Do you want to discuss boring politics? (28 Viewers)

[Brighton Sky Blue]

My advice: don’t trust tax and spend political parties. It’s never enough.

The Scandinavian countries and their positions as the consistently happiest in the world beg to differ.

What we are moving to is a Scandinavian tax rate but an American level of public service…

 

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[Marty]

Don't trust the idea that spending is dependent on taxes, that's a good start

Money printer go brrr?

 

[Sky Blue Pete]

Just starting to get into politics , I’ve just read we are paying over £100 billion a year on debt interest. Madness. Surely instead of increasing spending on welfare and pensions and foreign aid etc , we need to bring this number down??

That money could then go to ( I imagine this along way off ) NHS, education , increasing the tax thresholds for people , more money for people to spend, creating jobs etc

The country is £2.8 trillion in debt??? Who in the hell let that happen?? Fooking madness

It was just this government and starmer

 

[Sky Blue Pete]

In fairness it was a case of "I'm alright Jack" from Pete. Sums up the modern labour party.

Thankfully my friends and family look at my actions not my poorly chosen (on occasion) words

 

[fernandopartridge]

Money printer go brrr?

All money is created from nothing mate, how could taxes be paid without it?

 

[Marty]

All money is created from nothing mate, how could taxes be paid without it?

I don't know. Creating more money leads to inflation, no?

 

[CCFCSteve]

Interesting thread. What he says is technically true on the point that we can’t go bankrupt…

If we get to a point where we’re printing money (because that’s how government “creates money out of nothing”) though and inflation gets out of hand, it’s a catastrophe waiting to happen.

Hence the point about household debt because a fundamental weakness of the UK economy is the asset price boom. Approx 50% of household spending is on household bills. Back in the 70s when interest rates were 17%, households obviously struggled but could mostly cope. Anything above 8-10% in today’s economy would be cataclysmic and people would lose their houses. No government wants to willingly devalue the property market or causes thousands to lose their houses.

In any case, Andy Verity kinda contradicts himself because his end point is that to restore ‘fiscal credibility’, levy windfall taxes on corporations rather than households… Windfall taxes on energy companies have had negative impacts and NI increases had similarly bad impacts on unemployment already.

MMT is just a convoluted way of getting to the same answer these days…..the amount you are able to spend is ultimately controlled by printing, inflation and taxation

You could argue that partial MMT is kinda already utilised when it comes to the QE used worldworld since 2008 and then governments inflating away some long term debt . This has gone badly in terms of overall debasement and inequality in most countries including ours

The only difference I can see with conventional theory is the belief that you can control inflation purely by taxation rather than interest rates. I personally think the tax system if far too cumbersome to change quickly, coming up with and implementing tax changes takes ages, let alone collection of those taxes.

Too many using MMT as ‘the answer’ are still intentionally/disingenuously not addressing the risks/costs/consequences of it though and Polanski is the new poster boy for this. Whether it would work long term, who knows, I’m not a prophet but there is no way this could ever be implemented into the current world without major economic shocks, probably devaluing of pound and rampant inflation, that would make truss mini budget look like a minor tremor