BeermatYes, I’d be happier with less rhetoric and more working-through from JC as well. Unfortunately I am not sure the public is ‘geared’ to listen – A soundbite like ‘He might be King but he isn’t God’ probably worked better with the public than a tretise on lunar gravitation. This applies to both sides of the current political debate, as far as it goes.
Still going to vote Labour though.
BeermatIt’s only tired and old in the way ‘the tide goes in and out’ is tired and old.
Unfortunately we are living through a time of canute-followers. Those with a grasp of lunar gravitation / economic history are indeed ‘unsuccessful’. No-one could deny that!
No one is accusing anyone of stealing. Just pointing out a few basic principles – myth-busting if you like. It’s not big or clever, anyone can do it by stepping back and looking at the system as a whole.
Unless one creates something of value (ok, or provides a service to / steals from the next tribe down the river) the net economic impact is zero. We are just cutting each other’s hair, and paying each other for it.
The City of London may well be making money from overseas. It is not magicking up wealth from nowhere, and no matter how wealthy individual bankers get, the alchemy is still a lot of smoke and chanting, and no real gold from lead.
BeermatNobody has said it’s fine if people don’t work.
It’s a myth. A nonsense. Where on earth does any Labour tract, manifesto, speech or anything ever say that no-one needs to work?
The clue is in the name. It does not mean maternity!
Is the daily mail now saying it’s house-building that is the problem? Or people working to pay for them? Or people not working and paying for them? Or what?
Are you seriously suggesting that if we engage on a house building programme there will through some unspecified mechanism be more unemployed people claiming benefits? Is that what they are telling you now?
No, I have not said all the money comes back to the government. But you tell me where it does go! Believe me, you will not find it in the Mail. They think you are too stupid to understand. And yet you were half way there with the Trident workers.
Think it through. What is the econimic impact of work? You get paid. Good. Where does that money go? To the shop. The carmaker, the hairdresser. They get paid. All good. But no more money has been ‘made’. Unless your work creates something of value where it wasn’t before, the net economic impact is zero. It just means you get to eat. This is as true of a worker at the submarine facilty as anywhere else. This is the first thing to understand, the rest follows naturally.
Social housing does not mean the same as housing the deliberately unemployed. I am repeating myself – did you actually read my post before the jerk?
‘Benefits culture’. What is that exactly, apart from a rubbish channel-5 freakshow?
The unemployed are housed already. Whether you wish to make them homeless is up to you and your concience. Regardless of that, building houses so the employed can afford to live somewhere does not encourage anyone into unemployment. Being unemployed is sh*t.
Which bit do little-Englanders find so ruddy hard to understand? I am not too hopeful of the ‘clang’.
Yours, sir was a three-pound coin.
Please give it some thought.
Sometimes there is nothing else to say but ffs.
BeermatBit like May-or-may-not, then.
The Tories have only got complacent because in believing their own bull they assumed everyone else would too.
Interesting that you are using the through-put of money from government to people’s wages and supporting businesses engaged in a zero-gain activity (which I presume you mean by ‘associated economic impact’) as a factor in cost when it suits, but claim not to understand the principle when it doesn’t (roads, railways, health, housebuilding – the last two of which are not even long-term zero-gain).
To put it another way, if you spend money, then add up all the extra money now in circulation among the people you spent it on and subtract one from the other.. your maths is bad if you DON’T get zero. That doesn’t make whatever you have spent the money on zero cost!
However it also doesn’t make it any net ‘loss’ to the nation either.
The only problem is, the interest paid to banks when this money has to be borrowed, which is indeed a bad thing… but even then, if they are UK banks it’s all money that gets recirculated as much as if you’d built a council house or a bomb with it – it isn’t somehow ‘lost’. It’s only ‘world banking’ that does that – more effectively than any foreign aid budget. Hence the new UK bank JC is proposing, probably.
Yes – against this background we actually need to be productive to create wealth, not just move the money back and forth in this manner. That is in fact an ancient left-wing principle, not a tory one (the Book of Thatcher says if you move it fast enough it grows). Then it just becomes a question of who we create the wealth for.
Believe me, when the penny drops it does so with quite a clang.
BeermatWhat do you suggest? Think you’re right about the cap, though.
CD that does suppose we are still not back in the black by 2050. It’s possible – those houses would be cost-neutral by then, so one can’t argue this is a spiral in itself.
BeermatDunno – what, about 100 billion for a million homes? Ballpark cost of Trident? Should produce 5 billion in rents, pays in twenty years – maybe thirty with punitive interest. Just a huge mortgage, really.
I’m not 100% it’s the right idea until the ship is steadied either. Not sure. If we do ditch Trident it would be a good use of the money.
BeermatExcellent. Wild cars and fast women? I wonder whether I can get them on the NHS?
BeermatCD.. the principle of helping people with tax money.. that’s what the fire service, teachers, the NHS, the police do all the time. You say ‘you cannot’ do it, but it’s what the Governments of civilised countries do all the time. Why should a ‘housing service’ – especially one that will indeed pay for itself within a generation, unlike the others – be any different?
Unless someone’s changed the rules there’s nothing stopping a Local Authority acting as a commercial landlord. That’s what council houses were. It’s the removal of that low-cost competition that has driven rents up.
I wonder whether one could make this a priority for the new bank? Or a suitable investment for the civil service pension fund?
BeermatWhy do they become part of the market, though? Only if they are sold, surely. No one would be so short-sighted as to do something so damaging a second time.. mind you, we do seem capable of some pretty dumb decisions as a nation.
BeermatOnly if they do in fact live in it for free. The model proposed by those that are pressing for more council housing is based on the idea that those terminally unemployed already have what is left of the housing stock, for free. It was a clever political move to get those who were not terminally unemployed to buy their homes at knock-down prices because they could, so that the Gov could then point at the remainder and say ‘Look at the untermenschen! Council house = tax drain!’.
So, whatever the solution to that, that’s a situation that already exists. Building council houses for those that CAN pay is a far less expensive excercise, and may even make a long-term profit for the state. The point being it will help people – ordinary tax-paying working people that the Gov keep banging in about – in the meantime not to also have to cover someone else’s short-term profits on the market – never mind the Government having to if the renter can’t.
Beermat“The problem with building ‘cheap housing for workers’ is that housing is in short supply and is allocated to those most ‘in need’; that inevitably means that the unemployed single-parent will get priority!”
Yes, but that only pertains when it is in short supply – so it’s not a problem with building more, it’s actually a problem with NOT building more!
BeermatThere are fewer eligible this year than last, so personal knowledge of other’s recent experience aside it can’t be getting any easier, surely.
The state paying a private landlord housing benefit does not ‘cost the government nothing’, though, does it? The property and its maintenence is paid for out of that money paid by the government to the landlord – and the government also pay for the landlord’s profit margin on top of that. Essentially the Government are paying two parties, not one, for the same home.
BeermatIt would be interesting to see the figures re. housing. Housing benefit is actually ridiculously hard to get, as is anywhere affordable to live. I expect by far the greatest amount of the housing benefit that does circulate currently ends up with private landlords, not back in the system. The thing to do surely isn’t to make that loss to the state worse by reducing the proportion of state housing?
I was proposing cheap housing for workers who are not on benefits. An old fashioned idea – you find a job, and work. In return you can afford a place, which you pay for, for you and your family.
Currently the state is subsidising artificially high rents.
BeermatSorry John.. or shall I call you ‘comrade’ now?
I understand that the broader the portfolio the lower the risk. Venture capitalists still exist, from experience they do a lot with Cambridge computer-related start-ups, which either a) muddle along in a flatish way, kind of break even and fold quickly without losing anyone too much money or b) make shedloads.
I think being a VC is never going to lose anyone a fortune, but might make a second one. Trouble is they like to invest in posh hobbyists that went to the same school whether the proposition is all that great or not, not just some bloke from Widnes with a good idea. It’s a tribal thing. The VC money doesn’t necessarily flow too far from these ‘centres’.
I also wasn’t aware of previous Gov involvement in venture capital.
BeermatThat’s the thing about social housing. People do pay rents, it isn’t free – the people who currently can’t live where the work is end up unemployed or in jobs that won’t pay the rent somewhere else, the thing is people who need social housing are, these days, working. In fact just the same situation that pertained the first time around – not ‘the social’, but houses for the workers.
They do NOT give short-term profits that pay off your first-home mortgage, instead they are lot cheaper and simply pay the building costs. But the whole point is they are long term cost-neutral, at worst.
They didn’t fail the first time around, either. They were simply sold for a fast buck. Privatised.
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