What government schemes are giving free cars? I hadn’t heard of that. I guess there is Motability for people with disabilities?
Something you realise when you travel around the UK is that only a handful of areas actually have a productive economy. In many towns, you find that the only outside money coming is from the government, either in the form of government organisations based there (councils, NHS, etc.) or benefits. That money then swills around the town on services like MOTs and hairdressers and so on.
That means the few productive areas like London, Birmingham and Manchester and a few others have essentially all of their production taken by the government and reallocated to these areas of zero/negative productivity. This isn't a new thing either. The UK has been in a "productivity crisis" since at least the late 2000s.
My family come from one of these productivity holes, and they are all on the take. Everyone's scamming the benefits system and any work they do is under the table.
Really I believe as a country, we need to face reality at some point. We have to turn off the tap that people have become dependent on and require that people figure out how to survive without it.
1. You cannot subsidise unproductive economies indefinitely. If there's no work in your local town, go somewhere else. It's a small country and somehow people from Eastern Europe manage to come here for work, so someone from Merthyr Tydfil can probably figure out how to get to Cardiff. Government spending should be on infrastructure to facilitate productivity.
2. The elderly are clogging up the system. Either we need to start cutting services to the old, such as reducing healthcare provision beyond a certain age, or we need to import massive amounts of productive labour from other countries to rebalance things, and build huge amounts of housing, hospitals, schools to support it.
3. We need to rebuild as a country of innovators. This means making the burden of regulations proportional to the size of your enterprise. But we also need a cultural shift here too. If you have an idea here, everyone will quickly tell you why it won't work and you shouldn't try. If you do it anyway and are successful, you become loathed. Tall poppy syndrome etc.
Everyone is blaming Brexit and sure, Brexit didn't help matters, especially over the last few years. But there are lots of countries doing fine outside the EU, and these problems started well before Brexit. Our problems are deeper rooted and, perhaps, in many ways EU membership was hiding them.
The elderly demographic is large and they all vote.
However, if you have no (documented) savings or property, the sorts of things you will get are a free council house, weekly allowance and child benefits.
People will often then supplement it by claiming disability, having multiple people in the house claiming benefits, subletting free property and working illegally.
The cost of living in these sorts of areas tends to be very low too.
What do you mean? It looks like the UK's income tax system is progressive, so you'd still be making more money, even if at a lower percentage of the real value. Do you mean that your net pay would be too low to warrant spending time on a weekend?
Naturally people optimize around the fact that there are salary ranges that exhibit no increase in net income. It creates a lot of perverse incentives.
I'm surprised by the amount of tax illiteracy shown in these comments.
Life is a dream lived over an abyss. We invent all sorts of distractions and systems of order to seal the gates of hell, to keep the dream alive, but the truth cannot be ennchained forever. Like children, we go about our days unaware of the unfathomable darkness lying in the heart of the human soul. We look at men who do great evil, killers, tyrants, etc., and think evil begins and ends with their kind, but this is a comforting lie. It's in us all: the face of the most abominable monster is our face, yet we deftly conceal it with our many illusions that keep the darkness from rising within us.
We will all die and be forgotten. Humanity will be superceded and humiliated by its own progeny. Life, as we wish it to be, as a think that can be conserved, is futile. What happens when then the illusions fall, making life aware of it's own futility? Life can only be kept innocent as long as it believes in itself--that it has a future, that it can be preserved. Once life becomes aware of its own futility, it becomes self-destructive and hostile to life...demonic--if you will.
Our civilization has turned its back on this spiritual struggle against death(satan). Like children who ignore the wisdom of their fathers, we have chosen to pretend that it's not real. That material abundance will solve all of our problems. But no material abundance will compensate for the poverty of the soul of man.
As long as we ignore the eternal struggle, all that we build will fail and we will be utterly unable to know what causes our downfall because it fundamentally takes place in regions we refuse to acknowledge. Like an attack from some higher dimenson beyond our understanding, it will appear as if we were undone by some unaccountable magical force.
Likewise there is a profound disconnect between such societies and nature, even by those who claim to want to "save the planet".
Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell and many others have gone into depth on this.
1) you own the house you live in, someone on benefits does not;
2) for the point "I have the benefit of getting literally no help", this is literally incorrect, your ability to earn a living in the UK is contingent on a wide range of public services, from roads, to public education, to the NHS, to a functioning civil service and justice system (as flawed as these may be).
how do you afford a house on benefits?
I think this is bad for everyone. Poor people for obvious reasons, and everyone else because even when it works it drives up rents and by extension house prices, with the extra money going to people like me (and I left the UK).
I think the UK government should be building more council houses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_house
So a single person reliant on benefits will at best be able to live in shared accommodation. Larger families in more expensive locations (e.g. most of London) would not have their rent fully covered. A single bedroom flat in the cheaper parts of London rents for about £15,000/yr.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/jun/24/nhs-consulta...
but you can claim £1,000 of trading allowance per year if registered as a sole trader!
This is a policy choice that can and should be changed: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/29/opinion/biden-liberalism-....
High earners in Sweden for instance pay nearly 11% higher effective rate compared to the UK.
Things are extremely difficult here if you're working for a living and are not ultra wealthy. Just last year I brought a house which put in me hundreds of thousands of pounds of debt because of how ridiculous house prices are. I've worked and saved my whole life since I was a teenager (32 now), yet there are 20 year olds on benefits in my family who live in houses that are worth more than mine and have never worked. I'm so stressed out right now because interest rates are obviously rocketing up so I'll be paying a much higher rate when I go to remortgage next year and at the same time house prices could potentially crash. The reality is if I lose my job over the next few years I'm probably going to be screwed and the last 15 years of work was probably all for nothing. Fun.
At the same time significantly more than half my income goes on taxes when you consider taxes like VAT, council tax, TV license, car tax, fuel taxes, stamp duty tax, and all the others I'm forgetting on top of the income and NI tax that comes out of our wages. For the hundreds of thousands of pounds of tax I've paid over my career I have the benefit of getting literally no help whenever I need it because I work and I also get to enjoy our barely functional public services.
I'm not complaining about my situation, but it does upset me when I've struggled my whole live to get where I am, yet single mums in their 20s in my family still get to live in nicer houses than me, get free cars from the government while not having to work a day in their lives. I'm driving a Fiat Punto with 90,000 miles on the clock while several people in my family on benefits have gotten new BMWs because of government schemes.
The low growth we have in this country doesn't surprise me at all. Last week I was looking for a weekend job to help with the bills, but given my tax rate it's basically pointless looking for extra work. People in my family on benefits are also routinely advised not to work by the job centre because it would leave them financially worse off. But we're not just disincentivised people from working, we're also massively over regulated. It never ceases to amaze me just how difficult it is to do anything here. For example, my girlfriend likes making bath bombs she wanted to sell some so I looked into helping her set up an online store, but I found out you have to pay hundreds of pounds to have every product you want to sell reviewed and approved first making the whole thing pointless at the scale she would be operating at. Another example is something I'd love to do which is sell cakes, pastries and pizzas as a delivery service from my home kitchen because I love cooking and always have too much food. But I can't sell food because to do that I need to have health and safety inspections, and again at the scale I'd be operating at it makes no sense. And it's like this with everything here. Unless you're super rich or know someone in the industry who can get you through all the regulatory hope I don't really understand how anyone starts any business without being terrified that they're operating in violation of some regulation. Apparently I can't even cut the tree down in my own garden without telling the local council because it's over a certain width. It's a beyond a joke.
I very much agree that Britain is heading for a crisis if we're not already in one. The core problem we have is that people here truly believe the government can fix everything by spending more money and increasing taxes, and until that attitude changes nothing will get better. So instead of cutting taxes and incentivising people to work, I can almost guarantee the public will demand the government fixes this problem by increasing taxes on people who earn more than them while spending ever more money on various inefficient wellfare schemes. And if you want an example of this then just look at what's happening right now with the energy bill crisis... No one is asking for tax cuts to help people with affordability, they're asking for handouts to pay for their bills while increasing taxes on the energy companies.