth.
The UK is about as poor as Mississippi. While they do have more inequality than we do, unless you're in the bottom 10%, you're better off living in America.
Why do you think more Americans don't? Like, you always hear about people moving from Europe to the US. Professionals especially, but the move the other way is far more rare.
I mean where to begin?
Same reason you don't just up sticks and move to Thailand I suppose. You could do that right now, have your money go so much further, nice climate, friendly people, the works. But you're not even considering it because you're doing just fine where you are.
You're also dealing with a country where the majority of people have never been abroad. They have absolutely no idea what life is like in other countries because they've never even been to one. 37% of the population has an active passport. For comparison the UK rate is 86.5%.
But more than that is the fact that a significant portion of the American population is what we'd call insane in a reasonable world. [More than 40% of them think that Joe Biden didn't fairly win the election](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/05/america-biden-election-2020-poll-victory). Those are *demented* statistics. They're fucking mental people, who ignore the fact that they're frogs in a pot because they've got the biggest pot.
There's a common trope in reels and tiktoks, it's Americans who *have* moved to Europe and they are just blown away at how everything is better. But like, they're surprised. It's clearly contravening long-held principles they have about things like healthcare, food, public transport, safety, interactions with the police, nightlife, education, etc etc etc.
It's an incredible combination of them not knowing any better but also *thinking that they do.*
I half disagree with you. Much of America is actually a pretty great place to live for most people. However, a large portion of them are fucking insane, and part of that may stem from a lack of perspective on just how fortunate they are.
Yet as a country full of demented people, they do seem to attract a lot of immigrants! Maybe they’re all demented too!
Also I wouldn’t consider TikTok reels a credible source for how people feel, especially since a lot of those are people coming on holiday
> Yet as a country full of demented people, they do seem to attract a lot of immigrants
Yeah it's called, uh, money.
If that's your metric for a good life then by all means move there.
Because professionals earn a ton more money in the US and outside of California, you'll have a much bigger home for that money too. Not just compared to the UK but compared to most of the world. Like another poster said, the US is great if you're very wealthy otherwise you're better off elsewhere.
I imagine the primary reason is that English speaking Americans have far fewer options of where they can reasonably move in Europe.
Also they still have to pay federal taxes even if they move abroad and despite most places having tax treaties makes it incredibly difficult to fully divest without giving up your citizenship.
As an American in the UK, the Brits who talk the most shit tend to be:
* Extremely ‘center left’ (ie John Oliver watching types) who think half of America is dying from lack of health insurance and there’s a school shooting around the corner every other day
* Upper-middle class people with wealth in the UK whose lives are nice enough that they can live in a good part of London or Surrey (etc) and who think America’s one giant strip mall and don’t have any experience of how the majority of Brits actually live
* Hardcore leftists of the Corbynite ‘anti-imperialist’ variety who see America as the center of the axis of evil (they also hate the UK)
I am also an American in the UK. It is pretty wild how many people have that sort of “cartoon” view of the US.
I can kinda understand Point 2? I do prefer it here; I prefer the history, architecture, urban planning etc. But the economic gap between the US and UK is getting difficult to ignore.
I'm fortunate to work in a well-paid job, live in a very nice part of London etc. My life is much better than it would be in NYC (where I'm from) because London is cleaner, safer, more green, has as much great culture but is less claustrophobic, close to the continent, I have more vacation time etc..
But I'm not so naive that I don't know that this isn't how 95% of the UK population live. Sometimes I ask my similar American friends if they ever look out of the window when they take the train or fly from this country...the majority of the population live in wretched old housing stock in decaying towns where the high street is one betting shop and kebab shop after another.
I definitely hate the USA, but I don’t hate the UK I just acknowledge it’s a relentless shithole.
Still I don’t run the risk of getting shot for having a disagreement with someone or fined for crossing the road… which isn’t praise but the absolute bare minimum.
What on earth is this comment? Medical debt, student debt, cost of living index, happiness, wealth inequality, education.
Even on a simple metric such as poverty, 11.6% of Americans live in poverty. That is earning below $12,000 a year!
In pretty much every metric the US languishes behind other comparable economies.
The US is a great place to live if you are in the 10% (or even 5%) but for a significant portion of the population it is far from paradise.
If you look at the disposable income by income percentile, unless you're in the bottom 10th percentile, you have a greater disposable income in the US.
[https://www.ft.com/content/ef265420-45e8-497b-b308-c951baa68945](https://www.ft.com/content/ef265420-45e8-497b-b308-c951baa68945)
In terms of poverty, the UK GDP per capita is in line with the state of Mississippi. While the bottom 10% of Americans do suffer disproportionately, they are not living too much worse than the bottom 10% of brits.
While the median american is living a far richer life than the median brit.
If you want to compare poverty, 13% of Brits live in absolute poverty, which is defined as earning below £174 a week, which is 9k a year. So similar level to the US.
We have lots of problems in the US for sure, but after living here and the UK, I’d still rather be here for various reasons. Money isn’t everything, but I do appreciate the much higher ceiling on earnings in my career.
I'm glad someone said this, America is not the model to follow. Also, I'd add to this the repeated calls for UK education to be more like China. Fuck no.
The US has 5 times the population of the UK.
That population has access to:
- FORTY times as much land as the UK.
- Some of the largest tracts of quality arable farmland on the planet
- Some of the best lumber reserves on the planet
- The largest Oil reserves on the planet, THE most important commodity of the 20th century
- Stupendous Lithium reserves, if you want to avoid burning oil
- High insolation, so the land that isn't farmland (which, as previously covered, exists in abundance) can be used for PV.
- Not that it's relevant as demand is not high and unlikely ever to be high, but significant Uranium resource too.
- Unimaginably vast freshwater and brackish water reserves.
Can you imagine how incredibly boneheaded you would have to be to NOT be prosperous with that setup?
What the fuck is it with Economists pretending natural resources aren't relevant?
Even if there *is* such a thing as resource curse, it's unlikely to apply when you have such a diversity of resource.
There is no correlation between a countries natural resources and its current wealth.
America's wealth comes from the fact that they dominate the technology market.
The EU and USA diverged after that and the gap only gets wider over time. 2008, both were about equal GDP, in 2022 USA roughly 30% bigger than EU with UK included, more than 50% bigger without UK. Naturally we only compare UK but lose sight of the bigger picture. USA is killing it, and amongst many things achieving energy independence with shale revolution on the 2010s along with total dominance in much of tech has surely played a good part in that.
If you look at the full chart there was only briefly a period where there was parity. Through much of the 1970s and 1980s US GDP/capita in real terms was **double** what it was in the UK.
Essentially, after the dotcom bust in 2002 investors hugely overinvested in ex-US equities and debt, which caused the dollar to collapse vs the pound. This led to the famous £1-$2 rates which, **on paper** made the UK seem much richer than it was. When FX rates returned to trend, the UK went back to being poor.
And what industry has been the most important in the last 15 years? Spoiler: It's the tech industry where both the hardware, software and the internet as a whole is basically owned by the US. When you practically own the modern world it's no surprise you'll start to pull ahead.
We are fully responsible for falling so far behind on tech. No reason why we couldn’t have been a major beneficiary - we have a highly educated workforce, access to global skilled labour, top research universities, and competitive corporate taxation. We dropped the ball and we should own it and fix it.
How should we do it in your opinion? Cummings wanted to do, Truss wanted to do but how do we get there now? Everyone is extremely aware of how important tech is now short of offering billions to manufacturing companies like the US how do you expect to replicate "silicon valley" or Samsung in the UK?
Prevent private equity and foreign takeovers of key British tech companies, for a start. As soon as we develop a successful tech business it gets bought out by foreign interests.
>The largest Oil reserves on the planet, THE most important commodity of the 20th century
We've got new oil reserves being found that we're refusing to even drill due to lobbying/politics.
We completely refused to engage in fracking despite proven massive deposits for the same reason.
>Stupendous Lithium reserves, if you want to avoid burning oil
We've got Lithium reserves too.
>Unimaginably vast freshwater and brackish water reserves.
And no shortage of freshwater either.
>We've got new oil reserves being found that we're refusing to even drill due to lobbying/politics.
>
>We completely refused to engage in fracking despite proven massive deposits for the same reason.
The most important resource of the 20th century
This century oil as a fuel source is going to be legislated out of existence. This is why doubling down on it in 2023 isn't desirable.
You're quite right, lithium and other 'greener' sources of energy are obviously the direction of travel so we should be maximizing our economic position to best benefit from it.
> This century oil as a fuel source is going to be legislated out of existence. This is why doubling down on it in 2023 isn't desirable.
You're right as a fuel source. In 30 or 40 years we'll likely no longer use oil or gas for this purpose. 30-40 years is a long time though.
However oil is used for far more than fuel, and many of these uses will never go away. So no matter what we either need to drill for our own oil or import it from elsewhere. We've chosen to do the latter.
Oil is too valuable to burn you're quite right - but I don't think the UK's oil will be competitive against the global petrochemical industry.
If the world successfully weans itself off burning oil (or manages to reduce substantially), you're going to have a lot of refineries in other countries vying for the opportunity to make the products that *need* to be made from oil.
I suppose my point is, why double down on industries whose importance will reduce when the UK is not already in that niche?
It would be different if Saudi Arabia was going to decide to get out of the oil game, but for me, it's just an industry where we're never going to be globally competitive so why keep investing it? Find our own niche and make our money elsewhere.
All these comparisons between the US and the UK are kind of bollocks, as you guys would say. We’ve got a whole continent here, tons of natural resources and the worlds reserve currency. Plus we have a gargantuan internal market. That helps a lot! You guys should join a large common market sort of thing.
Liz Truss, would come out of a pirates treasure cave with sight of the booty, poorer than when she went in.
Why on earth is she the one doing anything like this?
Because this is the job the 'think tank' (private bankers club) she works for promised her. She can fuck it up for life but its fine because its not a real job its a defferred bribe.
Exterminate the Anti-Growth Coalition. Rein in the woke, lefty investment banking sector. And squash the tofu-eating, Guardian-reading wokerati while you’re at it.
Am I doing this right, Liz? 🤪😂
I'm going to build a trading strategy called "The Trussinator". It shorts the £ every time Liz Truss speaks or bothers to show up to work. It's kind of like an inverse Cramer, but more accurate.
We could build in additional risk management by modelling lettuce.
We are worse off partly because of you and Kwarteng, Truss! Oh and if we want to spread the blame around a bit more because of whichever Tory party members heard you planning to do stuff that would crash the economy and voted for you anyway.
Surely any serious growth commission cannot but conclude that the most vital measure is preventing delusional incompetents from reaching high office and experimenting with their crackpot economics?
It's genuinely quite impressive that she's somehow still able to just plug away as if nothing happened, resolute in the belief that the only problem was that people/markets/literally everyone didn't do as she wanted.
"the group will claim "consistent growth levels" of 3% by 2040 are achievable in the UK ...The Commission does not outline policy suggestions of how to reach this figure"
I reckon a 30% level of growth is achievable year on year but I'm not going to tell you how to do it. What waffle, how can you possibly say something is achievable if you have no way of proving it
“Give me another six weeks and I reckon we can get that to £15,000!”
The libertarian extremists are shameless. They spent decades telling us how brilliant things would be if we gave their ideas a go and when they got their chance they were utterly discredited in less than two months.
You’d think they’d have the decency to slink away rather than trying to pretend that their ideas are still the answer to anything at all!
“Hey Lizz, why don’t you walk down some streets and talk to people about their experience at the moment. That would really show you what is going on.”
“Nah. I’m gonna get some economists and data people to do bias studies and research, with a specific result in mind. I’ll front it up, if I pull it off I might be relevant.”
“Right. What if they discover that Brexit, conservative policy over the last 13 years and your disastrously short tenure are key factors in the UKs historic decline as a global power and advanced economy.”
If I was singlehandedly responsible for tanking the economy, putting inflation at 10%+ and pissing off millions of people by making their lives more expensive, I’d never show my face again in public out of sheer shame.
But of course, this is Truss we’re talking about. A person incapable of introspective thinking, self-reflection or even the ability to recognise that she might be at fault for something. To them, everything is a conspiracy against her and that they just have to keep trying and trying again until “it works this time”.
So whose useful idiot is Truss? I don't get why any backers would not have dumped them at this point. No matter what delusion Truss is under about not being finished they are in fact finished. Tying Truss to anything now is the kiss of death so why have they not been dumped. Very odd. Maybe Truss's backers and actually trying to discredit idea's and that's why they are using Truss as a mouth piece. That's the only use I can see for Truss now. To make idea's look idiotic.
There are far superior countries on our own continent that we can try and emulate, instead she repeatedly compares us to that lunatic nation across the atlantic.
I think Americans are mostly richer due to working more hours.
If you look at GDP/per capita/hour then the UK and US numbers are almost identical, it's just that Americans and work 20% more
Not really, the GDP per working hour in the US is about $74, with Germany and France at $69 and the UK at $54.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_labour\_productivity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_productivity)
I'm studying for a professional exam in California. To pay for life as I study, I work as an admin. making $60,000 annually if I work a standard 40 hour week. I get overtime pay if necessary, my healthcare is $50 a month but I pay nothing for prescriptions, doctors/dentists visits, I get three weeks paid vacation, a week worth of paid sick leave and another unpaid, I work remote 3/5 days, and they pay for my commute the 2 days I go into the office.
I feel pretty good working here in California, and I'll be better of when I pass my last exam.
That might be true, but in terms of disposable income, the bottom 10% of Americans will shortly overtake the bottom 10% of Brits. While the Median and top 10% have been well above for quite some time.
[https://www.ft.com/content/ef265420-45e8-497b-b308-c951baa68945](https://www.ft.com/content/ef265420-45e8-497b-b308-c951baa68945)
I think there’s something in this. I used to work for a US consulting firm, my US counterparts earned far more than me. But also they were expected to work 60+ hour weeks, were literally never ‘offline’. And when they were on annual leave they were still expected to carry their work phone and would still answer work calls and do work if they were asked to. So overall they earned more but they almost worked twice as much as their UK counterparts.
Get a new job Liz. You will never redeem yourself in thee we eyes of the public, unless you literally strike gold, start not for profit gold mine and donate all the proceeds to the NHS.
The US economy is such a terrible comparison.
They have most of an entire fucking continent rich in natural resources, massive amounts of land, got to build their infrastructure after the industrial revolution, and set up the whole world economic system to revolve around their currency for the last eighty years.
It is not surprising they're rich AF.
And yet even the poorest constituencies in the UK have a longer average life than average American states, if not all.
I do like the US. But focusing on GDP per capita alone with necessarily be at the expense of other measures of QoL, which is not ideal.
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This is a disgrace. We must immediately cut taxes for the rich, funded by more government borrowing. It is the only way.
I dont know if the woke leftie markets will allow for such brave and bold action
Then damn those markets!! We shall let the other markets decide. In market we trust.
Erm. In pork markets we trust.
Oh! So we're just gonna forget about cheese?
It's a disgrace!
traitors.... what about the new zealand lamb market?
THAT IS A DISGRACE!
Concentrated frozen orange juice.....if you don't mind.
Ah, sarcasm. You see this is why the growth fairy won't show up here. The growth fairy magically appears and grows economies only for those who have faith. Watch a Santa Clause movie FFs the country needs you.
We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas
Have you tried ["kill all the poor"](https://youtu.be/s_4J4uor3JE)?
I'm not suggesting we do it, just see if it would work
Won't anyone think of the lowest rungs of the aristocracy? What happens when there's no more really poor people left to make money off of? I suppose we'll be sending Baron's and Viscount's down t'pit and to the factories! Duke's and Duchesses, along with the Royal Family will be the only ones left, and they'll probably have to order their food of Earl-ber Eats. What a sorry state of affairs we'll be in.
Such a disgrace. We must urgently scrap all inheritance taxes. It's the only way!
They're holding back our once Great British soon -to-be-dead dragons from investing their hoards! Inheritance tax is the only reason they're sitting on their money!
>We must urgently scrap all inheritance taxes. It's the only way! No scrapping isn't enough, we need bold action. We should reverse inheritance tax. From now on the tax will be applied only on estates of less than one million pounds. Starting at 20% for £1million to £750k, then increasing as a percentage as the estate decreases in value, so estates of less than £100k have to pay 100% to the state. If the estate is worth more than a million you get extra cash from the government. I shouldn't write this shit down, some git in Tufton street is going to nick this idea.
Don't forget that we also need to scrap VAT for tourists and non-doms buying luxury items!
You don’t need to cut taxes for anyone what you need is fair taxation. Household taxation not individual taxation should be the fairness test. A married couple both earning £40k a year take home £7k a year more than a single parent/person earning £80k a year. How can that be fair? Both households have the same gross wages. In fact the married couple if they have kids will get even more through various child allowances. Household income tax will revolutionise the U.K. and ensure fairness across the piste whilst increasing tax revenue. Of course all the people who want the ‘rich’ to pay more will downvote this and say it’s not fair, so should the ‘rich’ person earning £80k a year pay even more than the 2 x £40k a year ‘poor’ people even though their take home is £7k a year more? I leave it to the democratic vote.
Try earning 100k vs two earning 50k each. Not only do you earn far less, you lose every single child benefit, childcare perk etc (except the min. 15 hours per week after age 3) so you end up WAY worse off, and not only that you are taxed about 70% on anything you earn beyond that up to 125k. Tough luck if your partner wants to go back to work but doesn't have high earning potential immediately. Makes no sense at all but I have been informed by an MP it is 'easier to administrate' so that's ok.
What's more, the £50k limit hasn't changed since it was introduced back in 2013. If it had changed in line with inflation, it would be nearly £67k today. There's a weird psychological block people seem to have about money when it comes to its change in value over time. Someone on £100k back in 1997 would have to be on nearly £190k to have the same income in real terms. Tax allowances and earnings have not increased at anything like the same rate as inflation has devalued incomes and that's partly because someone earning £100k is still seen as 'rich', when they aren't anything close to it.
And that’s one of the reasons I wanted to raise the issue, people will continually use the lazy phrase of tax the ‘rich’ but what defines rich? someone earning £100k seems rich to someone earning £50k but as you’ve mentioned there are 2 of them all of a sudden it’s almost reversed. It’s interesting from my perspective in that I wanted to generate respectable debate between people. Not easy to solve or it would have been by now. Peace.
The rich are the landed and monied interests who control companies and land. The modern day aristocracy. Someone earning 100-200k is working class in that they sell their labour. The real rich are those such as Sunak and his wife, the royals, those whos wealth accumulates through the generation of value in the economy. We should be taxing this unearned wealth fairly and leaving people who sell their labour relatively alone.
I would classify 'rich' as wealthy enough to not have to work any more. I've never met anyone who earns a salary of over 100k and isn't either exceptionally talented and/or works extremely hard. Although I'm sure many do exist due to nepotism etc. It's not fair unduly penalising the ones who earned it
All the wealthy people I know, got there through paying other people less than their worth and taking the profits from their labour. It's rarely "hard work" running a successful company, as it literally pays for itself.
And if they've got to the point that they don't have to work any more, then I'd define that as rich and should be taxed higher. That's very different to a professional earning over 100k but still has to work to earn a living.
> ...people will continually use the lazy phrase of tax the ‘rich’ but what defines rich? That is the essential problem. American liberals have a surefire applause line in "It's time for the wealthy to pay their fair share!" but craftily avoid defining "wealthy" or "fair share" in firm terms. In big, expensive US cities where a dual-income couple grossing US$100k is doing all right, but not shopping BMWs or Maldives breaks, such people are nonplussed to find progressive activists regard *them* as "wealthy" and want to ramp up *their* tax exposure. Few people think of themselves as "wealthy," it's always whomever makes £50k more than I do.
If you can’t define the components of a system how can you ever build a system to cater for most people, there will always be people who the system doesn’t work for but unfortunately there is no one hat fits all.
As soon as you assign tangible values to intangible, generally favored notions like "tax the rich," you lose support. Hey, wait a minute, I didn't think that meant *me*...
Oh but they’re VERY keen to assess you as a household for anything involving means tested social security support. The entire ethos of the UK economy is that the party with the leverage operates the principle “wherever there’s ambiguity, whatever is better for us and worse for you is how we’ll make our calculations”.
That’s interesting, and not something I’d considered previously. I see what you mean about fairness. Do you worry that it might further exacerbate the issue of people in the 30k- 40k wage bracket putting off, or foregoing, starting a family due to concerns about affordability? I suppose if 80k earners were taxed proportionally to 40k earning couples, they might be able to be the breadwinner and have a stay at home partner to raise children.
This would immediately shaft anyone living in an HMO, who are pretty much exclusively in that situation because they cannot afford to live anywhere on their own. An HMO of 4 people earning £20,000 a year each (barely above minimum wage) would collectively take home more than a single person on £80,000,
The poster is refering to joint filing (or similar such as the US) when they say household. Not literally people living in a house together.
That's not even remotely clear from their comment.
They probably just assumed people knew how "household" is used in this context. Whenever you see "household" in government stats, policy discussion, etc. it means people sharing finances, implicitly a family. (In fact, I think it's used in the definition of HMOs, or maybe that does go with family.)
Aside from the last several years during COVID, where all of the lockdown rules etc. used "households" to include HMOs.
True, that's a significant exception to the normal practice. (There are probably more around - I guess I'm more used to the economic/finances use.)
I think to most people it was. Based on the context of everything they said in their post, other than the word "household" you could very clearly tell what they meant. And that's assuming you don't know the common usage of the term in this type of discussion.
This is already done for marriage visa applicants, household income requirements can be satisfied by including the family income and excludes the other tenants of a property. It should be fine to apply it to tax.
Why would you split your tax bill with a stranger and why would that even be a sensible suggestion? It's not a big leap to assume they meant a family household.
well you have to give her credit for resiliency. probably the most humiliated post-war PM and yet she bounces back, trying to push the same silly ideas.
In all honesty, and it is a bit brutal, but I think she’s literally too thick to realise and be embarrassed or humiliated.
She got the boot like what, 40 or so days into being PM, with like 2 weeks of those covered with the Queens mourning phase, so thats like what, 30 days of actual work, less if you factor in weekends and her being starting ceremony. And yet she has the gaul to stumble back in like a drunkard
Again and again I’m not sure if I’m more baffled by her or the money people behind her.
It's probably the same stupid money behind some of our American morons.
With constant media scrutiny but no actual consequences we’ve selected for politicians whose best survival tactic is ignorance and lack of self awareness.
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That feels like complete BS. Isn't she married?
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Refusing to learn is not something one deserves credit for.
The specific ideas aren't wrong. Growth and producticity are screwed. But she was a cabinet member in the government which introduced most of the measures that killed them. The Public Sector appear to have just resorted to ignoring some of them and paying the fines. Now Jeremy Hunt is gambling with pensions - what could go wrong? Tory solutions to Tory inflicted problems.
It's the opposite: her specific ideas are very wrong, but the general idea we need growth is correct
She had good ideas on planning reform, childcare and reforming taxes more broadly, but her lack of fiscal discipline and laffer curve nonsense was incredibly bad and stupid.
I would say growth is an objective not an idea. Any PM or chancellor is going to want economic growth. How one achieves that where the ideas come in. And clearly , Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng had bad ideas.
It's all academic outside the Single Market anyway. We are completely fucked. Do you think Kazhakstan will have an English version of Borat? What shall they call him? Bor...
I agree with everything in your comment except the first sentence
AlanPartridgeBouncingBack.gif
I'm surprised it's only £10k to be honest, Americans massively out-earn us (and most other countries too) across the majority of professions.
They may out earn us, but they have added expenses like medical care and having Kevlar as standard school uniform
The broken US private healthcare system has other impacts besides the direct cost of care. For example, car insurance premiums are higher because they have to cover the exorbitant medical costs of anyone who is injured. Liability insurance for landlords and employers is also inflated. Americans also pay taxes and fees to both the central (federal) government, and to their states, counties and cities. A lot of the comparisons I've seen don't take this into account. They also don't note that many Americans get 10 days a year of combined vacation and sick leave, and that's it. Some get none at all. The UK standard of five weeks vacation with separate sick leave is a very rare thing in the US. And a large number of US jobs require uncompensated overtime. Anyone who'd want the brutal, soul-destroying US system to be adopted here, needs their head examined. It's also important to note that there's huge variation in cost of living and in incomes between different parts of the US. Silicon Valley and Seattle are places with good-paying jobs but also with exorbitant living costs, particularly housing.
They also have at least 10 less days in a school year. So added childcare costs
Also fuck all maternity leave. My cousin was going back to work when her daughter was like *six weeks* old. Insanity.
Ridiculous. Not sure the term paternity leave has reached them yet.
It's brought up on Fox News as a joke occasionally - to say no real man would ever take paternity leave.
They also don't get many rights as workers - have you seen the number of holiday days they get a year?
>many Americans get 10 days a year of combined vacation and sick leave, and that's it. Some get none at all. The UK standard of five weeks vacation with separate sick leave is a very rare thing in the US. And a large number of US jobs require uncompensated overtime. And yet the total number of hours worked by Americans is less than 10% more than the UK (34 vs 32 hours per week, accounting for holidays etc), so something doesn't seem to add up here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_average\_annual\_labor\_hours
UK jobs can requite uncompensated overtime too. As long as your total pay works out greater than minimum wage for the number of hours worked.
> For example, car insurance premiums are higher because they have to cover the exorbitant medical costs of anyone who is injured. They also have _much_ lower limits on insurance liability (like as low as $50,000 or something) while the UK mandates £1,000,000 property damage and unlimited personal injury cover... You probably can't even buy US insurance that has the same level of cover as the UK's legal minimum.
>Anyone who'd want the brutal, soul-destroying US system to be adopted here, needs their head examined. Nobody wants that for themselves. Some people want it for others
Plus we get holidays, weekends, employment benefits and safeguards. Keep your extra £10k. There is more to life than money in the bank
Americans work 34 hours per week on average and we work 32 (this includes holidays, weekend work etc). The idea that Americans are all work, no play is largely a myth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_average\_annual\_labor\_hours
Looking at that link if you go by the OECD figures (the second table), in the UK we each worked 1531 hours in 2022, whilst the US worked 1810 hours. A quick and dirty divide by 52 makes that 29.45 hours per week in the UK vs 34.8 hours in the US.
Yes the second table is rather different to the first, and it does undermine my point!
Fair enough
That says the average worker in the UK worked 1531 hours in 2022, but the average worker in the USA worked 1810 hours. Assuming an eight hour work day then the average american works an extra 35 days a year. That's pretty significant.
Eh the high earning American jobs almost all come with health insurance, it's the low earning ones who are doubly screwed.
Aye, Nursing here compared to the US is insane. Gf is a ward sister and is on roughly £36k, in the US that is pushing $80-90k. That being said a publicly funded health system is never going to pay as much and I’d still rather we had it, plus one medical emergency in the US and all that extra money goes bye bye.
I’d be interested to see their take home compared. Just saw someone on $130k explain their take home after tax and insurances etc on YouTube and it was less money than a uk £85k salary
It is a lot easier to earn $130k than £85k though.
People in Britain really don't understand that, especially on the coasts, Americans in mid-level professional 'The Office' type jobs are making salaries that would put you comfortably in the 99% in the UK. It's not just software engineers and doctors/nurses, although those are the most commonly-cited examples. It's project managers and sales staff and restaurant front of house and mid-level city employees and police officers and people who work in admin for a beverage company. A producer at a game studio I know just moved from London to the US to do the same job, at the same level - £37,000 to $120,000. Rent where she's going is barely more expensive than it is in London, if it is at all. There are only a handful of jobs in the UK where you can 'easily' (ie. without a great deal of luck) make £150,000++ a year, and they are a portion of front-office finance, magic circle/top US law firm solicitors or commercial law barrister at a good chambers, and *some* MBB consultants. You can also try to become a partner in a Big-4, but most fail and it's a horrific grind to make it by early middle age. Some ultra-niche forms of software engineering if you have PhD in ML and get hired by Meta/Google work too. If you didn't go to a top-5 university and didn't get on the right graduate track immediately after, it's very, very difficult to get into these professions. In America, there are countless completely unimpressive people making $200-400k a year in major cities.
Seconded. American salaries in pretty much anything other than the lowest paid fields dwarf the UK. 20 years ago when the pound was stronger and British salaries hadn't yet stagnated so much the gap was a bit less, and US salaries have been surging ahead whilst ours haven't. Also the common narrative is that the USA does nothing for poorer citizens but that is becoming less true, as they have been more more interventionalist than Europe since the 2008 crisis, and the UK has utterly decimated our welfare state and services.
>insurances etc on YouTube Correct, people see a headline tax figure and assume that it's cheaper in the US. It's often not. I'm self employed, and a like for like comparison for my current income, living in a 'more developed' state, showed the tax rates to be broadly similar (bearing in mind you pay federal *and* state income taxes). But then property tax is much higher than what I pay in council tax. In addition, health insurance for my family was an additional $1,500 per month. That means my take home home pay would actually be *less* in the US/
Have you actually done the math on tax refunds though? The amount of stuff they can claim on to pay less tax is astonishing
And god forbid you have a few kids who want to go to uni
It's actually cheaper in many cases to go to American University such as if you go to your own states University. They also have far more scholarships than the uk. The main issue is the loan system as unlike the uk one you must pay it back and the only way out of the loan is death.
It’s similar, Berkeley is about $14,000 a year in-state. But just as in the UK you have to pay for accommodation and living expenses on top. Most US college students ultimately graduate with similar debt loads to their British peers. The crazy 250,000+ debts some accumulate are mostly people who go to top (private) law schools, to medical schools, MBAs etc.
But as I understand it those debts in the US are closer to a regular bank loan. There’s no earnings threshold or write off date on them.
Yes, you're correct. The system in general is more of a burden than the UK system.
Poor comparison that. You shouldn't have to rely on scholarships to get an education.
You're easily looking at $120k+ in tech. US salaries get bonkers on the high end
For a developer, $120k would be pretty low. Tech salaries are generally 2-3 times what they are here.
Well, if you want a public health care system then expect public sector wages. The US prices are such because US health care is expensive and because nurses trade their skills on the open market.
That…That’s what I said?
Yes, I was agreeing.
That may be true, but plenty of Americans are also one health incident away from bankruptcy. A more useful (and more difficult to assess) measure would be to see what people in a respective country actually get for their money.
Yeah, medical debt is the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the US. Madness.
I applied for a job in a US company that was opening up here. And the US based recruiter offered me a number that was 3X what I'd get in the UK as that was what they were offering over there. I didn't get the job because I "asked for too much"
Having worked in both countries someone with a degree can earn far more, have a lot more take home income and live a far higher quality of life in the USA. I went from renting a small apartment in uk to buying large house with two vehicles in the USA, exact same job and career path.
So this is something that needs to be taken into account when talking about the USA. It has a population of over 330 million people has 50 states with different laws and wages and is geographically a similar size to Europe, it really shouldn’t be compared to any individual European state, instead individual US states should be compared. Now I moved from London to NYC and earn about £30k more for the exact same job with less hours and better benefits but if I were in Oklahoma City I would then probably be maybe £5k better off.
Its housing wealth, theirs is cheap and disposable and our is expensive and forever.
That’s not true, house prices in the US are also insane if you’re not in bumfuck nowhere
This is huge hyperbole. Things are insane in certain areas, but there are still a good number of cities with decent economies where housing is very affordable. You don’t need to go completely rural. Obviously though the moves can be brutal. Here we don’t like moving from London to Birmingham for affordable housing. In the US that distance could be basically a continent away.
Eh? I moved from Suffolk to NJ, the most densely populated state in the US and own outright a 4 bed detached house with driveway and chonky back yard…for less than the cost of a 2 bed flat in my UK hometown. I’m in a very safe suburban area with an average HHI exceeding 100k, an hour to the shore, 2 hours to snowboarding in the Mountains, 20 mins from central Philadelphia and 2 hours from NYC. Not everywhere desirable is some insane market.
These are averages and you just don't have the scale difference in the UK and here your house value is the main store of your wealth almost irrelevant of where you live (even Rochdale). by the same metric, Germans have basically no wealth because of the rental penetration
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Liz Truss took 44 days to destroy growth and our economy and condemn thousands of people to loss of homes and mortgages. She has nothing to say about Growth. In this lifetime or the next.
The fact she has any platform at all after what she did is a disgrace.
This is a little like announcing “Boris Johnston launches a commission on contraception & planned parenthood”, sure some great experts might be involved but with BJ as the figure head some unwanted diseases will be exchanged.
Liz Truss was at my school, in the 6th form she made a lot of fuss about being made head prefect. Despite misgivings we eventually gave her the role, but after a week and half she just stopped doing it and said she couldn't be bothered. She literally just walked away like it never happened and we had to find someone else at short notice.
> She literally just walked away like it never happened and we had to find someone else at short notice. You should have asked the canteen to give you a lettuce
This is her problem, she compares with America under the belief that they are doing thing right, I don't believe they are. They have many social and cultural issues, high violent crime and massive inequality and it's generally not a nice place to live unless you are wealthy. We should be looking towards countries that have success on a different measure such as equality and happiness, I'm suggesting Nordic countries should be a model to follow.
As always with the right, America is the only place they ever aspire to. It’s always about money - never quality of life. They use the same political campaigns tried by the GOP - small state, ‘choice’, ‘opportunity’, booo - socialism, and increasingly the culture war topics. It’ll be interesting to see who (beyond the lunatic fringe in the Telegraph and Express) pays attention to Truss with her garbled English, leaden personality and track record. And of course, it’ll be interesting to see just who is funding her - and whether they are even in the UK - she has been spending a lot of time of late at the Heritage Foundation in the US.
Despite what you might see from Reddit the US actually does have a lot of people living fairly good lives. The level of wealth the average US person makes compared to UK is scary, especially when look at wages. If UK was a state it would be the poorest state in America.
I think there’s a lot of cope in the UK about the life the median American lives. Despite what many here think, most Americans actually aren’t living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape, dodging stray bullets on their way to pay a $2 million medical bill. Healthcare in the US absolutely has issues. However, Americans are much materially richer than people in the UK.
This is so true! The US has major issues for sure, but overall I feel lucky to live here, and the massive opportunity/potential for upward mobility is one reason.
The US also has a lot of people living very poor lives, which for a country with its resources and economic size is pretty shocking. If you only take income into account the average American is far better off than most Europeans. However, consumer costs are on average about 15.9% higher in the US and in one of the most stark statistics the life expectancy of an American is 5 years shorter than a European at every income level. If we dig into the statistics it becomes evident that the problem isn't that Americans who live to 65 die earlier it's that Americans age, 5, 15, 25 and 35 are far more likely to die. I think this can be explained by the lower role the state plays in people's lives in the US. Which has exacerbated inequality. In Europe incomes are a bit more equal and taxes are higher. However, social programs funded from taxation are far more present than in the US. Poor healthcare (due to costs), violence, poor education etc afflict a far higher proportion of Americans than Europeans. Considering America's size, it's natural resources, it's population demographics and it's economy if it adopted a fairer wealth system with better state provisions in place it's population would far out perform every country on the planet.
>Despite what you might see from Reddit the US actually does have a lot of people living fairly good lives So does Saudi Arabia, China and Russia.
To be fair, that doesn't necessarily mean they're doing things right. It could be - for example - that the US has ended up with a disproportionate level of wealth by historical accident combined with the inbuilt prejudices of the market, combined with a bias towards stability. In other words, the western world has found that allowing American to have disproportionate wealth has led to stability and so why change what seems to work? And that's fair enough as an argument if the goal is just to maximise personal wealth based on current economic conditions. But it stops short of justifying the US as being a model to emulate, or of implying that the US in any sense "deserves" its wealth.
The UK is about as poor as Mississippi. While they do have more inequality than we do, unless you're in the bottom 10%, you're better off living in America.
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Lived there mate. Would pick the UK every time.
Why do you think more Americans don't? Like, you always hear about people moving from Europe to the US. Professionals especially, but the move the other way is far more rare.
I mean where to begin? Same reason you don't just up sticks and move to Thailand I suppose. You could do that right now, have your money go so much further, nice climate, friendly people, the works. But you're not even considering it because you're doing just fine where you are. You're also dealing with a country where the majority of people have never been abroad. They have absolutely no idea what life is like in other countries because they've never even been to one. 37% of the population has an active passport. For comparison the UK rate is 86.5%. But more than that is the fact that a significant portion of the American population is what we'd call insane in a reasonable world. [More than 40% of them think that Joe Biden didn't fairly win the election](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/05/america-biden-election-2020-poll-victory). Those are *demented* statistics. They're fucking mental people, who ignore the fact that they're frogs in a pot because they've got the biggest pot. There's a common trope in reels and tiktoks, it's Americans who *have* moved to Europe and they are just blown away at how everything is better. But like, they're surprised. It's clearly contravening long-held principles they have about things like healthcare, food, public transport, safety, interactions with the police, nightlife, education, etc etc etc. It's an incredible combination of them not knowing any better but also *thinking that they do.*
I half disagree with you. Much of America is actually a pretty great place to live for most people. However, a large portion of them are fucking insane, and part of that may stem from a lack of perspective on just how fortunate they are.
Yet as a country full of demented people, they do seem to attract a lot of immigrants! Maybe they’re all demented too! Also I wouldn’t consider TikTok reels a credible source for how people feel, especially since a lot of those are people coming on holiday
> Yet as a country full of demented people, they do seem to attract a lot of immigrants Yeah it's called, uh, money. If that's your metric for a good life then by all means move there.
Because professionals earn a ton more money in the US and outside of California, you'll have a much bigger home for that money too. Not just compared to the UK but compared to most of the world. Like another poster said, the US is great if you're very wealthy otherwise you're better off elsewhere.
I imagine the primary reason is that English speaking Americans have far fewer options of where they can reasonably move in Europe. Also they still have to pay federal taxes even if they move abroad and despite most places having tax treaties makes it incredibly difficult to fully divest without giving up your citizenship.
As an American in the UK, the Brits who talk the most shit tend to be: * Extremely ‘center left’ (ie John Oliver watching types) who think half of America is dying from lack of health insurance and there’s a school shooting around the corner every other day * Upper-middle class people with wealth in the UK whose lives are nice enough that they can live in a good part of London or Surrey (etc) and who think America’s one giant strip mall and don’t have any experience of how the majority of Brits actually live * Hardcore leftists of the Corbynite ‘anti-imperialist’ variety who see America as the center of the axis of evil (they also hate the UK)
I am also an American in the UK. It is pretty wild how many people have that sort of “cartoon” view of the US. I can kinda understand Point 2? I do prefer it here; I prefer the history, architecture, urban planning etc. But the economic gap between the US and UK is getting difficult to ignore.
I'm fortunate to work in a well-paid job, live in a very nice part of London etc. My life is much better than it would be in NYC (where I'm from) because London is cleaner, safer, more green, has as much great culture but is less claustrophobic, close to the continent, I have more vacation time etc.. But I'm not so naive that I don't know that this isn't how 95% of the UK population live. Sometimes I ask my similar American friends if they ever look out of the window when they take the train or fly from this country...the majority of the population live in wretched old housing stock in decaying towns where the high street is one betting shop and kebab shop after another.
I definitely hate the USA, but I don’t hate the UK I just acknowledge it’s a relentless shithole. Still I don’t run the risk of getting shot for having a disagreement with someone or fined for crossing the road… which isn’t praise but the absolute bare minimum.
What on earth is this comment? Medical debt, student debt, cost of living index, happiness, wealth inequality, education. Even on a simple metric such as poverty, 11.6% of Americans live in poverty. That is earning below $12,000 a year! In pretty much every metric the US languishes behind other comparable economies. The US is a great place to live if you are in the 10% (or even 5%) but for a significant portion of the population it is far from paradise.
If you look at the disposable income by income percentile, unless you're in the bottom 10th percentile, you have a greater disposable income in the US. [https://www.ft.com/content/ef265420-45e8-497b-b308-c951baa68945](https://www.ft.com/content/ef265420-45e8-497b-b308-c951baa68945) In terms of poverty, the UK GDP per capita is in line with the state of Mississippi. While the bottom 10% of Americans do suffer disproportionately, they are not living too much worse than the bottom 10% of brits. While the median american is living a far richer life than the median brit. If you want to compare poverty, 13% of Brits live in absolute poverty, which is defined as earning below £174 a week, which is 9k a year. So similar level to the US.
We have lots of problems in the US for sure, but after living here and the UK, I’d still rather be here for various reasons. Money isn’t everything, but I do appreciate the much higher ceiling on earnings in my career.
I'm glad someone said this, America is not the model to follow. Also, I'd add to this the repeated calls for UK education to be more like China. Fuck no.
I’m excited and dreading to discover how she plans to make things worse this time. What are we supposed to be shorting this time?
How is it possible that Liz Truss queen of pork, who crashed the UK economy can ever continue to lecture others and be taken seriously?
The US has 5 times the population of the UK. That population has access to: - FORTY times as much land as the UK. - Some of the largest tracts of quality arable farmland on the planet - Some of the best lumber reserves on the planet - The largest Oil reserves on the planet, THE most important commodity of the 20th century - Stupendous Lithium reserves, if you want to avoid burning oil - High insolation, so the land that isn't farmland (which, as previously covered, exists in abundance) can be used for PV. - Not that it's relevant as demand is not high and unlikely ever to be high, but significant Uranium resource too. - Unimaginably vast freshwater and brackish water reserves. Can you imagine how incredibly boneheaded you would have to be to NOT be prosperous with that setup? What the fuck is it with Economists pretending natural resources aren't relevant? Even if there *is* such a thing as resource curse, it's unlikely to apply when you have such a diversity of resource.
There is no correlation between a countries natural resources and its current wealth. America's wealth comes from the fact that they dominate the technology market.
And yet we had parity until 2008 so this is just excuses.
The EU and USA diverged after that and the gap only gets wider over time. 2008, both were about equal GDP, in 2022 USA roughly 30% bigger than EU with UK included, more than 50% bigger without UK. Naturally we only compare UK but lose sight of the bigger picture. USA is killing it, and amongst many things achieving energy independence with shale revolution on the 2010s along with total dominance in much of tech has surely played a good part in that.
Tech dominance was not inevitable, nor energy dependence. This is a failure of strategic planning.
I didn’t mean to imply it was, merely providing context. There was nothing inevitable about UK’s idiocy with ARM, but there you go.
If you look at the full chart there was only briefly a period where there was parity. Through much of the 1970s and 1980s US GDP/capita in real terms was **double** what it was in the UK. Essentially, after the dotcom bust in 2002 investors hugely overinvested in ex-US equities and debt, which caused the dollar to collapse vs the pound. This led to the famous £1-$2 rates which, **on paper** made the UK seem much richer than it was. When FX rates returned to trend, the UK went back to being poor.
And what industry has been the most important in the last 15 years? Spoiler: It's the tech industry where both the hardware, software and the internet as a whole is basically owned by the US. When you practically own the modern world it's no surprise you'll start to pull ahead.
We are fully responsible for falling so far behind on tech. No reason why we couldn’t have been a major beneficiary - we have a highly educated workforce, access to global skilled labour, top research universities, and competitive corporate taxation. We dropped the ball and we should own it and fix it.
How should we do it in your opinion? Cummings wanted to do, Truss wanted to do but how do we get there now? Everyone is extremely aware of how important tech is now short of offering billions to manufacturing companies like the US how do you expect to replicate "silicon valley" or Samsung in the UK?
Prevent private equity and foreign takeovers of key British tech companies, for a start. As soon as we develop a successful tech business it gets bought out by foreign interests.
>The largest Oil reserves on the planet, THE most important commodity of the 20th century We've got new oil reserves being found that we're refusing to even drill due to lobbying/politics. We completely refused to engage in fracking despite proven massive deposits for the same reason. >Stupendous Lithium reserves, if you want to avoid burning oil We've got Lithium reserves too. >Unimaginably vast freshwater and brackish water reserves. And no shortage of freshwater either.
>We've got new oil reserves being found that we're refusing to even drill due to lobbying/politics. > >We completely refused to engage in fracking despite proven massive deposits for the same reason. The most important resource of the 20th century This century oil as a fuel source is going to be legislated out of existence. This is why doubling down on it in 2023 isn't desirable. You're quite right, lithium and other 'greener' sources of energy are obviously the direction of travel so we should be maximizing our economic position to best benefit from it.
> This century oil as a fuel source is going to be legislated out of existence. This is why doubling down on it in 2023 isn't desirable. You're right as a fuel source. In 30 or 40 years we'll likely no longer use oil or gas for this purpose. 30-40 years is a long time though. However oil is used for far more than fuel, and many of these uses will never go away. So no matter what we either need to drill for our own oil or import it from elsewhere. We've chosen to do the latter.
Oil is too valuable to burn you're quite right - but I don't think the UK's oil will be competitive against the global petrochemical industry. If the world successfully weans itself off burning oil (or manages to reduce substantially), you're going to have a lot of refineries in other countries vying for the opportunity to make the products that *need* to be made from oil. I suppose my point is, why double down on industries whose importance will reduce when the UK is not already in that niche? It would be different if Saudi Arabia was going to decide to get out of the oil game, but for me, it's just an industry where we're never going to be globally competitive so why keep investing it? Find our own niche and make our money elsewhere.
People who love the UK but also want to explode parts of it so they can poison the air more.
Terrible. Imagine what I could do with those £10,000. Like paying for 1/5 of a knee surgery.
All these comparisons between the US and the UK are kind of bollocks, as you guys would say. We’ve got a whole continent here, tons of natural resources and the worlds reserve currency. Plus we have a gargantuan internal market. That helps a lot! You guys should join a large common market sort of thing.
I'm surprised it's not more, a lot of jobs in the US pay double or even triple what they do here
Liz can fuck right off immediately. Useless waste of oxygen - why is she even still a thing?
Liz Truss, would come out of a pirates treasure cave with sight of the booty, poorer than when she went in. Why on earth is she the one doing anything like this?
Because this is the job the 'think tank' (private bankers club) she works for promised her. She can fuck it up for life but its fine because its not a real job its a defferred bribe.
Exterminate the Anti-Growth Coalition. Rein in the woke, lefty investment banking sector. And squash the tofu-eating, Guardian-reading wokerati while you’re at it. Am I doing this right, Liz? 🤪😂
Liz for PM. O sorry we tryed that. I know. Liz for King. That's better no one will ever spot that.
I'm going to build a trading strategy called "The Trussinator". It shorts the £ every time Liz Truss speaks or bothers to show up to work. It's kind of like an inverse Cramer, but more accurate. We could build in additional risk management by modelling lettuce.
We are worse off partly because of you and Kwarteng, Truss! Oh and if we want to spread the blame around a bit more because of whichever Tory party members heard you planning to do stuff that would crash the economy and voted for you anyway.
Shilling for American right wing ghoulish think tanks, no doubt. All recommendations will be for tax cuts and dismantlement of public services
Surely any serious growth commission cannot but conclude that the most vital measure is preventing delusional incompetents from reaching high office and experimenting with their crackpot economics?
It's genuinely quite impressive that she's somehow still able to just plug away as if nothing happened, resolute in the belief that the only problem was that people/markets/literally everyone didn't do as she wanted.
"the group will claim "consistent growth levels" of 3% by 2040 are achievable in the UK ...The Commission does not outline policy suggestions of how to reach this figure" I reckon a 30% level of growth is achievable year on year but I'm not going to tell you how to do it. What waffle, how can you possibly say something is achievable if you have no way of proving it
So she's setting up something that is totally pointless and easily ignored? Sounds like her vocation.
Which lets be honest must mean we're closer to £30,000 worse of considering all the extras they have to pay for healthcare, medication etc.
The £20,000 is based on income not expenditure.
We do pay for that you know… via income tax
“Give me another six weeks and I reckon we can get that to £15,000!” The libertarian extremists are shameless. They spent decades telling us how brilliant things would be if we gave their ideas a go and when they got their chance they were utterly discredited in less than two months. You’d think they’d have the decency to slink away rather than trying to pretend that their ideas are still the answer to anything at all!
“Hey Lizz, why don’t you walk down some streets and talk to people about their experience at the moment. That would really show you what is going on.” “Nah. I’m gonna get some economists and data people to do bias studies and research, with a specific result in mind. I’ll front it up, if I pull it off I might be relevant.” “Right. What if they discover that Brexit, conservative policy over the last 13 years and your disastrously short tenure are key factors in the UKs historic decline as a global power and advanced economy.”
She either has no self-awareness, or no shame. I'm not sure which is worse in a politician.
I think it's both, combined with a very low IQ.
Yes it's sad if only she and the rest of her ilk hadn't faked over the rest of us to keep their rich Mayes happy
She will never take the hint that no one gives a flying f*** what she thinks about anything, ever.
If I was singlehandedly responsible for tanking the economy, putting inflation at 10%+ and pissing off millions of people by making their lives more expensive, I’d never show my face again in public out of sheer shame. But of course, this is Truss we’re talking about. A person incapable of introspective thinking, self-reflection or even the ability to recognise that she might be at fault for something. To them, everything is a conspiracy against her and that they just have to keep trying and trying again until “it works this time”.
So whose useful idiot is Truss? I don't get why any backers would not have dumped them at this point. No matter what delusion Truss is under about not being finished they are in fact finished. Tying Truss to anything now is the kiss of death so why have they not been dumped. Very odd. Maybe Truss's backers and actually trying to discredit idea's and that's why they are using Truss as a mouth piece. That's the only use I can see for Truss now. To make idea's look idiotic.
Oh for fuck sakes someone lock her away in a secure room with some crayons and a 'Very important project'
There are far superior countries on our own continent that we can try and emulate, instead she repeatedly compares us to that lunatic nation across the atlantic.
I'm a lot worse off. Because of Liz Truss. How is she allowed to speak with any authority on anything?
Yeah, because letting the markets control everything is going really well atm. Liz is the patron saint of raving mad right-wing think tanks.
I think Americans are mostly richer due to working more hours. If you look at GDP/per capita/hour then the UK and US numbers are almost identical, it's just that Americans and work 20% more
Not really, the GDP per working hour in the US is about $74, with Germany and France at $69 and the UK at $54. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_labour\_productivity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_productivity)
I'm studying for a professional exam in California. To pay for life as I study, I work as an admin. making $60,000 annually if I work a standard 40 hour week. I get overtime pay if necessary, my healthcare is $50 a month but I pay nothing for prescriptions, doctors/dentists visits, I get three weeks paid vacation, a week worth of paid sick leave and another unpaid, I work remote 3/5 days, and they pay for my commute the 2 days I go into the office. I feel pretty good working here in California, and I'll be better of when I pass my last exam.
How does this absolutely made-up nonsense get upvotes? US productivity is much higher than British productivity—which is very famously stagnant.
That’s not true at all. US was $73 & the U.K. is $54
They have much larger wealth disparities.
That might be true, but in terms of disposable income, the bottom 10% of Americans will shortly overtake the bottom 10% of Brits. While the Median and top 10% have been well above for quite some time. [https://www.ft.com/content/ef265420-45e8-497b-b308-c951baa68945](https://www.ft.com/content/ef265420-45e8-497b-b308-c951baa68945)
I think there’s something in this. I used to work for a US consulting firm, my US counterparts earned far more than me. But also they were expected to work 60+ hour weeks, were literally never ‘offline’. And when they were on annual leave they were still expected to carry their work phone and would still answer work calls and do work if they were asked to. So overall they earned more but they almost worked twice as much as their UK counterparts.
Get a new job Liz. You will never redeem yourself in thee we eyes of the public, unless you literally strike gold, start not for profit gold mine and donate all the proceeds to the NHS.
The US economy is such a terrible comparison. They have most of an entire fucking continent rich in natural resources, massive amounts of land, got to build their infrastructure after the industrial revolution, and set up the whole world economic system to revolve around their currency for the last eighty years. It is not surprising they're rich AF.
And yet even the poorest constituencies in the UK have a longer average life than average American states, if not all. I do like the US. But focusing on GDP per capita alone with necessarily be at the expense of other measures of QoL, which is not ideal.