For decades we have suffered ministers who get elected to advance their own careers but not to deliver good government, in which they have no belief. Government that’s rotted from the top down is the consequence of that.
OK, yes. Self-serving fools get to help themselves to other peoples’ money. And?
Oh. Man thinks this can be solved by having different self-serving fools rather than reducing their ability to help themselves to other peoples’ money.
No cigar then.
What happened was that became the price someone was willing to pay for it. That’s not the same as value.
It isn’t? There’s some objective method of valuation that doesn’t depened upon hte price someone is willing to pay? One that rests, perhaps, in the Galactic Brain of a solanum?
Perfectly willing to agree that the price someone is willing to pay be different from that Spud is. But other than that….
There can, however, be no believer in democratic government who can take any comfort from what happened. Support for democracy is hardly in a good place right now. The USA is tottering on the brink of fascism. Neo-fascist parties are securing significant support across Europe. Romania looks as though it might fall under the control of a far-right president. There is significant political instability in Germany and France, to which the far-right is contributing. The UK is governed with indifference by a government that appears intent on promoting a far-right alternative to itself. This is not a moment when believers in universal suffrage and the right of the individual to be represented within the power hierarchies of the state can be relaxed. I am, most certainly, anything but relaxed.
The S Korean coup failed because democracy. I’d suggest – lightly, gently – that democracy looks in pretty fine fettle.
But note the ongoing lament. Voters seem to be moving in a direrction Spud doesn’t like. Therefore democracy must be in danger because the people are speaking. An odd definition of democracy really….
No wonder this government is already in such a mess. Not only does Rachel Reeves not understand economics, but it is also now clear that she and Keir Starmer clearly do not understand that without good financial controls and having people in charge who really understand the importance of accounting and everything that goes with it, they have no chance of delivering what they want for the people of the UK.
Accounting, accountability, control of financial systems and the good management that flows from those things might be too mundane for Starmer and Reeves to worry their empty heads about, but they ignore them at their peril.
I take that as a bid to be made Cabinet Secretary. Hear the pension’s pretty good there….
Kemi Badenoch’s pretence that we can adapt to climate change is wrong because we can’t.
The claim that business makes that we will find some solution to this in some technical sense, but which we don’t know about as yet, is wrong, because we’ve known about this problem for long enough for that technical solution to have been created by now, or it probably doesn’t exist.
There is, just coming over the horizon into economic acceptability, something that will indede largely solve the problem. And it’s going to be Elon Musk that delivers it.
Space based solar power.
Every individual part of it can be done technically. Sure, probably have to build a couple of iterations of each bit to get it exactly right. But it can deffo be done. The problem is cost. Specifically, cost per kg into orbit. Which is the thing that SpaceX is just solving. We really are getting to the point where it will be economic.
At which point, given insolation, we end up not having a problem, at all, with 24/7 electricity. And with Fischer Tropsch and the like not with anything else either.
Now, I don’t expect to see this supplying the world by my likely checkout date. But odds on in the lifetimes of my nephews, and solid 100% nailed on certainty in the expected lifespans of my great nephews.
There really is a technical solution to climate change and it’s going to be so much fun that it’s Musk who is going to deliver it.
They are fundamentally running a parasitical operation that extracts value rather than adds value. The city likes to claim that it adds £97 billion of value to the UK GDP, which actually isn’t that big when the total UK GDP is over two and a half trillion, which is £2,500 billion, which puts the £97 billion in context, But, even if that was true, that they added £97 billion, they have not counted the negatives.
They’ve only counted how much they were paid to extract value, when in fact, if the resources, those young people, those able people, those well-paid people, were reallocated within our society, to do something that was much more useful – anything from teaching, to innovation, to managing services that provided care, or whatever it might be – we as a society would be much better off.
Of course, the Potato knows!
As opposed to the other 8 bilion people on the planet who really rather like there to be an international financial centre.
Richard Murphy says:
November 27 2024 at 11:49 am
If I have to fund £100 in a year and the interest rate is 0% the cost of paying in a year’s time will be £100 nowIf I have to fund it but the interest rate is 100% then I only need put aside £50 now because I can earn the other required £50 in interest over the next year
So, if the interest rate is higher the amount I need to put aside for a future bill is lower
Does that make sense?
Except it doesn’t make sense from the man who has been squealing that we should never use discounting….
….Free trade is the answer then, yes?
So, what is Trump doing by declaring trade war in this way? He’s going to unleash mayhem. Why is he going to do that? Because a tariff increases the price of goods imported from these countries into the USA. And the USA is heavily dependent on imports from China, from Mexico, and from Canada.
Betcha he’d say no, no, it isn’t…..
The first was an article in the Guardian on what it calls ‘The Great Abandonment’. This is how it describes the process of people withdrawing from the habitation of areas that previously supported human occupation. They noted:
Since the 1950s, some scholars estimate up to 400m hectares – an area close to the size of the European Union – of abandoned land have accumulated across the world. A team of scientists recently calculated that roughly 30m hectares of farmland had been abandoned across the mainland US since the 1980s. As the climate crisis renders more places unliveable – too threatened by flooding, water shortages and wildfires to build houses, soil too degraded and drought-stripped to farm – we can expect further displacements.
This does, of course, highlight my concern about climate migration. But, it also makes clear just how significant the process of climate change already is. Change is happening.
It is, of course, fuck all to do with climate change. It’s economic growth making people rich. So they no longer live like – as – peasants. This is factories and towns and industrial farming being more effieicnt – thereby freeing up 400 million hectares of land for nature to reclaim. With, you know, those lovely effects of rewilding *reducing* climate change.
Seriously, how can someone get this shit so wrong?
Ministers might well, of course, seek to highlight the significant increase in the apparent interest cost arising during the course of the year. However, whilst it is true that the costing question rose, that is offset because the cost of financing future pension obligations fell very dramatically because of the increase in interest rates, which therefore meant that a much smaller provision is required for such costs, meaning that in overall terms the government actually had, in a proper accounting sense, net financial income rising during the course of the year of in excess of £140 billion.
….
The critical figure to look at is net public sector pension liabilities as shown under non-current liabilities, and as is clear, this potential cost fell from£2,639 billion to £1,415 billion during the year, or a decline of £1,224 billion – or almost half the UK’s annual income.What is more, the total UK government deficit fell from £3,875 billion to £2,389 billion or by £1,486 billion (or, near enough £1.5 trillion) in total, or well over half the UK’s total annual income for this year. And I stress that this happened in a single year, and all because interest rates rose so much that future pension costs are now considered to be vastly more affordable.
The good news is that the UK is now, near enough, £1.5 trillion better off than it thought. That money should, as a result, now be available to be spent on making sure that those pensioners for whom the provision is being made might have a country in which it is possible to live in their old age.
This is from the man who insists that discounting future cashflows is a very naughty idea. Yet, when changes in the discount rate favour his ideas he shrieks that there’s another £1.5 trillion that can be spent.
But then who expects logical consistency from a potato?
I could go on. My point is, however, a straightforward one. It is that tax changes behaviour, and often quite dramatically.
Then the Laffer Curve must be true, right?
That, and more – the intergenerational contract that, as I’ve said before, is that one generation will create capital which will be used by the next generation who will forgo their income to look after those who went before them now living in old age and unable to look after themselves. So, unless the savings that people make, which have a monetary form, are invested in assets that are actually of real use to the generations to come, then frankly, as a pension savings mechanism, they’re utterly useless.
The vast majority of the money that is now saved through pension funds in things like, for example, stocks and shares, are actually in assets that are going to be of remarkably little value to generations to come.
The Sage of Ely has a unique insight into what will be worth money in 30 and 60 years time.
Which he then uses to insist that your money should be invested in what he wants. Rather than, say, investing his own money in what will be worth money and thereby making his grandchildren as rich as Croesus.
A huge vote in the value of his prognostications there.
There are quite a lot of things that I only know a little about. That is, of course, true of everybody. Life is too short, and the world is too complex, for us to know a great deal about more than a relatively limited range of subjects. However, that has never stopped politicians from claiming to be the master of any brief that they are given, and for that reason alone, I feel able to ask a question about defence this morning.
That’s an excellent argument for politics – and politicians – not ruling our lives. Thus rather destroying the central thesis of The Curajus State…
Might you please post sensible comments here that add to debate?
As long as you don’t correct me, critique me, contradict me or anything like that…..
That said, it remains the case, as it always has been, that those who arrive here with the very obvious intention of trolling, or to abuse, or to promote ideas that are very clearly alien to the ethos of this blog will always see their comments deleted.
Because
saw them blocked because I simply do not have the time or inclination to deal with their newfound negativity that added nothing to debate.
See? Don’t tell me I’m wrong…..
When farmland has become financialised in the way it has been because of inheritance tax exemptions, farming can’t work, so farmers need to realise that actually having an inheritance tax charge helps them to reclaim farming for farmers and for the benefit of the people of this country.
One Twatto for missing that extant farmers are quite happy with a high price for farmland. It would be farmers who aren’t.
A second, and conclusive, Twatto for failing to realise that if this – if – true about tax then it’s also true about subsidy. So, abolish the subsidies and make farming better for farmers. Or, at least, worse for current farmers and better for would be farmers.
Farming might be important, but despite whatever the farmer might wish to claim, the ability to farm is not eugenically passed from generation to generation. It is a learned skill like any other, and a wise parent really should not demand that their children follow in their footsteps. That’s simply not good parenting.
So that’s following the family grift in making YouTube videos right out.
This, however, is really fun:
Alternatively, farmers are pointing out the glaringly obvious fact that the land that they are using in their farming process has no economic value because it earns no return. Their claim in that case should be that all the profits generated by their efforts are due to their own labour, and not to the value of the underlying assets used in the farming process, and therefore, those assets should have no value when it comes to inheritance tax purposes.
The problem with that claim is that, of course, the market price of that land does not bear this out. There is an active market in farmland, and so the question has to be asked as to why that is true if what farmers are suggesting that no profit can be earned from its use is true. There are two options here. One is that the claim farmers are making is not true. The other is that the price being paid for farmland is solely motivated by the existence of generous inheritance tax relief, which relief has massively inflated the price of farmland.
If this second option is true, then farmers should welcome the imposition of this tax charge because what it should do is significantly reduce the value of their land. This has two obvious advantages for them.
As with Willy Hutton there’s an implication to this.
The argument is that high farmland prices are a barrier to new entrants into farming. We agree, as we’ve said before. High farmland prices also mean that the return on capital of farming is pitiful. As we’ve also pointed out before. And as we’ve pointed out more than once there’s a strong implication of these truths. We must abolish farm subsidies.
Farm subsidies drive up the price of farmland. This isn’t a difficult point to grasp. If farming were subsidyless then there would be less money in farming. Land would therefore be worth less. This is more obvious under schemes that just pay a per acre amount but it’s true of any form of such subsidy. More money from the activity means the limited stock of assets upon which to undertake the activity are higher priced. Just are, obviously.
So Hutton’s telling us it’s righteous to take money off farmers in order to reduce land prices. Possibly – but if we accept that contention then it’s also true that we should stop giving tax money to farmers in order to reduce land prices. Something we wholly agree with – we’re always more favourable to not spending taxes than we are to collecting taxes after all.
Abolish all farm subsidies, go the full New Zealand. Now, does Spud have the courage to follow to that conclusion?
Secondly, the City does not add value to the UK: its activities may well, in fact, be the best explanation for the UK’s economic underperformance precisely because it sucks value out of everything that would otherwise contribute to the value of life in this country.
Would help if there were the occasional shred of evidence for it. Flogging legal, accounting and banking services to foreigners produces about 4% or so of GDP. Seems value to me.
The Government must:
(a)Now make a decisive shift away from voluntary measures to a system of mandatory regulation of the food industry.
(b)Fundamentally reshape the incentives for the food industry through a coherent and integrated set of policy interventions to reduce the production and consumption of less healthy foods, and drive production and sales of healthier foods.
Well, he would, obviously. So the House of Lords committee is arguing politicians should decide what you are allowed to eat.
Joy, eh?
As Rachel Reeves made clear in her Mansion House speech last night, she wants to relax banking regulations. Big bonuses will be coming back, paid much sooner than has been permitted of late. The aim is to increase risk-taking in financial services. She is issuing new remit letters to the Bank of England and others, emphasising that this is her expectation, although copies do not appear to be available as yet. Her belief is that this will boost the economy. She is wrong.
Aristotle noted a very long time ago that money cannot be made from money. His reasoning was clear. Value is created from the production of goods and services that meet needs. Bankers cannot do that. No one can eat money.
The counterargument to that suggestion is that banking and financial services facilitate the aggregation of capital, which can release productive capacity. I disagree with that claim in the modern fiat-currency economy. Banks are the primary source of capital for many companies where growth is most likely. But they do not aggregate depositor money to make loans. Instead, they make loans out of funds they create under a licence from a government-run central bank.
MMT means we do not require a motivated, incentivised, banking sector.
Which is pretty good twattery. Even under Spud’s absurd interpretation of MMT – that banks are not constrained by deposits – it’s still true that bankers allocate credit and investment bankers capital. So, we still want those doing the allocating to be motivated, incentivised, vubrant and all the rest.
The potato’s complaint doesn’t matter……
Whatever the spin on the other statistics (and none of them are good for either of our leading political parties), the reality is that GDP per head is currently falling, and over the last year, it has been flat. Nothing else matters in all this data. The aggregates make no sense when people know that, at best, they are no better off now than they were a year ago (when things also felt pretty grim) and may be worse off.
So, err, why not stop the migration? Large numbers of those coming are, after all, just costs, they’re not even working. So, per capita things are bound to be worse as a result, more costs, no more output.