381–390 of 784 posts
For most of the last sixty years, a good idea about how to run an economy should have involved closely scrutinizing what the British were doing. And then not doing that.
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> Brexit was the most stupid thing a country ever did to itself From an economic standpoint, brexit was indeed a big L, but I dont think brexiteers were largely voting on economic grounds - a point which is lost on most remainers.
from a non-economic standpoint it was just as stupid, the idea of "taking back control" is predicated on the concept that the UK was forced to accept rules imposed by others and would be free to stop doing that. But the UK had substantial influence on those, and it no longer does, while still having to follow them to be able to do business with the EU. And indeed, the UK has not really diverged from the EU in the las…
This is obfuscation to the point of dishonesty. The postwar public home-building project was the largest in history, and provided a previously-unbelievable increase in the quantity of cheap, good-quality housing.
> With some spikes and troughs, new homes built as a share of the total housing stock have generally declined over the past 60 years.
Again, very disingenuous wording. It is equivalent to saying "the housing stock grew less than exponentially over the past 60 years". For instance, a constant rate of house building would result in "new homes built as a share of the total housing stock" declining. Note also that 60 years takes us back to 1965, leaving an unmentioned 20-year postwar period.
Incidentally, wtf does planning permission have to do with nationalisation? The US has zoning laws, am I supposed to think they've nationalised their housing market? Does the author think we still have nationalised housing?
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And all of those numbers pale in comparison in how we cruelly we treat birds used in the food supply chain (eggs, chicken etc). The recent kurzsesagt video is a great intro to the topic ( https://youtu.be/5sVfTPaxRwk )
This is completely and utterly irrelevant to the topic at hand. Wild bird populations are potentially at risk, and extinction of a population has massive ecological consequences. Commercially raised chickens and the horrors they are exposed to are completely unrelated to that.
This is a conservative (note small c) bit of agi-prop. "Things were better in the old days" before politicians stuffed up. Sows discontent with no discussion of future action. The comments here are far more interesting and important. Bloody MSM!!
https://www.ft.com/content/8d5f2952-3c17-11e8-bcc8-cebcb81f1... https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/insight/the-housing-act-from...
Fun fact: there's a popular pub question to ask tories - "name one successful Thatcher policy" which on the face of it doesn't have an answer. However her "Enterprise Allowance Scheme" was ironically a big success
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/jul/26/thatcher-ent...
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> In the US, it should be possible to get a 95th percentile household income ($300k, married filing joint) effective federal income tax rate down to 10% to 15%. I cannot believe it. Do you have a worked example?
$300k income, MFJ, $46k 401k contribution, $8k HSA contribution After standard deduction ($29k), AGI is about $217k. That's the 24% bracket (barely), which adds up to $34,337 + 0.24*$16000 ~= $38,200 federal income tax $38,200/$300k = 12.7% You can get even lower with itemized deductions: mortgage interest (might be over $40k) plus SALT ($10k) plus a few donations ($5k) => AGI of $191k => federal tax rate of under 11…
Deeper question: Now that you provided a reasonably scenario where a household earning 300K USD combined income can "only" pay 12+% in federal taxes: Does this make sense from a policy perspective? My point: Should it be higher? It seems hard to pay for what a highly developed nation needs to pay for where 300K USD households are paying such measly federal taxes. (To be clear: I very well understand this is one component of total tax burden, but still a worthy discussion.)
Nastily anti-state bias that’ll get a heap of upvotes here no doubt. What the uk actually needs is less private companies leeching off the masses and more investment in state support.
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Humans in the UK killed and ate over 111,000,000 birds just in January 2025. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/poultry-and-poultry...
They also raised about 110,000,000 birds that otherwise would never have been born. This is completely irrelevant to wind turbines or any other power generation tech - the impact on wild birds is what is of concern, because, by definition, we're not able to raise any number of wild birds we'd like to have.
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Yeah of course distributed infrastructure is ... Bad??? Oh no we have no single point of failure, empower people to invest into the grid and have huge redundancies in the grid... Batteries literally solve most of the problems
Don't forget to factor in the possibility of lithium shortages in the next decade. Batteries don't solve anything if you can't build them. https://themarketbull.com.au/2025/02/07/lithium-remains-a-ke...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_United_Kingdom_miners%27_...
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We’d had a decade of zero growth and 30 years of industrial decline in the North. The country was not doing well, that’s the primary reason it was inevitable putting a big button marked “do not press, posh boy David Cameron says he doesn’t want you to but has no other solutions. Ignore the people saying it will fix the country” would result in the button being pressed. The economy was doing well for some parts of the…
Well now its not doing that well anywhere, bravo. Thats the problem with populists - they easily find some real issue and point to it, blaming all even completely unrelated woes on it. So far so good. But the solution part is where all populists fail, since actually addressing it and its root causes always has to involve admitting that no, problem is actually much more complex, different etc. than I was voted for. Li…
It's not hard to understand why, given that choice, someone stuck in a Northern ex-mining town facing zero prospects, poor housing, no local amenities, massive regional unemployment or unstable employment would listen to the one pretending to be listening to their issues. Again, we'd had 30 years before that where FPTP allowed the main parties to more or less ignore huge parts of the electorate.