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One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

bbc.com

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Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#421

Post by Kaijo »

skippyboxedhero wrote: post #409
Kaijo wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Five Guys is not "3x any other burger chain", that is lunacy. I live in London and eat burgers a lot. Chains like GBK ("Gourmet" Burger Kitchen, of course just another mid-market chain, not gourmet in a classical sense), Honest Burger, Byron Burger, Black Bear Burger, Burger & Beyond, Patty & Bun, other imported USA chains like Shake Shack, and others. They're all popular places to go for a burger, and they're as or…

We don't all live in London big man.

Correct. However, enough of us do to render your claim that Five Guys is "3x as expensive as any other chain" entirely factually incorrect. And the situation's basically the same in any UK city big enough to have a few Five Guys.

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#422

Post by skippyboxedhero »

IshKebab wrote: post #263
skippyboxedhero wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't believe prices are so high...goes to Five Guys which is at least 3x any other burger chain. I still can't believe how cheap the UK is. Big Mac meal near me is £6, cheeseburger is £1, 1kg of potatoes was 20p the other week, two-portion microwavable rice 20p, even a nice matured ribeye steak is only £5, it is genuinely incredible. In particular, the price of stuff that comes from farmers is really too low in the…

> the govt recently introduced free childcare for a certain number of hours I'm guessing you don't have children because they actually promised to do it in a year. Nothing has changed yet. Also the extra funding for free hours works out at like 20p/hour which is way below what is needed for nurseries to break even on free hours. I think you're massively overstating how good things are. Are taxes aren't high because t…

Our state pension is paid out of contributions made over a lifetime, it isn't remotely close to a good deal...if it is so good, would you have all your contributions paid into the state pension? No.

Brexit? Zero cost. Corruption? Zero cost. It is amazing that the state is giving massive handouts to people in work, and they still complain that things are terrible. We are giving thousands of pounds per year to people on more than 3x the median salary, and your response is: more money please. We are spending £200bn/year on healthcare, fully universal..."why am I having to pay taxes for this? Things are so bad".

Okay...if you were on £50k, would you support the govt making thousands a year in transfers from you to people on £200k?

One reason why economic policy is so bad in the UK is that people genuinely cannot conceive of economic policy being made for anyone but them: planning, govt finance, monetary policy...every area, it is really quite excruciating.

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#423

Post by mustacheemperor »

EddieEngineers wrote: post #294
mustacheemperor wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Draegers is probably the most expensive grocery store I have ever set foot in. The one near San Mateo has a crazy wine selection sometimes but I literally cannot fathom buying a week's groceries there. Beautiful produce, but you can get beautiful produce at a farm stand for a couple bucks too. Not sure how to feel about the existence of luxury grocery stores. I'm sure the people who shop there are happy.

It's the only place that has guanciale and decent pancetta near me, plus they sell pasta from my in-laws village in Italy, which is fun to cook carbonara with from time to time. They also sell wagyu which is hard to find in the Bay Area! I absolutely would never ever do my actual weekly shopping from there!

Speaking as someone who spent an hour last week fruitlessly looking for pancetta that wasn't factory packaged in plastic, you raise a good point!

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#424

Post by tmnvix »

monk_e_boy wrote: post #50
el_oni wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

House prices are awful, and with the current mortgage rates it makes it even harder. Last July when we first started looking at what sort of deposit we would need and how much mortgage payments would be it looked like we would be spending an additional £400 a month (which is fine, I wouldn't have to save for a house after all). But since the catastrophic economic policies of our shortest term prime minisiter we would…

And who is hoovering up those expensive houses? Not the middle class. Rich folk are investing in housing and renting it out. It's crazy.

Sometimes not even bothering to rent them out. It's the capital gains game!

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#425

Post by skippyboxedhero »

Kaijo wrote: post #421
skippyboxedhero wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't all live in London big man.

Correct. However, enough of us do to render your claim that Five Guys is "3x as expensive as any other chain" entirely factually incorrect. And the situation's basically the same in any UK city big enough to have a few Five Guys.

It isn't. I would try leaving London. Almost all the chains you have mentioned do not exist outside London.

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#426

Post by noneeeed »

gpderetta wrote: post #370
noneeeed wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is your brother in Scotland? If not he should get his tax code checked. Combining income tax and national insurance contributions, the highest marginal tax rate on your salary is 47%, and that is only on everything over £125k (about $150k). The vast majority of people are in the standard rate band where you pay 20% IT and 12% NI contributions, a total of 32% on what you earn over the tax free allowance £12,500 and un…

Between 100k and 125k the tax free allowance tapers away, for an effective marginal tax rate of 60%.

Good point, I’d forgotten about that weird bit of the band.

I wish we would simplify the tax and NI system into one set of bands, but that’ll never happen.

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#427

Post by fshbbdssbbgdd »

jjav wrote: post #372
dragonwriter wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the US, someone earning $155,000 USD (Equivalent to 125 GBP) will also be paying 6.2% in social security taxes, 1.45% in medicare taxes, and then another 6.2% in social security taxes (employer’s portion), and 1.45% in medicare taxes (employer’s portion). In the UK, there is also National Insurance tax on top of income tax, which works similarly (but is a bit more complicated.) The employer share is 13.8%, which…

> > ‘Americans pay less taxes’ is largely a meme with no basis in reality. > No, the UK has a much higher tax burden; the US is significantly below OECD average, the UK a bit above. > [0] https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/revenue-statistics-highl ... Rather than contradict the OP's statement, the above document reinforces it. The document only covers taxes identifies as "taxes", which makes the comparison with US a…

If we’re talking about the UK, college has got a lot more expensive there. Cost to run a university is getting more expensive everywhere, the Baumol effect doesn’t discriminate. Some countries subsidize more aggressively than others, but it’s getting harder.

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#428

Post by pmontra »

jjav wrote: post #372
dragonwriter wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the US, someone earning $155,000 USD (Equivalent to 125 GBP) will also be paying 6.2% in social security taxes, 1.45% in medicare taxes, and then another 6.2% in social security taxes (employer’s portion), and 1.45% in medicare taxes (employer’s portion). In the UK, there is also National Insurance tax on top of income tax, which works similarly (but is a bit more complicated.) The employer share is 13.8%, which…

> > ‘Americans pay less taxes’ is largely a meme with no basis in reality. > No, the UK has a much higher tax burden; the US is significantly below OECD average, the UK a bit above. > [0] https://www.oecd.org/tax/tax-policy/revenue-statistics-highl ... Rather than contradict the OP's statement, the above document reinforces it. The document only covers taxes identifies as "taxes", which makes the comparison with US a…

Add pensions to that. Many countries have mandatory state run pension funds (for lack of a better translation, it's late at night here.) People can add their own private pension fund.

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#429

Post by ohgodplsno »

dragonwriter wrote: post #230
vkou wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, someone earning $155,000 USD (Equivalent to 125k GBP) will also be paying 6.2% in social security taxes, 1.45% in medicare taxes, and then another 6.2% in social security taxes (employer's portion)[1], and 1.45% in medicare taxes (employer's portion). Added to the rest of their marginal tax rate, they'd be seeing a rate of 22 + 15.3 = 37.3%. Of course, they won't actually get health insurance for it, which…

> In the US, someone earning $155,000 USD (Equivalent to 125 GBP) will also be paying 6.2% in social security taxes, 1.45% in medicare taxes, and then another 6.2% in social security taxes (employer’s portion), and 1.45% in medicare taxes (employer’s portion). In the UK, there is also National Insurance tax on top of income tax, which works similarly (but is a bit more complicated.) The employer share is 13.8%, which…

Pretending that the employer is paying taxes for the employees is doublespeak popularized by large companies to justify why they want to stop paying it.

It is not taxes. It's a contribution to a functioning society. Otherwise, employers would get access to employees with NHS without putting a penny in.

Re: One million cancel broadband as living costs rise

#430

Post by ohgodplsno »

armitron wrote: post #375
dragonwriter wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the end of the day, Americans still pay, and pay more They pay less in taxes, by a wide margin. They also get less for them, by a wide margin, particularly (but not exclusively) in healthcare.

Really? I have top of the line healthcare through my employer in the US, which also covers my wife and teenage daughters, which costs me essentially nothing. NHS in the UK is collapsing, but even if it didn't, qualitatively it's orders of magnitude worse than what one would receive in the US through one's employer: Months to years for an appointment, incompetent doctors and a bureaucracy that puts Kafka to shame. htt…

So you have an employer paying tens of thousands a year to get you health insurance, leading to a situation where only the most well off can have access to healthcare. The NHS is struggling because there's a shit load of people to treat with very little means. The US healthcare system is doing well because it leeches money off of the most well off and lets the poorest die.
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