Do you want to discuss boring politics? (16 Viewers)

Grendel said:

The council just would get what Central funding is given - it’s not the private sector

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I know that. Where have I said differently?

You said you couldn't understand how LA control would be better. So I basically gave two ways in which whatever funding is provided can be used more efficiently than under the academy system, where public funds are given to private enterprises.

fernandopartridge said:

Polish government interest payments are a higher proportion of its annual national income than the UK's are.

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Which is what you’d expect from a middle-income country…

What’s got the bond markets skittish about France and the UKs debt to GDP is the proportions of that debt that’s going on welfare. Poland are driving their rearmament program.

So it’s like a bank looking at two individuals who are (for arguments sake) spending the same amount of money but on different areas. For example, if person ‘x’ spends money 100k on a car (depreciating value) that and person ‘y’ spends 100k on a 2nd house (appreciating value) or rental income. This is a v high level explanation and not to be taken literally.

Take note of the following:

CCFCSteve said:

Yeah, their budget deficit is forecast to be 6.9% (revised up from 5.5). Ours is around 5%. The difference appears to be driven by Polands defence spending which is 4.8% of gdp (ours is about half that)

Debt to gdp as you say is 55% increasing to 58% (far less debt than us and the older developed EU countries like France)

Not sure where in the thread the comparisons with the uk started but it’s not really an appropriate one, it’s half the size and is at a difference stage of development. France and Germany are the most obvious comparisons in terms of population, size of economy, stage of development etc. both struggling

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SBAndy said:

I get the logic - I think the issue is profiteering. There’s a reason quite a lot of private equity has gone into car home provision over the last 5+ years. I mean, what other choices do people have at the end of the day? Let your elderly relatives remain at home sitting in their own piss until they inevitably injure themselves or blow the house up because they forgot they left the hob on?

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Benny Franks said "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes."

I guess this needs to be modernised to account for the almost inevitable end we all face.

chiefdave said:

Not sure this is true. We don't necessarily need more money, we need the distribution of what we have changed. The last 15 years have seen money flow to the top at an unprecedented rate. Not sure you need to do much more than reverse that.

Try and move back towards hard work being rewarded rather than hard work meaning you're struggling to survive. For the younger generation its horrifically bad. Mates daughter has a full time job and two part time jobs and still has nowhere near the level of income you'd need to move out and have even the most basic standard of living.

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Is your mates daughter renting?

Mucca Mad Boys said:

Which is what you’d expect from a middle-income country…

What’s got the bond markets skittish about France and the UKs debt to GDP is the proportions of that debt that’s going on welfare. Poland are driving their rearmament program.

So it’s like a bank looking at two individuals who are (for arguments sake) spending the same amount of money but on different areas. For example, if person ‘x’ spends money 100k on a car (depreciating value) that and person ‘y’ spends 100k on a 2nd house (appreciating value) or rental income. This is a v high level explanation and not to be taken literally.

Take note of the following:

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More made up nonsense. Poland spends twice as much as a % of its GDP on welfare than the UK does. As if markets really give a fuck what government spends its money on anyway, or are even really in control

Where are the goalposts going next?

fernandopartridge said:

More made up nonsense. Poland spends twice as much as a % of its GDP on welfare than the UK does. As if markets really give a fuck what government spends its money on anyway, or are even really in control

Where are the goalposts going next?

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If your last sentence was true, how did the bond markets bring down Liz Truss?

You’ve also not accounted for a) Poland’s significant increases in welfare spending in recent years (as opposed to historical levels) b) Poland’s debt to GDP ratio and c) Poland’s growth is c. 3% pa.

When the UK last significantly increased welfare spending under Blair, growth was stronger and GDP around 36-37%.

It’s when you get to around 100% debt to GDP that markets get jittery.

An extended debate on Poland’s welfare spending-to-GDP ratio is exactly what this thread should be about, keep it up.

Sky_Blue_Dreamer said:

And that's what we've been arguing for god-knows how long regarding needing higher taxes and really looking at reversing the flow of money upwards. We have to take some pain and upheaval now or we just have to have even more later. Yet all we get told is that we're living in cloud cuckoo land and it's too hard.

Nice to see you're slowly coming round to that way of thinking.

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I've always said and you can review my history on this thread, that I'm more than happy to pay higher taxes as long as it's getting to front line workers. I disagree with all eg NHS staff including administrators, of which we have too many, all getting the same share of the pie.

rob9872 said:

I've always said and you can review my history on this thread, that I'm more than happy to pay higher taxes as long as it's getting to front line workers. I disagree with all eg NHS staff including administrators, of which we have too many, all getting the same share of the pie.

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Grendel went a bit quiet, but this bit on the problem with MATs is worth reading. Much more money is being diverted from the frontline service in these privately run setups.

Brighton Sky Blue said:

As it applies to schools, you would need to reverse academisation and put the schools back under local authority control. Doing that alone would put big amounts of money back into the public service without costing any extra; you could divert it into recruiting more classroom support, facility refurbishments and so on.

It looks like a similar story for care homes but I don't know that sector particularly well.

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From my experience care homes suffer from two issues directly to related to them not being publicly run, on top of the well documented issues with poor pay and unfilled roles.

The first is that astronomical fees are paid to enable an individual or company at the top to take out huge amounts of money.

The second is that as they view it purely in terms of how much money can be made there is a lot of interest in running care homes at the lower end of the needs scale, essentially old people who just want to live in a community and have a basic level of care assistance, but much less interest in running facilities for people with more advanced conditions and complex care needs. Essentially they want they easy money.

There's another issue, which you could in part put down to privatisation, and that's duplication of work. The amount of meetings, and amount of paperwork, I have that are just going over the same thing. That's because you have meetings with the care home itself, the NHS, the council all going over the same thing. The meetings with the NHS are largely because they have no direct control over the medical care being given, meetings with the council because they are paying (some) of the bill, meetings with the care home so they can try and upsell you extras.

I queried why there are so many meetings and was told by the council that it was common for care companies to keep billing them when people had either died or moved elsewhere.