Britain's Livelihood Crisis

[cells]

Whatever the current complexion of their governments, Germany and Scandinavia have had a higher tax-take than the UK for many years now. If you define socialist countries as countries with a higher level of taxation, these are socialist countries.

In Europe, at least, the higher taxing countries generally have a better standard of living and have coped better with the recent economic problems. The low tax economies of e.g. Greece and Ireland are ones that are crashing and burning.

It depends what the government spends the money on

You could gave a pure communist system with 90% tax so long as those pulling the strings allocate the money well

More important are your laws and after you have the basic property laws you need to make sure the cronies don't come and corrupt your laws for the benifit of the few.

Planning laws are one such leech on the majority of the UK people. Something.which transfers wealth from 95% of us into the hands of the top 5%.

Others exist too. You can get something like a million in capital gains tax free. Where is my million in income tax exemption?

[cells]

+1

The only thing trade (ie import) restrictions will do is put up the price of everything (such as toasters, imported cars, food etc) so people have less disposable income to spend within the rest of the economy. What Labour did was rather than trying to 'rescue' our declining industries by taxing imports, was to cut out the middle man. The 'taxed' import or more expensive home-made item will cost more - why not tax the UK citizen and then just pay the redundant workers dole money directly!

I think we are at some kind of game changing point which has slowly been brewing for decades. We have had a 60 year credit expansion and most (not all) of us have paid for items out of tomorrow's earnings - tomorrow is now here. I personally define money as 'a future claim on someone's time (labour), property or intellect (or a mixture of these)'. If that is the case and we have been living on debt, then we have to pay in the future with our time, property or intellect. Which means falling living standards.

I also believe however that all debts must be repaid, either by the borrower (in future) or the lender (in effect it was already paid at the time of the loan) - so we could all just default instead.

But all up I think the following will happen. Wages and living standards in the developing world will rise, and will fall in the developed world (esp for jobs that can be outsourced easily!) until there is some kind of equilibrium. There will be huge amounts of underemployed people (compared to their ability), and some will see the upcoming change and protect themselves - and others won't.

Most people I know still don't 'get' what is going on, and as such they will be destined to a life of hard graft and a retirement of poverty..........shame really.

This isn't true. A wealth of a nation depends solely on its laws and productivity and not of its neighbours.

There is a small impact in that commodities ate global and we compete for them but that is small fry relative to our needs.

So you feel you are getting poorer. You may well be....

However say you are disabled severely. Are you better off now or 50-100 years ago?

If you are 70 and have ni savings are you better or worse off than 50 years ago?

If your a single mother...if you develop cancer...if you need care?

There are many who are far better off today than yesteryear. You just don't see them

Overall we are not worse off nor will we get worse off however the benefits will probably be skewed so you are worse off

[wonderpup]

I think we are probably on the cusp of the wave where traditional white collar jobs get outsourced the way the IT industry has

Examples I am thinking about include areas like legal work, finance, design

The reason will both be because its significantly cheaper to do the work abroad and because in many cases ownership / demand is abroad

For instance in the car industry, many of the west's brands are now owned by Asian companies and China is the biggest car market in the world

I don't know too much about the specifics, but I get the impression that the effect that the same forces have had on salaries in the IT industry has been pretty unpleasant for many people

There's an aspect to this that doesn't receive a lot of attention. Many if not most of these white collar jobs now involve, in essence, the manipulation of data of various sorts within the context of industry standard software packages.

So- increasingly- mastery of these professions is synonymous with mastery of that software- as to some degree the workflow itself has been increasingly shaped by the needs and limits of the software being used.

I trained myself to use an industry standard 3D animation tool and ended up working with degree qualified peers- despite having no formal qualifications- and part of the reason I could do that is because I had access to entire tool set of their profession- all they could know I could also learn- no more 'guild secrets' in the computer age.

So I would argue that computerisation of many tasks has 'homogenised' the professions in a way that makes it far easier for foreign competitors to get up to speed, once they ave access to that software.

In the past much of what it took to get along in a given profession was not always so accessible- knowledge was more widely disbursed, but once you go down the road of computerising a task the need to standardise and rationalise the workflow leads to a transparency as almost all of your 'trade secrets' lie exposed in the software you are using.

[Timak]

In the past much of what it took to get along in a given profession was not always so accessible- knowledge was more widely disbursed, but once you go down the road of computerising a task the need to standardise and rationalise the workflow leads to a transparency as almost all of your 'trade secrets' lie exposed in the software you are using.

Pretty much agree - I can't think of many "brain powered" jobs that a reasonably intelligent person with a good ability to retain information (and the ability to access and understand the new information) could not perform to a decent standard within 6 months.

And I include medicine in that.

[boynamedsue]

50% top rate of income tax, 40% income tax on "middle earners", 20% VAT...I don't think there's much room for any tax increases. On the contrary, my guess is the next election will be all about tax cuts rather than increases.

There's about 45% of room to tax top earners more. Have you not heard George Harrison whinging on the taxman? Maybe if tax had been higher the nutter who stabbed him wouldn't have been cared for in the community. Ah, the law of unintended consequences...

Edited June 7, 2011 by boynamedsue

[ken_ichikawa]

There's about 45% of room to tax top earners more. Have you not heard George Harrison whinging on the taxman? Maybe if tax had been higher the nutter who stabbed him wouldn't hav been cared for in the community. Ah, the law of unintended consequences...

Pah your 45%. Sengoku Jidai Japan tax rates of 125-150% were quite normal. The local warlord would come and take all the grain of the peasants (meaning they hid a lot of it) and demanded that the peasants give their labour in construction AND as cannon fodder conscripts in times of war. In modern Britain we should be able to put it up to 2-3 million percent