Truss vs Sunak - Page 3 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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By Tainari88
#15249043
noemon wrote:Once again you seem to be extremely partisan. Are you in harmony with yourself Tainari? My parents are happily married for over 40 years.



Instead of concentrating on what impact this budget will have on the economy and to people's living standards you are just virtue-signaling abstractions. More money on people's pockets, all of the people's pockets, more investment, more happiness, more growth. More tax, less of all that.



There are several thresholds that people abuse for years even decades where they work minimum hours(.ie 16), get the dole, get other benefits also and live pretty good. At this point nobody wants to do any work and people are simply abusing the system, the system both rich and poor pay to sustain them.



You talk about karma yet you pass judgment on a person you know nothing about just because she happens to sit on the opposite ideological aisle.

I do not like Truss but that is irrelevant to my reaction to her policy, which I find reasonable and rational.

She should have unfrozen the thresholds instead of reducing the top-tax rate but we are talking about 2 billion, the equivalent of 2 pennies essentially for a trillion pound economy. 2 pennies have caused global market turmoil because some foreign people want to interfere in internal British politics which you may find amusing because you hate the British Empire but once again this does not say much about "karma".


Noemon, I am responding to your reactions to how you feel about your mother and your father. One is an asshole and the other is not. Why is he an asshole? Is it something personal or is it his politics that are about that? I think the reality is that parents are not perfect human beings. They have defects. Like all human beings do. I do not know what causes a happy marriage between two people who have differences in politics. But differences in power relationships between human beings are very common in this world. I would say power imbalances are endemic to all human relationships. Think about it Noemon. Parent vs child, wife vs husband, teacher vs student, middle-class income vs low-income persons, foreigner vs native, and the list is endless. Do both sides have the same level of power or balance of power? How one finds equal rights and equal power balances in this world? In a society full of differences in power relationships, that is the core of what politics should be about. Negotiating power relationships. The fundamentals of power 101.

I do not know what is of primary importance for you to focus on in terms of priorities for you that concern human power relationships. For me? It has to do with meeting human needs. @Rich posted an intelligent video discussing what are the impediments to development. Primarily economic development.

Why would the UK have a lot of workers or potential workers on partial work and on the dole for decades or for years and that is the only solution to keep them on the dole because full employment and developing the working classes and the lower middle classes is too much of a challenge for the UK government to take on? I would think it has to do with avoiding angry mobs from the lower classes getting pissed because if they have no way of paying bills, and can't find remunerative work or work that pays enough to get ahead? They become a threat to the status quo. The dole is a band-aid solution to unstable or lack of full employment in society.

As for your statement of saying I virtue signal and I don't get along with someone of the other side of the ideological aisle? Noemon, I don't come to PoFo to get along with conservative Tories, or Republicans or Fascists or Right-wing nationalists like Meloni, or any other person of that ideology. I come here to contrast my point of view from theirs. I don't believe in coming to fora on debates in politics to get along with the ultra right wing. I don't agree with it. Why I don't agree? That is what the core of political debate is about.

The trickle down economics of tax cuts for the well off is not a recipe that really translates into jobs for the people on the dole bothering you with false job apps to do the dole quota. There are a lot of obstacles for the majority of workers to overcome in their search for a better life. Many people are just disillusioned Noemon and don't believe in the system anymore. They don't believe their votes count for much. Or they only get offered part time work. They find their ability to buy affordable homes in big cities difficult. Many reasons. The final truth is always going to be how do you re-engage people in their own ability to change their own lives when faced with obstacles? The right wing thinks pull yourself by your bootstraps. They believe in what steps to success? Versus the Leftist versions? So how do you tackle the problems to getting people to re-engage with the effort to find meaningful employment? That is what policy arguments should be about Noemon.

Let us take the movie Seaspiracy that both you and I watched eh? Both the liberals and the conservatives, the right and the left failed to address the underlying reasons for the collapse of that series of government policies eh? How do you get people to come together and re-engage in fighting that problem? A huge problem.

Really well done politics is about really well thought out policy. But it has to have again inclusivity and a sense of dedication to what is good for ALL OF US. Not the center of all politics being profit for a small group only, or lying about the lack of functionality of proposed policies Noemon. It has to have something that works for the objective. Reverse the extinction of many sea creatures, preserve the coral reefs, and eliminate plastics and waste through what? That is what is going to have to happen. Human cooperative groups between many nations work together to solve the huge threat and the huge problem.

Again, that means addressing power relationships and who has power and who does not. Who feels left out and without a voice or representation and who feels powerful and in charge? Who feels apathetic and who is uncaring and who cares and who engages in the solution? Who ignores it?

That is political life Noemon. It will always be so. It is very simple for me Noemon. Using political life for power-grabbing individualistic sake? Is counterproductive for a world full of those type of problems. Truss is not the one doing it.

I think about holistic politicians. What does that mean? That if a politician has bad values and is self centered in policy and in power relationships? They become assholes. They can have all the labels of socialist, communist, fascist, anarchist, moderate, liberal, liberal democrat, and everything in between...but if the core of them is self centered and not humane? The result of the policy will ultimately be a failure.

Your consciousness level determines the effectiveness of your policies and the success of your ability to motivate people for change. Be consistent. In everything that has to do with government. Seek to include as many people in dialogue as possible. If you can't make anything work it usually has to do with a few reasons related to the ability to re-engage people in solutions. If you focus all energy on retaining your power positions and being right only, and wanting to defeat the ones you hate? You won't be able to make progress.

As for hating colonialism in British history. I do. I hate it. I always will. Enslaving other societies in order for a few in the Imperially minded society to live well is not something I see as human. It is not about progress. It is about oppression. I never thought oppressing people makes us free. Not for the ones being oppressed and certainly not for the ones doing the oppressing. The only way to gain a balance of power between disagreeing human groups? Will be about respecting each other's essential humanity. If we can't do that?

We will fail to be able to solve the vast majority of political problems. Once we dehumanize the lower classes because we see them as not quite as human as we are? Because they are in underdeveloped economies or countries or nations, or because they are not the same as us or some bullshit reason. Humans always come up with those when they should be honest with themselves. They fear the unknown and the ones who might take money from them or cost them something or some other nonsense reasons about being obligated to be responsible for someone else's circumstances in life. It is going to kill all hope if that fear is allowed to dominate all decisions in political life.

We lost the battle for a solution that lasts over time. We will lose rights that are hard won over time. We lose ground and we lose also our planet. Because instead of cooperating we will be reaching for nuclear bombs to make the other side give in. Is that the kind of solution we want Noemon? I got kids. I don't want that solution. I never will.
User avatar
By ingliz
#15249046
noemon wrote:reducing the top-tax rate

There is no evidence that tax cuts for the rich result in growth. None. Repeated analysis of this for OECD countries in the period 1965 to 2015 shows that the policy merely leads to higher income inequality in both the short- and medium-term, with no significant effect on economic growth or unemployment.
User avatar
By noemon
#15249071
ingliz wrote:There is no evidence that tax cuts for the rich result in growth.


There is no evidence that 2 billion of tax cuts will cause economic armageddon, nor is there any evidence that reducing them will not result in growth.
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By Potemkin
#15249093
Looks like @noemon is Truss’ only defender. In the entire world.

Keep fighting the good fight, @noemon! :up:
User avatar
By Negotiator
#15249113
ingliz wrote:There is no evidence that tax cuts for the rich result in growth. None. Repeated analysis of this for OECD countries in the period 1965 to 2015 shows that the policy merely leads to higher income inequality in both the short- and medium-term, with no significant effect on economic growth or unemployment.


Whow. Great link ! Thank you !
By Rich
#15249121
The demented cretinism of the Poll Tax shouldn't obscure the fact that not all Thatcherite tax policy was hate driven stupidity. In 1979 the top rate of tax on investment income was 98%, 83% on earned income. Reducing these rates should have clearly been the sensible thing to do. Note under Thatcher the rate of capital gains tax was actually increased.

Taxes on the rich are too low, both in Britain and internationally. The key taxes being for the rich being Corporation, Capital Gains, Inheritance and Mansion taxes. The key point of the Council Tax is that it doesn't scale linearly and it is capped. Remember even the Poll Tax was only paid at a twenty percent rate by those on benefits, so the Poll Tax wasn't actually a pure poll tax. The Council Tax with its single person rebates and exemption for empty properties, is as close to a Poll Tax as the Tories could get away with.

A Poll Tax is essentially just a negative National Basic Income. The ever increasing price of land (with planning permission) is a fundamental problem. There has been massive increases in the level of coercion with unemployment benefits. In the nineteen seventies there was virtually none in practice. Right wingers live in a pathetic fantasy world where people have some how become massively lazier over the last 50 years. Long term unemployment is actually low. The problem is the cost of housing means we have to spend vast sums on benefits, a large proportion of which just goes into the pockets of the landlords, just to keep people in poverty.
User avatar
By noemon
#15249122
Potemkin wrote:Looks like @noemon is Truss’ only defender. In the entire world.

Keep fighting the good fight, @noemon! :up:


As always, commies hate themselves and their own living standards.

The economic attacks against the UK are not rational mate.
User avatar
By Potemkin
#15249124
noemon wrote:As always, commies hate themselves and their own living standards.

The economic attacks against the UK are not rational mate.

Good to know that both the Bank of England and the IMF have become subversive hotbeds of communism. Phase II of our fiendish masterplan can now begin! :up:
User avatar
By BlutoSays
#15249126
I can tell you if my investment gains were $1 or a Trillion and the gubmint taxed it at 98%, I would relocate myself overseas with a new passport as a new citizen.

If my income gains were $1 or $1 Trillion and it was taxed at 83%, I would offshore myself with a new passport as a new citizen. I would do whatever it takes.

Administrators who do nothing except make proclamations and shuffle paper all day are a drag (leaches) on society and are hungry for revenue. They're way too hungry and do things the government is not chartered to do.

I have a finite time on this earth to live and to earn. I am not giving an inordinate amount of my time to complete strangers. That's theft. I'm not a slave to tap my private property endlessly.

The growth of the administrative state and unelected bureaucrats are a real problem that sucks the life out of a country. To think, the suger act and the whiskey rebellion were around 3%.
User avatar
By noemon
#15249177
Potemkin wrote:Good to know that both the Bank of England and the IMF have become subversive hotbeds of communism. Phase II of our fiendish masterplan can now begin! :up:


It's you that's a commie dude, not them.

The BoE is the most obtuse central bank in the world, factually so, by refusing to up interest rates so it can keep house prices going up and the IMF has an axe to grind because of Brexit.

2 billion worth of one income-tax bracket decreasing from 45% to 40% is not a good enough reason to downgrade the British economy.

Normal people should be able to understand this unless they are self-hating sadomasochists betting on chaos for them to thrive on.
User avatar
By Skynet
#15249180
Price caps are the most stupid thing a government can do, so there is no reason to save energy.


Lowering taxes is the right thing, for example Germany under Gerhard Schröder, lowered the taxes but the tax revenue increased.
User avatar
By Wels
#15249187
Sandzak wrote:Price caps are the most stupid thing a government can do, so there is no reason to save energy.

^ you are exactly right :)
Lowering taxes is the right thing, for example Germany under Gerhard Schröder, lowered the taxes but the tax revenue increased.

I am not à jour with all of your politicians, but if i get this right it was german chancellor Schroeder who made Germany dependent on russian gas, for personal gain/to please his friend Putin.
But then yes, at this time non-russian governments could easily lower what they call "value added tax" and still make the same or more money (due to rising prices) to get their economies going AND support their people – and Ukraine.
You really need some super-national entity with more power than the UN.
User avatar
By Potemkin
#15249207
noemon wrote:It's you that's a commie dude, not them.

The BoE is the most obtuse central bank in the world, factually so, by refusing to up interest rates so it can keep house prices going up and the IMF has an axe to grind because of Brexit.

2 billion worth of one income-tax bracket decreasing from 45% to 40% is not a good enough reason to downgrade the British economy.

Normal people should be able to understand this unless they are self-hating sadomasochists betting on chaos for them to thrive on.

Sorry to hear that your stock market portfolio took a dip after the markets, the BoE and the IMF all reacted badly to Liz Truss’ mini-budget, @noemon. I guess that’s what happens when the markets and all of the world’s leading financial institutions are controlled by self-hating sadomasochists betting on chaos for them to thrive on…. Hmm… so that’s where the Bank of England got all its money from…. :eh:
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By noemon
#15249216
Potemkin wrote:Sorry to hear that your stock market portfolio took a dip after the markets, the BoE and the IMF all reacted badly to Liz Truss’ mini-budget, @noemon. I guess that’s what happens when the markets and all of the world’s leading financial institutions are controlled by self-hating sadomasochists betting on chaos for them to thrive on…. Hmm… so that’s where the Bank of England got all its money from…. :eh:


I have removed myself from the stock market since before covid and I was never much into it anyway.

I am not in the upper tax bracket either.

The reaction to the 'mini-budget' was neither rational nor normal.

Sterling has now recovered to levels higher than before the 'mini-budget'.

All it takes to prevent collective market madness from snowballing against an entire nation is just a few people pointing out the obvious.

Fighting the good fight indeed. If this snowballed, the pain would not be for those in the stock market but for the average Briton.

FTSE has been losing for a year now, the only people in it at this point deserve their fate.

But the average Briton does not deserve another 5-10% hit on their incomes just because the BoE is obtuse and the IMF is openly playing political interference games.

Andrew Grice - Independent wrote:Now Labour can blame the mayhem in the markets on a tax cut for the rich – another reason why Truss should delay it. Again, there are other factors, including global ones, and abolishing the 45p rate accounts for only £2bn of Truss’ £45bn of tax cuts. Never mind the detail; it’s how it looks that matters.


Even Labour's advocates understand that the hysteria cooked up is pure politicking against the government at the backs of the British people & economy.
User avatar
By noemon
#15249240
Janet Daley Telegraph wrote:
The IMF is in no position to give Britain pious lectures

In the US, where the fund is head-quartered, the top rate of federal income tax is 37pc

In all the furore last week, it seemed slightly odd that the noisiest international criticism of the Government’s economic policy came not from our near neighbours and former European partners but from the United States.

But then it is hardly surprising that the major EU countries did not orchestrate any chorus of condemnation. They could scarcely denounce our level of national debt as irresponsible when it is lower than theirs, or our prospects for the immediate future when Germany is on the cusp of a recession and Italy’s population is in such despair that it has just elected its first far-right leader since Mussolini.

So no, Europe, for the most part, kept its opinions to itself. It was from Washington, at White House level and from the International Monetary Fund which is now a tributary of the American Left-liberal establishment that the judgements were delivered.

Since when, you might have asked yourself, did the IMF assume the right to criticise the policies of an elected sovereign government? Had we been asking this global finance club for a loan - as the Labour government under James Callaghan had been forced to do - such strictures could have been appropriate. Lenders have the right to impose conditions on borrowers. But the UK Government was asking for nothing from the IMF. Whatever it did was none of their business.

Even more startling was that the IMF felt free to condemn the Truss government’s actions on political grounds rather than purely economic ones. The “nature of the UK measures” it pronounced piously, “will likely increase inequality”. The White House economic adviser, Brian Deese, chimed in too. He urged the UK government to maintain “fiscal discipline” by refraining from what he clearly implied were reckless tax cuts. It might be worth considering then, precisely what fiscal policies these smug Washington elites preside over at home.

Reader, do you know what the current top rate of federal income tax is in the US? It is (deep breath) 37 per cent. And do you know how much Americans have to earn per year to qualify for that level of tax? $523,601 if they are single. $628,301 if they are married.

Have you got that? You have to be making over half a million dollars a year before you begin to pay the highest rate of income tax - which is 37 per cent. (The Biden administration is currently fighting against massive resistance to increase that top rate to 39.6 per cent.) So the UK - where people pay income tax at 40 per cent if they earn roughly twice the average wage - is being lectured on economic equality by a country in which… Sorry, I’m lost for words.

This American preference for low taxes is, of course, a function of its political culture which is profoundly weighted toward self-improvement and individualism. The ethos of making your own way and having a right (even an obligation) to make yourself wealthier if you possibly can, is still fundamental to the American dream. The US remains a very Calvinist society in which striving for financial success and independence is considered proof of personal virtue.

That attitude is rooted in the immigrant experience: you come to a “land of opportunity” and are expected to make use of that opportunity. There is very little parallel with this in the European Old World with its inherited class guilt and traditions of noblesse oblige.

So don’t get me wrong. I do not believe that the full blown American attitude to taxation could be adopted here. I don’t even believe that it works in the idealised way that it is supposed to do in the US which tolerates levels of poverty and deprivation that would be unacceptable in almost any modern European country.

But it is not necessary to embrace the full brutal nature of that make-it-on-your-own economic philosophy to adopt what is valuable in it - which is pretty much what the Truss/Kwarteng policies are designed to do. These are the basic ideas: that mass prosperity and the opportunities for self-determination that come with it are indisputably good things which should be facilitated by government policy; that the way to deliver them is through stimulating the growth of real wealth, and this can only be accomplished by lowering taxation and allowing free markets to be as innovative and resourceful as they are able to be. In truth, the only alternative to embracing these ideas is inexorable decline.

But adopting even an attenuated version of the New World social philosophy will require accepting some propositions that are pretty unfashionable in the current discourse.

For example, the one that underpins that pompous statement from the IMF which rejects any move that is likely to “increase inequality”. It is absolutely necessary - if we are to come to grips with what is causing our problems - to understand that there are very different kinds of inequality. The bad kind is permanent and debilitating: the result of social prejudice or systemically rigged disadvantage. But there is another sort which is transitory and unavoidable. Fluctuating disparities of wealth (which is to say inequality) is an inevitable feature of a flexible, thriving, dynamic economy. At any given moment, some sectors will be failing and others emerging.

Innovation and shifting needs (including demographic changes and emerging social trends) will cause significant, sometimes unexpected mutations in demand and consumption.

The most dramatic historic example of this is the industrial revolution which had tumultuous effects on the possibilities for wealth creation and the elimination of whole categories of work. The only countries that can guarantee absolute equality all the time are totalitarian ones in which wages and living standards are fixed by government fiat.

Inequality is what happens when the economy and the society grow and move on. It is one of the prices we pay for freedom.


Since when does the IMF comment on government policy without invitation and even more so of a G7 country? This must be a world first actually. :?:

The country with the second lowest debt-to-gdp ratio in the G7 and for 2 billion of tax-cuts when the top rate in the US is even lower and the threshold to reach it 3.5 times higher?

:eek: :roll:


But yeah let's all jump into the IMF bandwagon cause it's trendy.
User avatar
By ckaihatsu
#15249417
Politics_Observer wrote:
@Potemkin

Has Britian taken to the American model of passing big tax give aways to the rich? Isn't this sort of like Reagan's trickle down economics that has been proven to be a failure economically speaking? Cutting taxes for the wealthy does not increase employment, consumer spending, nor government revenues in the long term.



Agreed, but *technically* it's not a tax give-away, it's a subsidization of *profits*, to the energy sector.

It also occurred to me that increased balance sheets means more payouts on the *financing* of that larger debt, which deters economic velocity and growth, for any given country and currency.

*Trump* did the tax-cuts-for-the-rich thing upon entering office. Better would be subsidization of *need* -- here's from another thread:


Drlee wrote:
I am a conservative who is strong on illegal immigration. I firmly believe in workplace enforcement. But such enforcement without an amnesty would destroy our economy overnight. The solution, which I do not believe we will ever achieve, is an amnesty that puts current illegals on the tax rolls and which, only then, stops illegal immigration in its tracks by drying up the jobs.

Long post but the point is that we can't look at one tiny piece of immigration, legal or otherwise, and believe we are seeing the whole picture.

Pay American workers enough to pay for expenses including health care and still have enough left over to buy a modest family home and that simply economic principle you mentioned earlier will have houses growing like trees.



ckaihatsu wrote:
This winds up being 'nativism' (I think), and definitely nationalist trade-protectionism -- over labor markets.

If markets are so fuckin-awesome then why would you need national labor-protectionist wage supports?

But first, wait -- are you really *suggesting* wage-supports, or the government subsidizing of *wages* somehow?

You could make a whole political *career* out of that kind of campaign promise. (grin)



viewtopic.php?p=15248946#p15248946



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(Note 'profits' and 'wages' in the following diagram.)


material-economic exploitation

Spoiler: show
Image


Spoiler: show
Image
User avatar
By ckaihatsu
#15249427
Potemkin wrote:
Exactly. Truss is an adherent to ideological dogma which passed its sell-by date more than 30 years ago. Borrowing money to give tax breaks to the super-rich while taxing pensioners on their meagre income seems… an odd way of proceeding. Even the IMF, who are not usually noted as trendy lefties, have objected to this. Truss genuinely seems to think that she really is Thatcher 2.0. Even more worryingly, however, she also seems to genuinely think that this 1982 rather than 2022…. :eh:



Potemkin, if you haven't noticed, Truss is just doing the *politician* thing -- the tax-break is mostly *symbolic*, a *gesture*.

She's underwriting energy costs, and that's *Keynesian*. She's just inheriting a bad situation, like so many recent heads of state.
By Rich
#15249459
Anyway can we please stop falling for enemy propaganda. There was no budget here. This was just a special financial operation.
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