🤡

you’ll put those savings into a stocks and shares ISA where any gains from stocks are tax free guaranteed.

If you have more than £20k a year to put away into stocks and shares then yeah you need to pay some tax bruv.

Far less. In the UK half of all wealth is owned by the top 10% but there is very little concentration in the top 1% compared with the USA and other nations like Italy, Russia and China. Also, the degree of wealth inequality has mostly remained consistent for the last 10-15 years.

Another factor to consider is that for the top 10% (which in the UK you are in if you earn more than £52,000) hold around 50% of their wealth in pensions (which are taxed) and around 32% in properties on average.

Have a look at ONS data to back up what I’ve said. https://www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/dvc1727/Fig2/datadownload.xlsx

I still do believe that there is a better balance to be found with tax and wealth, but I’m less convinced that the answer is solely based on going after a 0.1% of wealthy.

agree, but a reminder that the top 1% pay 30% of the taxes the treasury receives.

fair. US debt to GDP seems to be around 100-120%[1] whereas in the UK there was briefly a spike of debt to 100% of GDP[2].

As a much smaller nation whose currency isn’t used as a world trade mechanism, britain devalue its currency too much, so there are fewer economic levers to pull when managing debt.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/united-states/debt-to-gdp-ratio [2] https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/uk-debt-hits-100-of-gdp-adding-to-rachel-reeves-headache/ar-AA1qSNYF

the thing is, it’s a gap between the money the government is spending and the amount of money it gets through taxes and other incomes each year.

So it’s money that has to be borrowed from folks, every year to keep things going as they are. And each time that money is borrowed it needs interest paid on it which makes the problem worse. Especially with the high interest rates around the world.

So british people are working hard, paying their taxes and a percentage of those taxes is going towards servicing debt that has been built up, by poor spending decisions in the past.

It’s like payday loans for governments. you’ve either got to get spending under control, make more money somehow (tricks in the car park or maybe sell crack) or eventually reach the end of the road.

I agree.

But the realist in me knows it is unlikely to be allowed to happen.

I know that the government will have to service a £15bn debt through borrowing, which will raise interest rates, mortgages, rents and require cuts to public services to pay for. That is on top of the investment needed over the next few years to stop sewage leaking into rivers and leaks of millions of litres a day.

In addition I know that pension funds and large investors will lose substantial sums of money and will look to divest from similar risks, which could lead to more utility companies becoming insolvent. A snowball effect.

Finally, I know that international investment in the UK will be seen as more risky.

What the government will be doing now is weighing up those risks against the cost of raising bills by the 59% that the water companies and industry bodies are asking for. If the worst should happen, will taxpayers be better off with a couple of hundred extra £ on their water bills to pay, or potentially a lot worse off with a rapid nationalisation of multiple firms.

same in Newcastle. Hundreds out with flags and signs. A festival atmosphere.

papers gots to have some drama to print headlines on tomorrow.

“government refuses to commit to £2.5bn unfunded spend on this occasion” doesn’t quite hit the mark

jokes on them I already sent in my postal vote

refinery malfunctions truck/ship breakdowns

sounds like “how to get prescribed as a terrorist organisation 101”

go on, squeeze in one more unelected prime minister before the election!

I’d be happy if that happened.

I’d like it to go that way too but realistically, no government in the world is going to go after a massive hedge fund or investment bank for failing to stop a company asset stripping a public utility for profit.

yes that would be awesome, but the problem is that “make it publicly owned” means “buy out their shares” which is giving them a bailout, plus “service all the debt the company is in” which is another bailout, before you’ve even got started with fixing the horrible lack of investment over many years

so the shareholders pull their funds, the water companies struggle and the taxpayer has to step in to bail them out.

problem is then that shareholders will pull their money and invest elsewhere leaving the taxpayer to pick up the pieces. clever privatisations always leave the public purse to bail out any losses 😒

the solution: don’t privatise in the first place. it’s like selling all your shit at a pawn shop

would love to but where does the money come from to buy out all the shareholders? you would need to raise tens of billions - remember we just spent £10bn to give people a 1% tax cut

and before you say “fuck the shareholders,” remember that lots of them are your pension fund

yes so you’re agreeing with me

Yup, but you have to think “how would malicious software/spyware/whatever get in our source code and if it does, how would we detect it?”

that’s where ISO and SOC II add value and give some assurance that detective, preventative and corrective controls exist and are working to prevent an issue.

If the company maliciously inserts back doors into closed source code and sells it like that, no amount of external audit is going to defend against that because they’ll just hide the code from the auditors.