Not in the EU it doesn’t:
To deter them, Zucman suggests a form of exit tax, known as an “anti-exile” shield, that would require those who leave to continue paying their dues for another, say, five or ten years, which he says is possible given a greater willingness in recent years for countries to exchange bank information.
It’s a restriction on the movement of labour and capital. Not allowed.
Research by the Centre for Social Justice estimates that by 2026 there will be more than a £2,500 gap between earnings and combined benefit income. A full-time worker on the national living wage is expected to earn £22,500 after paying income tax and national insurance. An economically inactive claimant on universal credit for ill health with the average housing benefit and PIP would receive around £25,000, rising to £27,500 for those awarded the highest rate of PIP.
Not really sustainable, is it?
Sure, of course we don’t want the ill or disabled to be dying in gutters. But there also has to be some sort of incentive to go our to work.
It’s not sustainable….
As I’ve written recently, Britain should explore public funding models akin to the BBC licence fee – collectively supporting AI systems serving public purposes rather than commercial imperatives.
Err, yes, Love. You go and have a nice lie down now….
Donald Trump signed a proclamation on Friday that would impose an annual $100,000 fee on H-1B visa applications, dealing a potentially major blow to the US tech industry, which relies heavily on workers from India and China.
The US commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, said at a Friday press briefing that “all the big companies” had been briefed on the new fee.
“A hundred-thousand dollars a year for H-1B visas, and all of the big companies are on board. We’ve spoken to them,” Lutnick said at an Oval Office event with the US president.
“If you’re going to train somebody, you’re going to train one of the recent graduates from one of the great universities across our land. Train Americans. Stop bringing in people to take our jobs,” he said.
It’s all long been more than a bit of a scam. Not sure this is quite the solution but blowing up the current position isn’t wholly bad shall we say.
It needs a national economic and environmental strategy, such as those that guide China and Singapore. In fact, Reeves should create a Department for National Strategy to lead public green infrastructure investment that will revive private investment in a weakened, risk-averse economy.
Labour should transfer that role to a new Inflation Control Office, which could use taxes, price controls and even rationing to lower inflation.
Price controls! Rationing!
East Berlin circa 1957 or so, no?
Speaking after the Guardian revealed the British public have been paying a “privatisation premium” of £250 per household per year since 2010, he described the mass privatisation of UK industry as a “failed experiment”.
“This report shows that privatisation has been one of the key drivers of the cost-of-living crisis and growing inequality … the Conservatives were the architects of this failed experiment, but the Labour government has done virtually nothing to change course.”
Or, perhaps, we should take him at his word? Britain’s problems are less than a £ a day per household. Should be easy enough to solve, no?
The annual rate of house price inflation has turned negative for the first time in more than 18 months.
The average asking price of a property coming to market in September is £370,257, according to the property search website Rightmove. The figure is 0.1 per cent lower than at this point last year.
House prices have been falling relative to median wages for several years now. As they obviously will when interest rates rise.
The argument we need to have a wealth tax to reduce asset prices – La Gazza – therefore fails. Not that that will stop them all shrieking….
UK workers take more sick days than in US or Australia
Since the pandemic the number of days off work due to illness has risen much faster in Britain than in those other countries
Much chuntering about workshy chavs and counterpoints of our appalling capitalist culture:
However, absence rates in the UK still sit below the major economies of continental Europe, where statutory sick pay is more generous.
Oh.
The UK’s sick-pay system is also more supportive than that of the US. Statutory sick pay in Britain is just £118.75 a week and not payable for the first three days but many employers supplement it with occupational schemes. In the US, by contrast, there is no universal federal entitlement, leaving millions with no paid sick leave at all.
Australia and New Zealand offer a maximum of only ten statutory sick days compared with 28 in the UK, and many antipodean staff save them for emergencies, suppressing usage.
Right. Incentives matter then. And that’s all we need to know too.
Sometimes things are simple….
The leftwing senator Bernie Sanders welcomed Trump’s efforts to take a stake in Intel in exchange for government grants, for example – something he advocated in the Guardian back in 2022 – while some Republicans have condemned the approach as (heaven forbid) “socialism”.
Sigh.
Its destruction has not happened overnight. The days were already long gone when the US, as the world’s undisputed economic superpower, could export free market, financialised capitalism worldwide.
After the 2008 crash, the conditions for which were created in Wall Street boardrooms, any moral or practical claim the US had to offer an economic example to other nations evaporated.
As the turmoil rippled out through the global economy, and the US government responded by bailing out large chunks of its financial sector, the lie of laissez-faire was laid bare.
That analysis is even more stupid than the policies of course.
There is ample ground for legitimate disagreement here: taxpayer stakes in strategic companies are much more common in European economies, for example. Trump may be laying down tracks that future US governments with different priorities could follow.
The US is markedly richr than the ssorts of places that do those sorts of things.
The actual complaint here is that Trump is doing all the right things – smashing free market capitalist laissez faire! – but it’s Trump doing it so that’s bad. But then The Guardian, eh?
US treasury secretary denies Trump tariffs are tax on Americans
There are theories in wihch the selling companies – the foreigners – carry the can. Not very good theories and ones that aren’t empirically valid. But they exist.
As concerns continue to grow over American companies trying to pass on the cost of US tariffs on to everyday Americans, Welker asked: “Do you acknowledge that these tariffs are attacks on American consumers?” To which Bessent replied: “No, I don’t.”
That’s an easy sidestep – is income tax an attack on American consumers? That is, even if tariffs are a tax upon Americans…..
Of course, tariffs are damn stupid but that’s another matter.
Thousands of young people face an “unemployment crisis” after a hiring freeze from shop owners threatens to reduce the number of part-time retail jobs.
Just the time to abolish the lower youth minimum wage – which they want to do – and raise the minimum wage – which they have done – and increase the taxation of employment – which they have done.
It’s just do damned annoying to keep having to point out the same thing. The people who suffer most from a minimum wage, or any increase in the costs of employment, are the young and untrained.
Nearly 7pc of Sainsbury’s shares are in the hands of hedge funds – making it the most bet-against company on the London stock market, according to data published by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
Hedge funds short stocks by selling them then buying them back later at a lower price, profiting from the drop in value. The high number of shorts means a decline in Sainsbury’s share price over the coming months is widely expected in some circles.
The bets against the supermarket chain, which also owns Argos, have escalated in recent weeks after Ilex Capital upped its bets.
According to FCA data, Ilex, a fund based in Kensington, west London, increased its short position to about £182m last week, up from £125m in early July.
The move highlights growing unease in the City about an expected price war between Britain’s major supermarkets. An aggressive price-cutting campaign from Asda has prompted rivals, including Sainsbury’s, to consider following suit.
So, competition between capitalists hungry for the consumers’ money leads to lowered prices and the capitalists taking the hit.
I’ve got that right, have I? What a fun system, eh?
Donald Trump on Wednesday revoked a 2021 executive order on promoting competition in the US economy issued by Joe Biden, the White House said.
The initiative, which was very popular with Americans, was championed by top Biden economic officials, many of whom had previously worked for or with the senator Elizabeth Warren, who played a key role in creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Barack Obama.
These are the people who, when seeing that egg prices rise during an outbreak of avian ‘flu, shriek “Greedflation!”.
Probably a good idea to get rid of their rules, yes.
“They couldn’t pay back the last loan and now the IMF is lending them another $20bn that they won’t be able to pay back either,” said Joe Stiglitz, the Nobel economist who once handled financial crises in emerging markets.
….
“The country is not on a viable course. There is going to be another crisis sooner or later,” said Prof Stiglitz, speaking at the Festival Gabo in Bogota.
You know, it’s not like Joe has any ideological reasons to think that a free market solution might not work……
Ireland’s economy has shrunk for the first time in almost two years after Donald Trump’s tariff blitz sparked a sharp drop in corporate activity.
New trade figures show that Irish gross domestic product (GDP) shrank 1pc in the three months to June 30.
US trade so distorts the Irish economy that it’s one of the gfew we shouldn’t use GDP to measure. GNP is the important one there.
The difference is between what is made there and what accrues to people there. Normally they’re pretty similar but there’s so much of the Irish economy that just passes through without sticking to the sides that the second, GNP, is the only useful manner of measuring how things are working out for the Irish.
No 10 has for some months been actively searching for an economics adviser; someone who can be Starmer’s eyes and ears on the ground. Despite reports suggesting this could be a senior former Treasury mandarin such as Tom Scholar or ex-deputy governor of the Bank of England Sir Jon Cunliffe, The Observer understands that interviews have been taking place at a more political – and junior – level, with progressive thinktanks being scoured for a Starmerite Alan Walters, the late economic adviser to Margaret Thatcher.
Imagine scouring the NEF for someone who knows some economics. An isometric exercise at best.
A senior government source said devolving more power to local mayors was central to Ms Rayner’s plan for economic growth, but Ms Reeves was looking for “quick wins” and did not want to force through constitutional changes that would take time and could backfire.
Not wholly sure that another level of trivial bureaucractic plans would, in fact, increase growth. Has Sadiq?
Rents, a major problem with housing unaffordable to many people, have fallen by 40pc over the last year after the government scrapped all rent controls, bringing a flood of properties on to the market.
Our rulers here want to impose rent controls of course.
It’s a standard part of the lefty economic analysis that imports take jobs – good union jobs – from hte locals. Therefore economies should produce their own stuff.
Cuba’s economy is in its worst state since the early 90s, when the collapse of its then benefactor, the Soviet Union, led its GDP to shrink by one third in a matter of months. President Fidel Castro euphemistically labelled the crisis the country’s “special period”.
This time a combination of US sanctions
Therefore Cuba should be rich as Croesus given that no American – capitalist! – imports come and steal local jobs. So, which part of the analysis should they give up? About imports? Or socialism?
One of the most striking from the interwar years was the economist John Maynard Keynes. In an essay published in 1930, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, he dismissed the prevailing mood of economic pessimism as wildly mistaken.
“It is common to hear people say that the epoch of enormous economic progress which characterised the 19th century is over,” he wrote; “that the rapid improvement in the standard of life is now going to slow down … that a decline in prosperity is more likely than an improvement in the decade which lies ahead of us”.
Instead, he suggested that economies were suffering not from the rheumatics of old age, “but from the growing-pains of over-rapid changes, from the painfulness of readjustment between one economic period and another. The increase of technical efficiency has been taking place faster than we can deal with the problem of labour absorption”.
It is testament to the timeless quality of much of his writing that Keynes might have been talking about our own age.
In any case, he was substantially right, and his long-run forecast that technological advancement would lead to vastly increased wealth and living standards, if anything, somewhat underestimated the extent of the progress subsequently made.
Yes, the quote is right. But his calculation was in fact about piling up the capital, not technological advance so much. One of the reasons he rather underestimated the rise in living standards….