Will things ever get easier for the common man?

kabayiri

I'm not sure if the austerity measures have really had time to bite yet ?

There are things already in the pipeline which will reduce the spending power of lower and middle earners alike. It seems inevitable that this will have a knock on to the wider economy.

At some point things will level out though. We seem to forget what advantages we still have. The recent shale gas discovery, if used well, could help us get over our mid-term energy concerns.

My question is what happens about the wealth transfer to the top 1%? This seems set to continue unabated. There is a global world out there happy and willing to accept their investment money. Their economic prosperity doesn't seem linked to UK prosperity any longer.

Do we really benefit as a nation from the 1% getting richer ?

Jennifer_Jane

Pobby wrote: »

I really do hate all this baby boomers rubbish. seems to me that some think that all people of a certain age are rolling in it. Well they ain`t. Some, like myself, smashed by the last recession, well actually the aftermath. Folk loosing their jobs in their 50`s. Try finding another. Not every baby boomer owns property. Folk splitting up in later life. Folk that worked, like my wife and I, paid into private pensions only to find they are worth so much less than anticipated. The list is endless.

Oh my, they way some here talk is that us, of a certain age, got together at a secret meeting and said that we all hate our kids and let`s screw them up.

I for one hated HPI. I have plenty of young `uns in my family screwed by it. We want to move for retirement to a similar house in a more expensive area. A few years back it would have been the difference of a few grand.

Liked the comments about young families with shopping trolleys with the bear essentials. Most I see are full of nasty rubbish. High fat, pre cooked rubbish. We are careful with the pennies since losing my job but do we eat well. We cook! Being a figures person I calculate our wastage is between 3 to 5%. That is far to high yet I here the average is 25%.

Got given some cooking apples. Man did I make an apple sauce that was far from the bland old rubbish you buy. We use a lot of spices. Not tiddly widdly little bottles at about a quid each from the super market but huge amounts far cheaper from Asian shops.

I love a drink but can`t afford beer so have taken a like to cider, lower taxes.

I also know that some younger folk want it all. Maybe not their fault but I see it in my near family. Want a house but also want 3 holidays a year and a flash car.

One of my God children, also a decent bloke, bought with his very nice g/f a £200k rabbit hutch. His lass has come in to some money and they now have given me a great niece. Yet there is the flash motor, shortly to have the flash wedding. Just hope their dreams are not shattered.

I really think it is hard on youngsters. Their heads full of media rubbish. Pumped up by dreadful TV shows, the celebration of half witted " celebs ". Imo it just sends out a very bad message.

I do many hours of unpaid on line work a week supporting a charity who helps gamblers. The young kids who come in with debts you would not believe. Yet we have a dreadful lack of regulations in this field. Kids trying to live the dream funded mainly by credit cards.

To generalise is not helpful.

A baby boomer.

Well done, Pobby. Said it for us. And when you say it's not helpful, it's not helpful to anyone - the Baby Boomers nor their critics.

Baby Boomers: remember food rationing? Remember getting equal rights for women? Abortion? Gay rights? Employment rights? Racial Equality? Who got all that changed?

Yes, there was free education. But who for - not for me because girls didn't, in general, go to university; women often didn't get Company pensions, and certainly a woman wouldn't be thinking of getting a house, because mortgages for single women were unaffordable (because of low salaries, and because bank managers wouldn't give women mortgages).

In the '70s there was no maternity pay, and empoyers could turn you down for a job because of your possible fertility (and even because you might have PMT). In the 80's there were soaring house prices; soaring interest rates; galloping inflation.

Baby Boomers came of age in the 60's and a lot of them are now providing free childcare for their grandchildren, and perhaps looking after ancient parents, we are not the ones in power now!

So don't keep blaming the baby boomers en masse for government policies and the results of the ongoing world financial crisis. It is the children of the Thatcherites who are the ones to speak to.

So you lot, do what we did after the war, get off your bottoms, get some backbone and stop whinging, deal with it.

I often wonder how the current lot of 30 year olds would manage if there was real hardship in this Country (of the kind my parents went through - my mother was shot at from a German plane in Bristol. My father dealt with bits of bodies in the Orthopoedic ward at the Bristol Royal Infirmary.) My sister hid under the stairs in terror from the bombs. A French friend, Jewish, was hidden for the war (in France) in a cupboard - yes, really!

You've been protected and spoilt, get some gumption, become inventive, or there really will be no hope for this Country in a competitive global situation.

For my situation, I came back to the UK in 1998 with no house, or pension. I was able (in selling my little house in Cape Town) to buy a second-hand Nissan Micra here in order to get to work. I have managed, through cutting down and really saving very, very hard, to buy a house which is paid off (bought 2000, paid off 2009), to get sufficient Company pension (I don't get the full basic state pension) to be able to live on about £1000 a month. The key thing is that I don't think the world owes me anything. I've struggled, really struggled, to get the little I have. If I can do it (I was an admin assistant, not highly paid) then I reckon anyone with any nous can do it too.


(Some, but not all, of the above has been taken from/inspired by U3A News, Autumn 2011)

MacMickster

ruggedtoast wrote: »

Inflation surging, unemployment rising, wages frozen or cut, many people are beginning to feel the pinch...........

It is so depressing I despair of this country.

:money:

I have said it before and will keep repeating it.

The standard of living which we experienced over the last decade, and which we now regard as the normal state of affairs, was in fact an illusion based upon record levels of personal debt. Now we are facing the reality of having to repay that debt.

Feeling the pinch is more a case of facing reality.

Going4TheDream

MacMickster wrote: »

I have said it before and will keep repeating it.

The standard of living which we experienced over the last decade, and which we now regard as the normal state of affairs, was in fact an illusion based upon record levels of personal debt. Now we are facing the reality of having to repay that debt.

Feeling the pinch is more a case of facing reality.

You see examples on the boards here all the time people saying how tough life is etc then you read their stories , they go like .... family with kids, father works mother stays at home... they have an income of around £2100 a month after tax, they pay around £700 on rent, £300 on food, £200 on bills etc, £200 running and maintaining a car, essential for work. They then pay £700 a month on servicing debt with minimum payments.....

Pobby

Oh I nearly forgot. Imagine this if you will. You are 8 years old in junior school and summoned along with all the other boys in the school to the main hall.

Standing on stage is the large figure of Miss Ryder, the head mistress. Some poor lad, for a crime such as petty stealing is called to join her on stage. He is then subject to humiliation from the head. The " high light " of the show is when he is ordered to go to the heads office to fetch the cane. Now this ain`t just any old cane. It is flat with a split at the end, the bit that strikes the victims hand.

We are then forced to watch the poor wretch receive about 6 very hard strokes delivered by the rotund head. Imagine that today. oh the joys of baby booming.

Ilya_Ilyich

MacMickster wrote: »

I have said it before and will keep repeating it.

The standard of living which we experienced over the last decade, and which we now regard as the normal state of affairs, was in fact an illusion based upon record levels of personal debt. Now we are facing the reality of having to repay that debt.

Feeling the pinch is more a case of facing reality.

Wealth isn't created from nothing though - it's not like we 'borrowed from the air' to create goods and services that improved the quality of life, and now have to labour to return things to normal. The quality of life improved because people were able to make goods and provide services for each other. They haven't suddenly become unable to do this - the problem is that in our current system we're giving wealth to the wealthy and then begging them to let us borrow some back in order to improve our quality of life. It doesn't need to be this way.

abaxas

Pobby wrote: »

Oh I nearly forgot. Imagine this if you will. You are 8 years old in junior school and summoned along with all the other boys in the school to the main hall.

Standing on stage is the large figure of Miss Ryder, the head mistress. Some poor lad, for a crime such as petty stealing is called to join her on stage. He is then subject to humiliation from the head. The " high light " of the show is when he is ordered to go to the heads office to fetch the cane. Now this ain`t just any old cane. It is flat with a split at the end, the bit that strikes the victims hand.

We are then forced to watch the poor wretch receive about very hard strokes delivered by the rotund head. Imagine that today. oh the joys of baby booming.

The sad thing is that it worked with little or no lasting psychological damage.

Wookster

Jennifer_Jane wrote: »

I've struggled, really struggled, to get the little I have. If I can do it (I was an admin assistant, not highly paid) then I reckon anyone with any nous can do it too.

Part of the problem now is that people expect everything to be easy.

They don't want to work hard for anything. This is the real problem with the Western world.

Pobby

abaxas wrote: »

The sad thing is that it worked with little or no lasting psychological damage.

I really am not too sure about that.

MacMickster

Ilya_Ilyich wrote: »

Wealth isn't created from nothing though - it's not like we 'borrowed from the air' to create goods and services that improved the quality of life, and now have to labour to return things to normal. The quality of life improved because people were able to make goods and provide services for each other. They haven't suddenly become unable to do this - the problem is that in our current system we're giving wealth to the wealthy and then begging them to let us borrow some back in order to improve our quality of life. It doesn't need to be this way.

Unfortunately, borrowing from the air is exactly what we did.

Fractional reserve banking allows money to be created from the air when a loan is made, so huge amounts of money was created and spent as people accumulated record levels of personal debt.

Perhaps you are suggesting that people were merely exchanging their labour for other people's labour to the benefit of all - with the utopian ideal that an hour of my labour is worth the same as an hour of your labour is worth the same as an hour of a peasant's labour in China. If you can come up with a way to get every government across the world to introduce this system at the same time (including set levels of payment, taxation, benefits etc), and eradicate the black economies which would immediately spring up, along with a way of then encouraging people to sacrifice earnings for the good of society to study to become doctors etc, when they could be earning the same rate throughout their lifetime stacking supermarket shelves. It would obviously also eradicate enterprise and innovation as there would be no benefit to the individual.

In the real world, people swap their labour for paper money which they exchange for goods and services provided by other people's labour. Personal debt arises when money is created from thin air to allow people to benefit now from next year's labour. This debt must be repaid however, or else we would all choose to drive a Ferrari, live in a mansion, eat in the best restaurants and holiday in 5 star luxury.