The government has a responsibility to not make the UK economy worse by its actions.
We have way too many people that enter politics with zero private sector experience in economics and finance. Or any real experience for that matter. Its this type of amateurism that ultimately results in sub-optimal policies because they always try to tax the productive to give more handouts to the old and unproductive.
What we are seeing today in the UK economy is what happens when you take that kind of redistributive mentality beyond the limits of the economic productivity that sustains it.
So now we have a stagflationary crisis, as well as a crippled entry-level employment market that is doing material damage to the young.
This is the price a country pays for amateurism run amok. Its the British political disease.
I would love to have a guy like Carney in charge here. A real professional.
Another excellent data driven article by John Murdoch at the FT
The squeeze of the top 10% of income earners in the UK has been so extreme over the last 20Y that the UK now has an even more redistributive tax structure vs Scandinavian countries.
The direct effect of such tax compression has resulted in wide scale behavioral changes at the margins for those higher earners, leading to lowered productivity growth (and outright emigration). This has made the entire country poorer as less tax revenue was therefore available for public services.
This is a serious immigration crackdown. Pathway to permanent residency is now 10 years+ with carveouts for higher earners (who can qualify in 3-5 years).
Roughly 2 million people came to the UK from 2021 to 2024 which is absolutely nuts. Boris Jonhnson truly was incompetent.
Labour being worse on economic policy than the Tories is one of the definitional differences between the parties. If the Tories go stupid then Labour goes insane. (or straight to Plaid possibly)
UK bringing in a âmansions taxâ. I donât think a ÂŁ2 million house in some parts of London is properly called a mansion and I donât think the new tax will affect property values. The province of British Columbia has âmansion taxesâ on properties valued over $3 million and there is not much grumping over it. The extra revenue goes towards BC education funding.
They removed maintenance grants in favour of maintenance loans, which added to the student debt pile fairly quickly. They also introduced postgraduate loans at that time as well (but those grow slower).
Yep. Productivity growth has been anhilated due to higher taxes on the productive. The young with skills and abilities are emigrating abroad.
The UK is over-taxing the very people who make the country truly productive, and then when no growth materialises from these choices, it repeats the pattern to over-tax to give more handouts to the old and unproductive. This is a doom loop and its reached the end of the road.
Part of that is Jersey City exploded in population and the PATH train simply doesnât have enough capacity. And everything on both sides of the river is so built up thereâs nowhere to dig a new tunnel.
My first house in Australia was frigid. When I moved I focused heavily on the energy efficiency rating of the houses as a screening tool for my next place. My next place was vastly warmer. Itâs a metric I wish theyâd bring to Canada and make a mandatory part of real estate listings. It incentivizes make homes more energy efficient as it gives buyers an indication of the relative operating costs of individual homes in terms of heating and cooling.
