481–490 of 528 posts
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Can we have your childcare, your healthcare and your housing market please in exchange? Childcare alone in Zone 4 London is £2000 per month.
Yup, it's mad! I pay £2,500 a month for nursery for my son in zone 2. So... to send your kid to nursery you need £40k of spare gross income before paying the mortgage, and everything else. I'm fed up and moving up north!
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I'm not sure why this pose was downvoted, apart from mentioning brexit. I used to live in the countryside, the 90s had a background of rapid improvements in schools and hospitals. 2000s full of out of town megashops killing the high street. 2010s public service cuts. 2020 stuff just not working. The scale of the housing price problem is difficult to behold. https://www.plumplot.co.uk/Norfolk-house-prices.html has the…
> if you live up in the northern part, the average house price is 100x times wage I really, really, _really_ doubt that's the case. That'd need salaries to be £1 million.
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California's state income tax is 12.3% starting at $677,276, so the top rate is 49.3%, and actually surpasses 50% once other taxes are taken into account, and then you have to factor in healthcare costs on top of that. Which as you get older and later into your career (which is when you'd make that much money anyway) can't be ignored either.
High-income wage earners on the US typically get health insurance from their job, which is a tax-exempt benefit that isn’t included in income statistics. After retirement age, Medicare will pay for most medical expenses, although it’s still smart to save some extra money for whatever Medicare doesn’t cover. Amortized over a career, reasonable savings for post-retirement health care might amount to 1% or so for someon…
This increase the total cost of labor which effectively is the same. Of course on the higher end paying a lump sum is way more optimal than an extra 10% tax to fund healthcare. If your income is low.. we’ll it’s a highly regressive system without government support. And with government subsidies it becomes effectively the same just extra hoops.
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> 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…
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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…
That’s a specific issue caused by the Tories deliberately running it down. Pre-2010, the situation was very different. You didn’t have things like the Annual Winter Crisis (which now extends through to autumn). Luckily, Labour will win the next GE, so they can start to turn this around.
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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.
A very significant proportion of US population is covered by Medicaid and if more if you add Medicare. In fact the US government spends almost 50% more on healthcare than Britain does (and that’s only public spending..). The problem is that the system is simply extremely inefficient.
Just look at Switzerland healthcare is privatized to a much higher degree than in the US yet still more accessible…
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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.
The NHS is struggling because the Tory government is deliberately running it down. You didn’t see the many crises it faces under Labour.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
combined with ever increasing inequality offers a much better explanation. Inequality is high in the US too but at least they have a lot of growth which means that the bottom 80% or so are at least not getting poorer.
Visiting family in the UK for the first time in about five years. Costs here are _way_ higher than I remember. I bought three hamburgers, three drinks, and two large pops at a burger shop here, the total was 48 GBP (about $60 USD). This was at Five Guys. I couldn't believe it. I visited my co-worker in the UK, and over some beers, he mentioned he's getting taxed at 48-50% on top of this. Also 20% VAT on regular shopp…
Five Guys is absolutely atypical and has always been very expensive. A burger and a soft drink in a Wetherspoons (love them or loathe them) will be between £5 and £7 depending on the burger. > he mentioned he's getting taxed at 48-50% on top of this That's the higher rate for those who earn the most and, again, atypical. https://www.gov.uk/income-tax-rates
It's not atypical if it's a fifth of workers.
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I don’t think capturing broadband markets and preventing other players entering would count on that scale as corruption although the sums of money involved are not doubt astonishing. You’re talking about something different to the context we were in as far as I can tell.
Actually, believing this kind of monopolistic behavior is in any way unique to Americans is a perverse form of exceptionalism
Visiting family in the UK for the first time in about five years. Costs here are _way_ higher than I remember. I bought three hamburgers, three drinks, and two large pops at a burger shop here, the total was 48 GBP (about $60 USD). This was at Five Guys. I couldn't believe it. I visited my co-worker in the UK, and over some beers, he mentioned he's getting taxed at 48-50% on top of this. Also 20% VAT on regular shopp…