The UK is in such a weird place right now. There are a group who legitimately want things to get worse because it serves their personal interest, and a group who think no matter how dumb we are, things will not get worse because we are the best country ever. They're conspiring to wreck the whole place. From Brexit to the last few PMs, to education cuts and wasteful spending, to energy "policy".
It's like watching a much smaller version of the fall of rome only without the class or sophistication.
/Rant
Biggest issues in Canada:
1) stupidly priced real estate due to decade plus of factors (rates, building starts, land use, immigration, tax policy quirks)
2) since last year, inflation accelerated making all costs of living too high.. this lack of living wage is a key reason for the great resignation in the service sector imho.
3) tax incentives kill incentive to work. High end rates too high, support at margin seems too generous (CERB)
4) govt services being neglected .. e.g. healthcare. Stuff that remains is bloated ( civil servants getting massive raises relative to others)
I hear from the news, the tax cut being proposed in the uk at least addresses #3 above. I agree that the Econ implications on inflation don’t seem to have been thought through.
Already there are some calls from within the Conservative party to remove Truss and she has only been in the job for a matter of weeks.
All this time wages and services have suffered, because the political class is obsessed with ideology over the boring work of governance. I realise this is not a unique phenomenon around the world, but what seems to set apart the political class in the UK is the heady mix of egoism and delusion, that blinds them to their own incompetence until they are removed and someone else is instated.
It doesn't address it in any meaningful way. That tax cut only benefits the significantly well-off while doing nothing about the lower classes.
In the lower class, this cut doesn't give you any further incentive to work (you're screwed and won't be able to afford your rent or energy bills regardless so may as well not even bother), and the upper class never really needed an incentive.
IMO, it shouldn't been the opposite - completely abolish tax on anything under 50k or so and make it up by taxing company profits higher.
Of course, you could say "fuck the poor" and not care about them as long as the "rich" are doing fine, but the problem is that a lot of "rich" stay there only because there's there's a steady supply of "poor" that buys their goods/services (not saying this in a bad way) - now if all those "poor" are too poor to have money for discretionary spending, a lot of businesses from the "rich" will no longer have any customers to stay afloat and close, leading to job losses, etc - furthermore businesses that serve those businesses will also see a downturn, etc - essentially a cascading failure, and this doesn't even mention the other downsides that tend to come with extreme, widespread poverty such as people resorting to crime as they're out of options.
Every country has problems caused by the pandemic, by war, and by climate change. The energy issues in Europe this winter are downstream of that.
Only the UK has chosen problems caused by Brexit.
And I don’t think any one country (even China or the us) is capable of causing the current inflationary trends. Googling suggests CERB ended in 2020. Pick the current acronyms to keep your political ads up to date.
* spiralling taxes on income for anyone above the bottom 20% of earners
* housing policy that actively stops construction, mis-allocates housing, maximises debt etc.
* collapsing public services due to lack of spending (NHS, Education, Local government provision)
* gold plated, very inefficient spending on certain benefits (housing and pensions and now energy)
The UK is the poster child for a lot of what Americans complain about with Boomers. When house prices go up 50% people shrug because boomers already own, when food prices go up 1%, government immediately offers anyone over 60 a huge subsidy. Then we realise there is no money so we defund health and education and increase taxes on working people. Rinse, Repeat.
The tax changes this week are nice (I will get an extra 2% in my pay packet) but they mostly just reverse the tax increases last year. Meanwhile I need to earn about 8% more this year just to keep up with inflation and because the allowances/bands don't change that will basically wipe out any gains from the "cut".
And we will need to vastly increase taxes very soon as we just decided to throw as much money at energy as we spend on education for under 18s. And that's not to solve the issue, it just paying people NOT to cut their use or insulate their houses...
/RantOnSteroids.
Times like these you remember those (what feel like an eternity ago) days back in '07 where 1GBP would buy you 2USD...
Also note that the article does not use the word 'collapse', which is click-baity editing by the poster.
It seems more like this is a global crisis against which the US is better sheltered than most, possibly due to its geographical position, fuel reserves, strong military and more hawkish monetary policy.
