Does anyone know what the £XXXXXXXXXX that the govt have borrowed could physically buy? Like miles of motorways, or Hospitals or XTR Groupsets?

I know we borrowed a similar amount after WW2, but we had something to show for that. We kicked Hitler’s arse.

A decent District General hospital is around £500 miliion I think. Motorway is 10 – 100 million a mile depending where it is built

something like that anyway.

But it’s only a certain rate above a certain figure though isn’t it?
it’s not [wasn’t] 83p/60p/50p off every pound earned

IIRC what is/was the 40% tax threshold was the 83% threshold i.e. anything above £35k would’ve been taxed at 83%

Getting bad this week, didn’t manage to sell any eggs at the gate all week until today.
Usually sell a dozen a day, free range for £1.50/dozen. I can’t drop the price, just have to eat more omlets then.

I work in the building sector & this is not as bad as the 80’s crash.

But government borrowing scares me rigid. Would have been cheaper to have paid off everyone mortgage & let the banks crash & pick up the pieces.

So much for being [PRUDENT].

I’d be interestwed to see how spending on upmarket cycling gear has changed in the last 2 years.

I know everyones says they’r buying SLX because its so much better value than XT, but realisticly, LX was always better value than XT, is it not that you can no longer afford XT, so are buying the new SLX as its the same price as the old XT? And people that would have bought LX are now buying deore kit?

IIRC what is/was the 40% tax threshold was the 83% threshold i.e. anything above £35k would’ve been taxed at 83%

Wiki to the rescue..!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_United_Kingdom#History

i heard ‘tother day, that the government have ANOTHER problem

they borrowed £10bn to ease the recession, and now the people they borrowied it off want it back….

firstly, surely they should learn that borrowing isnt the answer?
secondly, ide love to meet this handful of people who have £10bn between them in money from down the back of the sofa…

there are a lot of big flash cars being sold it seems to me.
i blame those people…. (not bitter, much)

i may have got this all wrong though….

In 1974 the top-rate of income tax increased to its highest rate since the war, 83%. This applied to incomes over £20,000, and combined with a 15% surcharge on ‘un-earned’ income (investments and dividends) could add to a 98% marginal rate of personal income tax. In 1974, just 750,000 people were eligible to pay the top-rate of income tax. [6] Margaret Thatcher, who favoured indirect taxation reduced personal income tax rates during the 1980s. [7] In the first budget after her election victory in 1979, the top-rate was reduced from 83% to 60% and the basic rate from 33% to 30%. [8]. The basic rate was also cut for three successive budgets – to 29% in the 1986 budget, 27% in 1987 and to 25% in 1988. [9]. The top-rate of income tax was cut to 40% in the 1988 budget.

98%! Thank goodness for Thatcher…. 😉

Anyone who has to ask ” Is this recession as bad as the one in the 80’s”, clearly did not live in the north (of London) in the 80’s.

personally this time doesn’t seam as bad as 80’s or 90’s 80’s was at secoundary school and remember lots of my mums and dads friends being out of work for quite some time and nowhere near as bad as the 90’s got made redundant at the end of my apprenticeship and was out of work for about 18 months and as i have got a job and it’s stable at the mo and i can afford my mortgage (no 16-16% intrest rates this time),i live in the south east and my work takes me all over the south east and havn’t come across many firm about to fold etc.

Just wait untill the stagflation later on this/next year.

TJ – “YOu guys need to remenber that the way unemployment is calculated now is different to the eighties – the figure now is 20-40% higher than it would have been in the eighties ie 2 million now would have been 1.5 million then. Under current ways of counting unemployed the peak figure in the eighties would have been 5 million”

All sounds very plausible TJ until you factor in that 16-18 year olds aren’t counted in the current unemployment figures, the fact there are more 18-25 year olds unemployed now despite the billions the government wasted on “new deal”, the 3m people languishing on incapacity benefit, and the 6-7m people of working age who aren’t in education, employment or training. All of which seem pretty compelling evidence that the UK is royally fecked.

All of which seem pretty compelling evidence that the UK is royally fecked.

I’m sure it might well be ‘pretty compelling evidence’ …….. but I’ll be fecked if I can understand it 😯

Using your figures Farmer_John, what do you claim the ‘true’ level of unemployment is ? 😕

According to the ever-reliable Daily Mash, the recession is THIS BAD. 😉

Can’t be bothered to read all of that!
Jus tell me…are we talking recession of hair lines or the whole economy thingummuy?? 😉

I joined JObcentre Plus in the early eighties and have have seen various booms & busts. This one has happened far quicker than anything else I’ve seen, and spread through more sectors than others. At the moment my job is visiting companies and giving redundancy talks, sorting out re-training etc etc. Its sole destroying to see all the people being made redundant or being put onto short time working….but………. there are the first signs of the rate of redundancies slowing, we’ve been quieter over the last 2 weeks (I hope that wasn’t a ‘murray Walker’ statement!) claim numbers are starting to slow up in the offices, and we’ve got more people signing off & starting work than in recent months. Who knows if this is the end of the begining, or its the tide going out before the tsunami hits us!

We had a bit of a talk about this in our management meeting today as to how his is affecting our company generally, strangely we all did not think it was not that bad!. now in fairness we are in electronics manufacture and came to the conclusion that its been so bad for us for so long that this hasn’t been that noticable! To qualify that, 10 years ago there were 400+ companies like us in the UK, now probably about 50. The Chinese have killed us and we survive by being good at what we do (most of the time). What this has really meant is that we react VERY quickly to our market and can “cut our cloth” when needed. A good example was us going to a four day week, it took us less than a week to restructure our production (no job losses and no drop in pay), the savings were due to reduced power and water use and being a bit more hard arsed with our customers. We’ve seen a reduction in business but we will just deal with it, we have to. What we see now has been a long time coming and this forum has spoken about it before it all kicked off (house prices, buying stuff you don’t really need, blah, blah). I personally have put enough cash aside to cover me for a good while if it goes belly up, could have bought a flash motor but decided that it probably won’t feed my kids. Not being smug just been in this potential position for a long time….

indeed…where is the inflation to go with all of this ? why are we not seeing inflation… it MUST happen in this economic climate..

Out of 22 shops in the same street as my shop, 6 are empty. 2 years ago when I started all were full and doing good business. I haven’t been affected personally by the current recession…. I couldn’t afford a house before and I can’t now.

Liverpool seems to be doing better than ever in the last year or so, the highstreet is always full of shoppers and the place is looking better than ever. Though apparently Liverpool is one of the worst placed for riding out the recession. I’m a student at the moment, so I guess I’m seeing it all from one perspective, a mate who’s an engineer has just had a meeting about how his company is going ‘survive’ but he didn’t think it was all that important.

Unemployment reached 2 million a couple of weeks ago though, remember being sat watching the news the day before the job interview I had (which I got offered) and wondering if I was going to remain a statistic for too much longer! They also predict the unemployment figure to reach 3 million by the beginning of 2010, so less than 9 months!

If you factor in the people not claiming dole because of Nu Labour’s stat-fudge, the figure is approx 8 million.

If anyone is under the illusion that things are going to go anywhere other than down for the forseable future, just bear in mind that the UK plc is effectively bankrupt.

Per-capita we have a 6-fold greater debt than the US.

Or banks have no ability to borrow. Building societies can’t borrow. Tax revenues will actually FALL despite the budget.

We’ve seen Phase I (Reduction in avaiable capital). Phase II (redundancies) is starting – I’ve got many mates who have had their notice, or awaiting their notice and those are highly paid people. Phase III hasn’t arrived. That’s the ‘depression’ of the 80’s that some remember.

Sad fact is that this IS way worse than the 80’s depression. NOT media hype!! And we sold our house in 2003 on the basis of this event. The fact that I’m not an economist and could see that 6 years ago puts the levels of talent in government into perspective!!!

Good luck to all.

At the moment my job is visiting companies and giving redundancy talks, sorting out re-training etc etc. Its sole destroying to see all the people being made redundant or being put onto short time working

Maybe you should travel between these companies using a bike or car then 😉

Or at least charge them a shoe allowance! 😆

People are generally confusing two things, the hole in public finance and recession. The fact that they overlie each other (and interact)encourages the confusion but they have their origins in diferent places.

That is why we can see the country coming out of recession in the next year to 18 months and a general feel good factor returning and at the same time require massive cuts in public expenditure for many years to come.

The level of debt is now (relatively) equivalent to the end of WW2 and if i recall correctly, we’ve only recently finished paying that off.

So how bad is this this recession? wrong question.

bartat, well put.

Do we imagine that Gordon Brown will hold an election before the latest date of june 2010??

if there is a sharp, early (autumn) upturn in the economy and a return of the feel good factor then an early Spring election could be on before what is going to happen to jobs in the public sector becomes truly apparent and cripples the Labour vote.

But odds on, May 2010 for me.

Bartat

Nice optimism.

What do you think will provoke the upturn in economy then?

Not only is UK plc bankrupt, the public themselves are way overborrowed. In a nation where lending to consumers and businesses alike isn’t happening.

In a nation where 25% of jobs are in the state ( not revenue generating and funded from tax).

It will be quite a while before we see the bottom ( we’re not even close)let alone the recovery!!!

mikertriod – you do seem to know waht you are talking about but it seems overly pessimistic to me.

I think more fuss is being made because its affecting white coller types more than in previous times.

You are totally out on your unemplyment stats tho – that would mean in the early eighties 12 million people out of work!

well, seeing as we are all going to hell in a handcart.

i’m off riding.

TandemJ

Don’t think I’m wrong there mate!

If anything it’s more than 7.9m now.

The govt have reduced that figure by careful manipulation of stats, creation of non- jobs, use of incapacity benefit, artificially boosting student numbers that would previously not qualify in full term education and discounting part time employment.

Despite being thick as mince ( to emerge from 15 years of ‘growth’ and be in this level of mess takes some doing!), Chairman Brown has a team of capable fraudsters at his disposal. We’ll never see the real figure.

Thing is mikerdriod – you do know that the tories systematically manipulated unemployment stats during the eighties to reduce the count by 1/3 or so and that the labour party actually restored the count to the method that counts higher and is more accurate.

Not that you could be accused of bias in any way of course.

I am, afraid on this one I am sure you are wrong. the number of unemployed is still far less than at the tory peak

Does anyone know what the £XXXXXXXXXX that the govt have borrowed could physically buy? Like miles of motorways, or Hospitals or XTR Groupsets

Yes. I have been doing the maths on that today

It would buy 1 Yumeya groupset.

TandemJ

I’m not saying the Tories didn’t do similar. I’m just commenting on the unemployment levels of the UK.

I AM wrong on my figure as that is about two months old. It’s no doubt over 8 million now.

you know a figure is becoming significant when people start debating its validity

do any of you actually believe that statistical spin is an exclusive trait of any one political party?

silverpigeon – Member

Does anyone know what the £XXXXXXXXXX that the govt have borrowed could physically buy? Like miles of motorways, or Hospitals or XTR Groupsets

Yes. I have been doing the maths on that today

It would buy 1 Yumeya groupset.

😆 😆 😆 😆

Does anyone know what the £XXXXXXXXXX that the govt have borrowed could physically buy? Like miles of motorways, or Hospitals or XTR Groupsets?

Probably 200 M class star-ships of a mass of 63,000 metric tons each dependent on the exchange rate. Capable of atmospheric re-entries and for surface landings. The micrometeorite and particulate shielding is sufficient enough to withstand rough re-entries.

Possible downsides are the Laretel WF-15 2.8 Terawatt fusion reactor. A tad troublesome, the newer P class star ships use the Laratel ZN-5 reactor which has a significantly longer Meantime Between Failures. But we’d oly get 80 of those….

IMHO Its bad and but its going to get worse, for a few reasons firstly apart from Financial services Britain doesnt own much to pull it out of recession, Financial services have been affected directly of course and indirectly by the global downturn and reputationaly – Browns changes to the UK regulatory framework were catastrophic.The collapse of sterling will help exports a little but we will be vunerable to further foreign investment/takeover in particular the LSE which Germany and the USA have been interested in buying for years, once the uk is downgraded as a debtor the interest rates will increase. As a nation we are severly in debt and we have an incompetent labour government who despite receiving an excellent economy described as “golden legacy” have succeeded through taxation and red tape increases to make our country totally uncompetitive and practically bankrupt (standard labour performance then!)Despite all the extra taxation they have largely wasted all the money squeezed out of taxpayers in a series of mistakes instead of consolidating the nations finances with a warchest for a rainy day. There seems little cause for any optimism to help start a recovery – increasing stimulus by borrowing more to spend our way out of it via the Public sector can not really be taken much further without literally bankrupting the Uk, in any case having a huge unproductive (in many senses!) Public sector is not really desirable when its already so disproportionately large compared to your productive Private sector – despite what all the Labour tssers keep saying!

What needs to happen is to scrap some of the big projects, e.g. ID cards – a total waste of money in these times; Crossrail – demanded by the City, well they can f*^k off now

I agree with you that the ID card scheme should be scrapped (and not just for financial reasons), but Crossrail is different: it’s something the private sector won’t do alone, it’s relatively labour-intensive (which creates employment), it’s long-term investment in transport infrastructure, and it will create vast efficiencies and vast added value for property.

indeed…where is the inflation to go with all of this ? why are we not seeing inflation… it MUST happen in this economic climate..

I don’t see why – you should only get inflation in overheating economies without any spare capacity, which is the opposite of what we have. I don’t think (hope) we should see stagflation again because there are so few barriers to driving wages or input costs down. We will see.

sirJohn

Spot on!

As for inflation/deflation:

Job cuts, wage freezes/cuts, house price instability, reduction in car prices, decrease in consumer goods prices all contribute to deflation. Despite the government’s attempt to flood the markets with available capital to kick start the economy, inflation won’t be with us just yet.

However when it does, I think inflation will be aggressive, drive up interest rates and we’ll be back seeing 14% mortgage rates etc.

A lot of pain for many yet to come.