Is the UK on the road to economic disaster?

And I see Truss has now said straight out that she does not care how the pie is divided up, she just wants a bigger pie. To me, that in itself makes her unfit to govern. A government should care very much that society is working fairly. It should attach at least equal importance to how the pie is divided. It certainly matters to the individuals who vote. But of course that is the difficult part and so she has written it out of her job description.

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Well, yes, because they are irresponsible profiteering carpetbaggers, in it for their gang of friends after all.

Yes.

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You’re absolutely right Sandcastle - but are missing something: it’s the division between entrepreneurs and investors.
You’re seeing it from the entrepreneurs/business point of view. If you’re building a decent, long-term business proposition, higher corporation tax (with investment allowances) is indeed a huge incentive to investment - as is an organised, unionised labour force.
But if you’re an external investor- especially if you’re a City fund manager, that can move ‘investment’ around for any short-term gain anywhere - that all looks very different. What matters is not building decent businesses, but what you can get away with tax-free this year.
Oh - and almost all the Tory Party’s funding doesn’t come from real, productive businesses - it comes from the City.

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Don’t you mean the offshore part of the city😃

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This graphic illustrates the problem perfectly

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The next best thing would be for everyone to take in someone else’s washing to stimulate employment and thus economic growth.

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Rich peoples washing only if you please!

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The New Economics Foundation has charted the tax benefits against inflation - revealing that the poorest half of the population will still get poorer, only the riches 25% will really gain anything much, and only the top 5% will be substantial gainers.

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It’s a very unusual situation summarised quite well by a sky news financial report. We have virtually full employment high inflation but negative growth. So the Bank of England wants to dampen inflation by using the only tool it’s got by raising interest rates hence lowering demand. Truss wants to increase growth by stimulating demand. So they are pulling in opposite directions. If Truss is successful in stimulating demand which is doubtful then the end result must be that the Bank of England will have to raise interest rates much than it would otherwise need to

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It’s pretty hard to fathom, isn’t it? The fall in the £ will also feed through into higher inflation.
All sorts of things occur to me. Deliberately creating a sterling crisis, forcing huge rise in interest rates - as cover to remove the independence of the Bank of England ? Just paying off their City funders, using the idea that lower taxes for the rich will produce growth as a cover for this ? Or just stupid enough to believe their own propaganda ?

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The claim is that Kwarteg’s mates all made a killing shorting the £

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No doubt - but still leaves the question of whether their explicit belief that lower taxes for the rich will create growth is genuinely held - in which case they are just stupid - or whether it’s a lie to cover profiteering - in which case they are just corrupt.

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Personally I favour corrupt and  stupid

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I know next to nothing about currency trading and I think of the stock market as gambling

BUT

if I did have market or currency investments in UK I would wait for a predicted pre-election short boost in the UK economy, and sell out.

Where to put the :moneybag::moneybag::moneybag: is another issue …

Phil Moorhouse A Different Bias offers an explanation about shorting and how this benefited those who were given advance information (probably illegally)

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Well, GDP would go up.
Which is why GDP is a measure that takes understanding and decision-making only so far.

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Basically there’s an election in 2 years or so.
The Tories are securing their funding for that.

They’ve kept the electoral system rigged so that votes still don’t matter enough. And already the keyboard warriors funded by entities behind which are powerful selfserving business and political interests have begun their work. Same as Brexit?

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The comments on how wildly Tory policies have swung about over the last 15 years are interesting.
The video focuses on economics - where the swings have been from austerity to Johnson’s apparent willingness to spend and ‘level -up’, now back to ‘trickle-down’ - and including a complete reversal of approach to public debt. But it’s also true on the social side - from Cameron’s attempts to modernise attitudes to gender, sexuality, race, the environment, etc - through to May’s ‘hostile environment’, Johnson’s opportunistic mix, and now full-on culture war.

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