RyanYou would not be able to afford to do that for every house and only doing it for some people would then be unfair. In most cases the amount was also a lot more than £25,000, most well over £100,000. Buying all the houses would have been more expensive than bailing out the banks, how could it not be when you think about it. The bailout was a partial amount of losses, just enough for them to get by. Buying every house in full would be the full cost and the government got shares in the bank in exchange. Paying the full cost would also encourage dumb lending in the first place.
RyanAnd are they really going to let troops fly it, wouldn’t they be better with pilots?
RyanThey had access to more or less the same components and software as any other manufacturer. That is a completely worthless analogy. Stealth technology is closely controlled by anyone who has invested the time and money necessary to develop it.
And these days people have access to the most advanced computers, which allows stealth geometries to be developed, as well as synchrotrons for material research. The US led the way and still leads the way but other countries are now definitely at a point of knowledge well beyond what the US was at back in 1990 when the YF-22/23 started flying.
RyanA stealth fighter that has to dangle weapons off its wings isn’t a stealth fighter.
RyanNo. No-one is planning or wants to ‘do away’ with anyone. Where on earth do you get your information?
Giving someone a council house? No one gives anyone a council house. A council house is available to rent. And that is to workers no less than the unemployed. The unemployed get housing benefit to cover their rent. AS THEY DO NOW – only currently a) it costs more and b) the council don’t get it back. Excuse the caps, yes I am shouting – do you still not get that basic point?
Wouldn’t need council houses if they were ‘beneficial’ people?
What the actual f**k?
Interesting documentary on Radio4 right now.
Working people can afford private rented accommodation somewhere in the country. If they can’t afford rented accommodation in X location, don’t work there. That’s how the market is supposed to work.
So more council houses means pay for the houses AND then pay the rent. Council estates are always such great areas too.
RyanI understand that, but I wasn’t condoning a massive building scheme, simply point out the differences, a private rental is as any other rental simply throwing away monies instead of investing it in housing stock.
Heck if a council is say paying hundreds a week as they do for some properties, such as emergency housing or B and B’s it would make more sense to purchase via a mortgage a property with those funds, that way it is available and the end of the day is an asset.
I also think that when families are being evicted due to mortgage arrears etc, rather than them becoming a burden on the state, the council should step in take over the mortgage and keep the family in their home, with a proviso that when they are financially stable they may at some point be able to repurchase the mortgage, either that or the building goes on the council stock. It makes more sense than sticking them in £500 a week plus B and B.
Totally agree re
Currently the state is subsidising artificially high rents.
It may not be cheaper to buy the houses if the money needs to be borrowed. It is quite possible (even likely) for a 100% mortgage to have a monthly repayment higher than the rent and the tenants may not be the kind to keep the house in a good state, this is why most private landlords stipulate that the tenants must be professionals. How much the asset appreciates is also up for debate. Not many private buyers would wish to live in a council flat.
The whole reason people in mortgage arrears get evicted is so the bank can sell the house and get enough money back to pay their own debts. They did this last time and they couldn’t and the government had to bail them out. If they were paying everyone’s mortgage instead, do you think that would be any cheaper for the taxpayer? Would it encourage banks to be careful about the mortgages they lend?
RyanRe the bit about council houses and rentals, I see a council house is an appreciating asset, the rental is being used to maintain the stock, generate revenue and pay off the initial outlay, those built in the sixties must owe the councils across the land nothing.. They also tend to be better built as they were designed to last.
On the other hand rentals are a drain on resources, quality of the stock and its maintenance is not guaranteed, plus the owners are in it for the profit so costs will be naturally higher.
And what about the interest on the extra national debt during that period of time? Interest on £250bn worth of borrowing to be precise.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/16/analysis-do-labours-manifesto-pledges-add/
RyanSo would you do away with professions like accountancy or law, or even medicine, since there is no end product there either? The city, much as it sometimes bends the rules, keeps our businesses financed. Finance is literally like blood to a business, can’t function without it. Furthermore it’s responsible for managing our pension investments, insurance investments (cars, healthcare, homes) and ISAs.
Back on houses.
So given that we got into this mess with people working to pay for houses built by the private sector got us into this mess, is building houses paid for by the taxpayer and giving them to people not working for free going to get us out? I think not.
The problem is simply that the housing market is due a correction. Helping people buy homes with government loans does not fix the problem, it just sustains it. The problem is fixed by people not being able to afford houses, which then reduces the demand and drives down the price. Another aspect is preventing organised crime syndicates using them to launder money.
I’m telling you that stuff went badly wrong even when people were working to pay for houses built by the private sector. The government building social housing at the expense of the taxpayer and ‘giving’ it to council tenants can and will only be worse.
Government build council houses. Home builders employed. Government builds Trident submarines, dockyard workers employed, they earn money and buy houses, home-builders still employed, RN staff also employed, they buy houses, design engineers employed, they buy houses, project managers employed, they buy houses. Because people are actually buying the houses, they pay money, then they pay interest, people at bank employed, interest to savers, builders of parts for submarines, BAE, Rolls-Royce, Weir etc. Ultimately building submarines is just more beneficial than building council houses for people who frankly aren’t beneficial, because they wouldn’t need them if they were, it also maintains vital ship-building skills, rather than simply knocking out ****e houses, when better ones will be built privately anyway. I mean JFC, for 100,000 council houses per year I could instead invest tens of billions of pounds in research on fusion and lithium-thorium reactor designs, SABRE engines, Skylon, launch vehicles, batteries for the distribution grid and stuff that might actually propel this country forward and open entirely new sectors. If we’re going to spend the money anyway, then instead of spending it on houses for Wayne and Waynetta, let’s at least spend it on something that might actually be useful one day.
Do you think helping teachers and nurses afford houses in London is actually solving a problem? No, you’re prolonging it. Perhaps if they couldn’t afford to live in London, London would have a shortage and people would decide to leave and live somewhere that actually had nurses and teachers. Businesses would then follow, with the end result being a reduction in London property prices and a less London heavy economic distribution.
Being unemployed is **** but some people need help realising that, and giving them council houses doesn’t speed up the process.
RyanIf people were going to get a house anyway, where would be the incentive to work, or the economic impact associated with that work? Instead you get a benefits culture and a draw on the taxpayer Corbyn is talking about social housing not paying people to do a needed job, which might also help retain vital skills. With Trident, extra people are being employed, who may then buy a house etc. and people are encouraged to work.
And when you talk about nationalising the railways, what do you mean? The railways themselves are already nationalised (Network Rail), only the rolling stock and stations are privatised, which is generally regarded as better because it improves competition, whilst not sacrificing safety. Personally I think they should scrap HS2&3 and run more local trains.
Your math is also bad if you think all the money comes back to the government, so yes there is a net loss in terms of national debt increasing. And frankly with people building on greenfield sites so aggressively without even considering brownfield sites I’m inclined to say ‘go to hell’ to house building right now.
Spain, Greece and Portugal have already tried his approach and it didn’t work, it didn’t work even with them getting £5bn/year net from the EU vs the £10.8bn net the UK pays. Not only do you end up with more debt to pay interest on, but the interest rate is higher too because ratings agencies lower your credit rating. Then you’ll be paying more money just on servicing the debt instead of anything even remotely useful.
Corbyn is full of feel good, sound good ideas, just like Communism. If building houses willy-nilly actually worked, we wouldn’t have even got into this mess. We got into this mess even with people working to pay for houses remember? Now a bearded man is telling us things will be fine if people don’t work to pay for houses. Let that huge £2 coin drop before asking people to drop pennies.
RyanBy 2050, the NHS will again be in a state of crisis, in this case one caused by the noughties and tenties immigration boomers who will have paid in very little during their lives, and someone will turn around and say that we need more low income young people from overseas to pay for them. At which point 60-80+ year-olds will turn round and say, “oh, not this BS again.”
People also vastly over-estimate the cost of Trident. Once you factor in, jobs, income tax and NI and associated economic impact, the cost works out to ~£1bn/year over 20 years, or about £15/capita. What the Scottish leader (remember the Black Adder episode about MacBeth) fails to mentions is that 20,000 Scottish jobs rely on Faslane and when you calculate the amount of income tax and NI collected there vs paying them all JSA and income benefits it’s not quite as simple as, “oh, it will cost this much insert large gross figure.” There is a cost associated with not continuing Trident too, not to mention more direct costs like decommissioning/POCO.
And whilst the red one says he intends to look after the conventional military better, he has not provided a figure as to the amount of extra money it would get if Trident were scrapped. And he seems to have u-turned on Trident for election purposes, as well as Brexit, which is actually his second u-turn on the matter making it a full roundabout. Hell the guy is practically Milton Keynes with a beard.
RyanLet’s call it only a million new homes needed then; so we’re back where we started! No Trident to scrap this time round (we never ‘used’ it anyway!) so what do we sacrifice next?
That’s easy. The rest of the military. :rolleyes:
And unless we correct the current course, the population will be 85 million minimum by 2050.
RyanHere’s my theory on the social care cap. Put these two together. £8bn extra for NHS, 1.8 million on social care = £4,450/year each average. So I think this cap will indeed be around £100k total for 20-22 years social care.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/may/18/may-extra-8bn-pledge-nhs-is-far-less-than-it-needs-experts-say
http://content.digital.nhs.uk/searchcatalogue?productid=22118&q=community+care+statistics&topics=1%2fSocial+care%2fSocial+care+activity&sort=Relevance&size=10&page=1#top
RyanRyan,
Your point about timing is a good one. We know that Dassault made some serious revisions between prototype and production Rafale to incorporate RCS reduction measures. This suggests that they hadn’t sought to incorporate them at the early design stages. Perhaps because they weren’t aware of their wider application in Germany and the US?
Indeed. For Typhoon, or the EAP/EFA, it’s a fact that they considered a stealth design but it was rejected because of technical risk, with this being the early to mid ’80s, so instead they went for a reduced RCS design. Stealth also wasn’t really compatible with the size of fighter they aimed to design, i.e. there aren’t many stealth aircraft with a then projected 22,000lb empty weight.
It would have been crystal clear with Tornado already but we europeans never learn or better are very keen of put political over technical and doctrinal considerations.
Indeed, it’s all about reducing the individual bill for a given nation, but as a result, the complexity of integration rises and the aircraft becomes more expensive and less competitive. Then you get some nations who don’t want to pay their share to develop the aircraft post launch, so they save £1-2bn over 10 years and lose £100bn in export contracts and thousands of jobs as a result. Classic false economy.
RyanRyan,
I read that the cap would need to be set at a rate which would allow an insurance market to begin, so it cant be too high.
She’s doing herself no favours by refusing to even give a ball park figure though. £100k would be okay but £1m would just be seen as protecting multi-millionaires and wiping out the middle class.
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