MalcSB
Well-Known Member
There is graph that looks like inequality reduced during 14 years of Tory misrule
There is graph that looks like inequality reduced during 14 years of Tory misruleThe gap between the haves & have nots has indeed been wider, but the rise of the middle classes makes it a bit blurred when you look at trends. In 1900 the gap was way bigger, but the middle class was minuscule compared to today.
In 2023 the richest 50 families in the U.K. held more wealth than half the total population, and if the wealth of the ‘haves’ continues at current rates, the wealth of the richest 200 families will be larger than the entire U.K. GDP by 2035.
we’re about average on wealth inequality in global terms, but one of the most unequal countries in the world when it’s based on income.. all sourced here which looks like an interesting site.
How Has Inequality Changed? - Equality Trust
Levels of inequality changed dramatically over the course of the 20th century. Overall income inequality fell from a high point in the 1930s, remained fairly static until 1979, and then increased dramatically from 1979 to 1991. Since 1991, the trend has been more volatile, affected by Great...equalitytrust.org.uk
There is graph that looks like inequality reduced during 14 years of Tory misrule
OBR report didn't support the £22bn claim, more like £9.5bn. Which of course Labour promptly doubled.“Indirectly” “essentially”
yeah you’re scrabbling.
What would you have cut given the £20bn of spending the Tories hid? And as you say seemed to know what they’d done because they priced it up pretty close (£1600 per household actually)
Yep just remembered the phrase I’ve always liked but it’s still impossible for the reason you make
Equality of opportunity is the desire isn’t it and steps put in place to aim for that
OK then, lets take politics out of it.Maybe so- I couldn’t give a toss about the party politics debate, which is just a big deflection anyway, I was interested in the trends themselves.
Are you *still* bitching about paying VAT on a luxury good?
Hope they double it next year.
Thanks for this interesting article. I had genuinely forgotten that years ago my colleagues and I had spent hours during lunch breaks discussing and agreeing how we could screw up all subsequent generations.interesting article..
Stereotypes of millennials are usually not flattering. However a series of new studies shows that their predicament is not of their own making, and that many problems faced by those born after 1980- such as unemployment, the cost of living crisis, crippling student debt and unaffordable housing- are a consequence of those who came before them.
Thanks to the baby-boomer generation, millennials are the first in the history of humanity to be worse off than those who came before.
In “A Generation of Sociopaths – How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America”, Bruce Cannon Gibney argues that by refusing to make the most basic (and fairly minimal) sacrifices, they have bequeathed their children a mess of epochal proportions.
Boomers did not address climate change when they could, gutted public investment in social programmes that would have benefited their children and grandchildren, and ushered in a new era of economic precarity that left their descendants poorer and more anxious.
To paraphrase Philip Roth, they ensured “socialism for us and capitalism for everyone else”.
Through government programmes such as social security and other entitlements, they ran up huge debts that are now absorbing the taxes paid by millennials.
With the US and many governments continuing to run eye-watering budget deficits to fund such benefits for the elderly, at far higher interest rates than before, it remains unclear how sustainable it all is.
“Because the problems Boomers created are growing not so much in linear as exponential terms, the crisis that feels distant today will, when it comes, seem to have arrived overnight.”
And generational inequality is leading to social tension. Jill Filipovic, in her book “OK Boomer, Lets Talk”, explains what she sees as the root of the intra-generational tension: millennials are leading worse lives than their parents did, and Boomers are to blame.
Data show that, as Filipovic puts it, “life at 30 for your average Millennial looks close to nothing like as good as life at 30 did for the average Boomer, and instead of constructive dialogue & action we see deflections such as attempts to blame immigration for all our problems, resulting in ongoing & dangerous racial & societal tensions”.
Baby-boomers’ true political legacy, she argues, was the Thatcher-Reagan revolution of the 1980s. This was a consolidation of benefits for the elderly, the lowering of taxes, and the shrinking of the social safety net for the young and disadvantaged. All this has resulted in ever greater generational inequality.
Studies in Australia and the UK show worsening livelihoods and social discontent for the youth, particularly in the decade after the financial crisis.
A report compiled by economists at the Resolution Foundation has laid out the extent to which Britain’s millennial generation (defined here as people born between 1982 and 2000) are worse off than previous cohorts were at the same stage of life.
The authors found that millennials born in the late 1980s earned, on average, 8% less at the age of 30 than their counterparts from previous generations.
The audit also found that the typical weekly pay of graduates aged 30-34 fell by 16% in real terms between 2007 and 2023. And according to research from the House Buyer Bureau, UK house prices are currently sitting at 8.8 times the average earnings. This is an all-time record, and has more than doubled since the 1970s.
In Australia, the latest Scanlon Report, which maps social cohesion, says that almost half of 18- to 42-year-olds – that is millennials and Gen Z – said they were “barely getting along financially”, and the same amount believed the things they do in life are worthwhile only a little or only some of the time. Meanwhile they see the generation before enjoy their ‘protected status’ while asserting that millennials just don’t know how to manage their affairs properly.
Of course, not everything can be blamed on one previous generation. One should not equate inadequate progress with total failure. The Boomers didn’t even come close to creating a good world for their children — but they didn’t inherit a perfect world from their parents, either. It’s just that the boomer generation in particular appear to have had no issues in protecting themselves at the expense of their descendants.
There can be no doubt how difficult the current malaise of generational inequality, high house prices, high cost of living, high debt and stagnant wages makes life for the young. Combined with existential issues such as the climate crisis, collapse of the global order, and the current trend of “blaming immigration”, this means that for large swathes of those born after 1980, it is often hard to have any hope at all.
I mean this is just nonsense, people don't avoid bettering themselves because they think they're going to be taxed on it. Come off it ffs.
Anyhoo, what do we all think of the budget.
State pension aside, I am £0.76 per annum better off.
Net effect of changes to state pension I am £18 per annum worse off. I will have to stop buying a loaf every month.
I used one on Guardian.Is there an online calculator to have a look?
I used one on Guardian.
Budget 2024 calculator: find out if you are better or worse off
Use our interactive tool to see how you have been affected by the chancellor’s tax and spending announcementswww.theguardian.com
It would be interesting if it was possible to put the actual budget in to the "simulator" @shmmeee shared a little while ago to see whether Reeves got it as wrong as we all did
I used one on Guardian.
Budget 2024 calculator: find out if you are better or worse off
Use our interactive tool to see how you have been affected by the chancellor’s tax and spending announcementswww.theguardian.com
It would be interesting if it was possible to put the actual budget in to the "simulator" @shmmeee shared a little while ago to see whether Reeves got it as wrong as we all did
If you think any tax that isn’t VAT, IC or NI does not impact ‘working people’, good for you.
Businesses aren’t stupid, they account for these taxes by either reducing pay for workers, freezing hires, relocating or passing increased costs to consumers.
Therefore, if you raise a new tax levy that has an impact on employees wages directly, you may as well have increased NI/IC. Likewise, if business increase the cost of products and/or services as a result of taxes, which they will. Again, you may as well have increased VAT.
A lot of businesses will freeze new hires and SMEs could struggle altogether to manage with these increases.
I’m just surprised that you seem to be wilfully ignorant of what is an obvious balance book trick by the Chancellor.
OK then, lets take politics out of it.
There's a graph that looks like inequality has reduced over the last 14 yers.
Getting hung up on word definitions just isn’t serious policy discussion. Sorry. All it’s been since Labour is normal politician stuff (register of interests, marketing language) suddenly being the worst thing ever seen.
All I know is the country is fucked. If I need to pay more tax then fair enough. If others don’t want to then they need to point to the excess in public spending cos frankly I don’t see it.
As does everyone else.you pick out the bits which suit your agenda and ignore everything else, that’s ok.
Source?I like this one.. no mention of daft political blaming, just the reality. I don’t care about Tory v Labour, but it’s pretty offensive to just be telling the younger generations to buy less trainers & don’t spend money on Costa when they’ve been left with a total shitshow by the people who came before & who are the ones moralising about what they should do and moaning about immigration.
“Young people in Britain could be forgiven for despairing at the financial pressures they face – and feeling that previous generations enjoyed a much fairer economic environment. Then just to add to their worries about home ownership and a precarious jobs market, along comes the gloomy announcement that the UK’s public debt is now 100% of GDP.
That debt burden will have to be carried by tax-payers for decades to come. Paying the interest – just the interest – of the country’s debt currently accounts for around 7.3% of public spending. That’s more than what is spent on defence (4.8%) or transport (3.8%).
And while some of what’s left will go to towards essential future public services, it will also go towards fixing problems caused by a historic lack of public investment (less money being spent by previous generations) in water, railways and other crucial infrastructure.
In fact, in the 1980s much of that infrastructure was used by the UK government to help finance itself, with assets including British Gas sold off at a bargain price. Those baby boomers and older generations who could afford to buy shares often made big profits.
There are other kinds of costs that today’s younger generations have had to bear too. During COVID lockdowns, universities and schools were closed as the young were forces to stay at home, predominantly to protect the elderly. They have lost the freedom to live and work in the EU after 60% of retired people voted for Brexit, while most young people voted against. Leaving Europe has also made the UK less well off.
But not everyone is poorer. In the last 20 years, the average income of pensioners has increased on average by more than 50%, while that of working-age adults has risen by less than 10%. The median income of pensioner households is now higher after housing costs than that of households with children.
Most of the country’s wealth is now in the hands of older people. In 2018, one in four people aged over 65 was living in a household with a total wealth of over £1m pounds. Poverty rates of pensioners are now lower than for the rest of the population.
Yet pensioners receive all sorts of unconditional discounts and benefits, such as free or discounted public transport. Their income is exempt from national insurance contributions, and there is a triple lock on state pensions, which is guaranteed to grow faster than work income.
While there is mild popular support for limiting the fuel allowance to poorer pensioners, the question of recouping money from older people remains highly sensitive. (Back in 2017, the then prime minister Theresa May had to quickly U-turn when she suggested using pensioners’ wealth to finance the rising cost of care.)
One reason for this reluctance to prise money from older people may be that while most pensioners are doing better (compared to the working population) this is not true of the poorest ones. Also, some pensioners do not claim the benefits they are entitled to, and the last thing a civilised society wants is to let its older people freeze.
But the apparent economic divide raises a broader question about inter-generational justice. What does one generation owe the generations that follow?
And it’s not just about money. Global warming is another thing older people have not spent most of their lives having to pay for, with the burden for repairing environmental damage again falling mostly on the young.
Perhaps a fair philosophical approach would be that it’s OK to leave certain costs to be paid in the future if the next generation can generally expect to live longer and in better health, with more consumer choice and comfort, and an improved quality of life.
But this does not seem to be the expectation right now. Incomes have stalled, and so has life expectancy, while housing prices have not been so expensive relative to earnings since the 19th century.
In that sense, many people, however old they are, would probably sympathise with young people today. And they may even argue that it’s time for the government to focus on policies that explicitly benefit the young – like house building, different forms of taxation or subjecting pension income to national insurance.
There could also be a change in fiscal rules to allow for more investment in national infrastructure, higher taxes on fossil fuels to pay for the energy transition, or sharing the cost of funding higher education more evenly among all graduates, regardless of when they got their degree.
Such changes would provide a dramatic shift towards an economic system which seeks to redistribute wealth not just among citizens – but between the generations.”
I like this one.. no mention of daft political blaming, just the reality. I don’t care about Tory v Labour, but it’s pretty offensive to just be telling the younger generations to buy less trainers & don’t spend money on Costa when they’ve been left with a total shitshow by the people who came before & who are the ones moralising about what they should do and moaning about immigration.
“Young people in Britain could be forgiven for despairing at the financial pressures they face – and feeling that previous generations enjoyed a much fairer economic environment. Then just to add to their worries about home ownership and a precarious jobs market, along comes the gloomy announcement that the UK’s public debt is now 100% of GDP.
That debt burden will have to be carried by tax-payers for decades to come. Paying the interest – just the interest – of the country’s debt currently accounts for around 7.3% of public spending. That’s more than what is spent on defence (4.8%) or transport (3.8%).
And while some of what’s left will go to towards essential future public services, it will also go towards fixing problems caused by a historic lack of public investment (less money being spent by previous generations) in water, railways and other crucial infrastructure.
In fact, in the 1980s much of that infrastructure was used by the UK government to help finance itself, with assets including British Gas sold off at a bargain price. Those baby boomers and older generations who could afford to buy shares often made big profits.
There are other kinds of costs that today’s younger generations have had to bear too. During COVID lockdowns, universities and schools were closed as the young were forces to stay at home, predominantly to protect the elderly. They have lost the freedom to live and work in the EU after 60% of retired people voted for Brexit, while most young people voted against. Leaving Europe has also made the UK less well off.
But not everyone is poorer. In the last 20 years, the average income of pensioners has increased on average by more than 50%, while that of working-age adults has risen by less than 10%. The median income of pensioner households is now higher after housing costs than that of households with children.
Most of the country’s wealth is now in the hands of older people. In 2018, one in four people aged over 65 was living in a household with a total wealth of over £1m pounds. Poverty rates of pensioners are now lower than for the rest of the population.
Yet pensioners receive all sorts of unconditional discounts and benefits, such as free or discounted public transport. Their income is exempt from national insurance contributions, and there is a triple lock on state pensions, which is guaranteed to grow faster than work income.
While there is mild popular support for limiting the fuel allowance to poorer pensioners, the question of recouping money from older people remains highly sensitive. (Back in 2017, the then prime minister Theresa May had to quickly U-turn when she suggested using pensioners’ wealth to finance the rising cost of care.)
One reason for this reluctance to prise money from older people may be that while most pensioners are doing better (compared to the working population) this is not true of the poorest ones. Also, some pensioners do not claim the benefits they are entitled to, and the last thing a civilised society wants is to let its older people freeze.
But the apparent economic divide raises a broader question about inter-generational justice. What does one generation owe the generations that follow?
And it’s not just about money. Global warming is another thing older people have not spent most of their lives having to pay for, with the burden for repairing environmental damage again falling mostly on the young.
Perhaps a fair philosophical approach would be that it’s OK to leave certain costs to be paid in the future if the next generation can generally expect to live longer and in better health, with more consumer choice and comfort, and an improved quality of life.
But this does not seem to be the expectation right now. Incomes have stalled, and so has life expectancy, while housing prices have not been so expensive relative to earnings since the 19th century.
In that sense, many people, however old they are, would probably sympathise with young people today. And they may even argue that it’s time for the government to focus on policies that explicitly benefit the young – like house building, different forms of taxation or subjecting pension income to national insurance.
There could also be a change in fiscal rules to allow for more investment in national infrastructure, higher taxes on fossil fuels to pay for the energy transition, or sharing the cost of funding higher education more evenly among all graduates, regardless of when they got their degree.
Such changes would provide a dramatic shift towards an economic system which seeks to redistribute wealth not just among citizens – but between the generations.”
In any case, I don’t understand how people think the government will magically make inequality disappear by investing in the public services.There is graph that looks like inequality reduced during 14 years of Tory misrule
He was just repeating what Joe Biden said the other dayThe bot account seems to be malfunctioning.
Well, the OBR has worked out low income migration (legal migrant who earns 50% less than median salary) will cost the taxpayer £150,000 by retirement age (calculated from age 25).There is some irony at the hate towards older people who have paid into the system all their lives but if you mention illegal immigration.....
Can somebody work out how much somebody staying in a hotel on the tax payer costs along with their healthcare, legal costs, etc etc as opposed to somebody on say 40k a year or a pensioner?
Well, the OBR has worked out low income migration (legal migrant who earns 50% less than median salary) will cost the taxpayer £150,000 by retirement age (calculated from age 25).
As you mention, Labour isn’t interested in that. The ‘smash the gangs’ rhetoric remains rhetoric and meanwhile, the scrapped Rwanda plan (or similar schemes) is potentially going to be adopted by the very EU countries that derided the scheme in the first place.
I believed Labour incapable of resolving the issues facing the country (not that Tories were a particularly better option). We’re a few months in now and there’s nothing suggesting they’re cut out for it. Starmer is haemorrhaging support particularly from Labour voters at the last election and without improvement, will suffer the same date as Sunak’s led Tory party this summer.
The potential silver lining is that we’re early into the parliament.
The real life consequences of such policies, however, is important and worthy of discussions.
In which, the chancellor has conceded there will be an impact on private sector workers. The Resolution Foundation has predicted two decades of zero wage growth.
This was supposed to be a pro-growth budget and this is anything but. So Labour deserve to pilloried on this.
As does everyone else.
I’m not saying it’s not hardYou are talking about equality of opportunity.
So therefore one would assume that starts with education. So everyone is educated to an equal standard.
The only way you do this is to equalise the system. How is that done? Even the comprehensive system is in essence rigged to the richer in society is it not?
Source?
£1262.85 better off milky bars on me tooApparently I’m £1200 better off! Milky bars are on me.
There is some irony at the hate towards older people who have paid into the system all their lives but if you mention illegal immigration.....
Can somebody work out how much somebody staying in a hotel on the tax payer costs along with their healthcare, legal costs, etc etc as opposed to somebody on say 40k a year or a pensioner?
this is from 2022 but gives an idea: Factsheet: Cost of the asylum system – Home Office in the media
£4.7m a day and 37,000 migrants, £127 a day to be in a hotel per person. £46,355 per year, per person just for housing.
Add in healthcare, legal costs, the allowance that is paid to them. I'd bet it's costing the taxpayer over £50k per migrant, per year.
All the old people's fault who have probably worked from 15-16 and paid tax into the system all their lives.
There is some irony at the hate towards older people who have paid into the system all their lives but if you mention illegal immigration.....
Can somebody work out how much somebody staying in a hotel on the tax payer costs along with their healthcare, legal costs, etc etc as opposed to somebody on say 40k a year or a pensioner?
this is from 2022 but gives an idea: Factsheet: Cost of the asylum system – Home Office in the media
£4.7m a day and 37,000 migrants, £127 a day to be in a hotel per person. £46,355 per year, per person just for housing.
Add in healthcare, legal costs, the allowance that is paid to them. I'd bet it's costing the taxpayer over £50k per migrant, per year.
All the old people's fault who have probably worked from 15-16 and paid tax into the system all their lives.
You really should step out of these conversations. You think the cost of health and social care and pensions is close to putting an immigrant in a hotel?
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