Why are savings rates on the floor?

Glen_Clark

bowlhead99 wrote: »

I can see the unemployment statistics,

Do you take them seriously?

bowlhead99

doughnutmachine wrote: »

ehhhh? i'd expect an economics genius such as yourself to make your point without a couple of thousand words of tripe

The point made by gadgetmind was that it would be better to have fewer regulations if possible. I'd agreed with him and said that complete freedom was a nice goal, obviously we do need some regulations to prevent abuses which could exist in unfetterered personal freedom and pure capitalism. You leapt on the idea of us needing regulations, as if I were agreeing with you, and said we needed lots of rules and regulations because you didn't like immigration being so high.

I attempted to explain what I meant by needing some regulation rather than complete heavy handed regulation such as an outright ban. Examples, we don't want to stop companies being allowed to exist and keep their profit reward for their endeavours, or people being able to own things that could be used as weapons, we simply want to stop monopolies and murders. We don't want to stop people getting into the country and lose the potential benefits of immigration, but we do want to check IDs and have some kind of control. Which we already have.

I get that you want to clamp down on immigration because you don't like it, and maybe that's because you are a closet racist, or maybe it's because you are jealous of people getting a helping hand to improve their lot in life by changing country and learning a new language, or maybe it's because you're greedy and fearful that your personal wealth will suffer because these people will come over and take your job because an employer would prefer them to you. This does not mean there are no positives to allowing people to come into our country.

i asked you how a romanian big issue seller boosted the UK economy

Do you have something against Romanians or Big Issue sellers? If you were down on your luck and homeless and resorted to selling the Big Issue, should we kick you out of the country because you are not currently 'boosting the UK economy'? What about when you graduate from the temporary job of buying newspapers at a pound to sell for two pounds, and into a better line of productive work. Should we have just written you off?

If I give two pounds to a big issue seller and the paper has only cost him one pound - where do those two pounds go? The pound he paid to Big Issue will go on to the printers and sellers of supplies for the charity and some of it temporarily into the pockets of homeless people who need a helping hand to buy something. It will keep bouncing around the economy in salaries and production costs of the goods and services people buy.

The pound that stayed with the Romanian will get spent by the Romanian, very likely quite soon and very likely within the UK. These pounds are not completely wasted and lost forever, they just temporarily pass through the seller on the way to somewhere else.

Now there is a point that the GDP per person reduces while the Romanian is in your country - but how much are you personally worse off? Maybe he spends the pound on a doughnut and the greater demand for doughnuts pushes the price of flour up as there is only a limited amount of flour being produced n the UK and now the Romanian is using some of it, rather than staying in Romania and using Romanian flour. Maybe the increased cost of flour causes a suicide somewhere. That would be a negative. Maybe after a few months on the street he moves to a better job and starts producing more than he consumes. That would be a positive.

Maybe he gets beaten up for being homeless and foreign which requires some extra police time. Of course, police resources are scarce so that's not great, but on the flipside perhaps we can all chip in to pay for some more police resources and in doing so create more employment for policemen. Every cloud, and all that?

The obvious and not-so-obvious consequences of there being an extra Romanian Big Issue seller could fill pages and pages. You would dismiss it as "a thousand words of tripe", so I will stop at this point, after leaving you with the questions "exactly how many Romanian Big Issue sellers are there today, what proportion of the Big Issue vendor population do they make up and what is the entire lifetime contribution to our economy of a Romanian immigrant". To save you time, I presume your answer to the last one is "probably nil or negative" but as this can't be accurately predicted for a specific individual, I don't believe your answer and so the first couple of questions become somewhat irrelevant

i also asked why other countries never had a policy of mass immigration? surely someone that makes slightly more than the london average salary would know such things?

You didn't ask that, you asked why specifically China and Japan, who are culturally quite different from each other, and from us, do not allow more immigration. Well China has over a billion people of its own and a very different set of economic and governmental policies. You would not expect them to need a policy of mass immigration. They certainly allow some immigration as I know of people who have done it.

Japan is one of the more difficult places to emigrate to, but they do have hundreds of thousands of Koreans and Latin Americans and tens of thousands of UK and US expats. But probably only a couple of million non naturalised foreigners living there. You can get your permanent residency eventually by working on different types of visas for long enough.

But even most children would know that they have a history of territorial disputes with neighbours and have had big wars with China and been nuked by the US. Perhaps this has coloured their outlook towards immigration policy. And of course their neigbours are less developed economies (China, Russia, Korea) so perhaps opening the door to immigration is less palatable than for us where our near neighbours are France, Spain, Germany, Holland, Scandinavia etc and you can actually drive between our countries while you can't just pop over the border into Japan from anywhere.

So 1) these comparisons between UK, China and Japan are not apples to apples so don't help prove a point one way or another and 2) are you implying we currently have some sort of 'policy of mass immigration' because I'd suggest we do not (other than allowing fair movement of people and trade within Europe as per our agreements).

Why are a lot of Middle East countries trying to reduce expat workers? are they wrong by wanting to employ local workers instead of foreigners?

If you are going to generalise to try and prove your points I could also generalise and say that the Middle East has various abhorrent policies which are unusual to us westerners, and we shouldn't necessarily want to emulate them.

The Middle East is of course large, so are you talking about Egypt, Syria, Israel, Iran? Which of these countries should we try and culturally, economically and governmentally emulate? Are you thinking of Dubai, where they have gleaming multistorey towers of hotels and offices built by immigrant slaves?

as a matter of interest where did you study economics? something tells me it wasn't at the LSE....

I took an A-level in it, and my undergraduate degree course at a redbrick university included a number of economics and finance courses. I was fortunate that during the course of my professional qualifications thereafter I had to discuss financial and operational issues with everyone from production workers and accounts clerks to CEOs and CFOs of organisations from small charities and factories to public sector institutions and investment houses to listed national and multinational companies.

Such is the life of a chartered accountant at a multinational firm. For the last decade I have worked in the investment managment sector where it is useful to have a keen interest in the local and global economy which is a factor in driving the underlying performance of private and public equities in which institutions may choose to invest.

I don't say this to boast of any personal achievements, as you don't need paper qualifications or a rich CV to be able to understand the world. All you need is to be smart and interested, and as the main character in Good Will Hunting quipped, you don't have to "drop a hundred and fifty grand on a f***** eduction you could have got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library".

I would question whether you have gone as far as spending the dollar fifty.

in all honesty perhaps you should go to a pub and just chat with people, just see how people feel about their job security, maybe even ask how their children are getting on looking for jobs after school/ uni..... maybe best not to chat about sticking knives into chests .....

I do. Would have been there tonight if something hadn't come up. Maybe I'll see you in there sometime :beer:

doughnutmachine

bowlhead99 wrote: »

The pound that stayed with the Romanian will get spent by the Romanian, very likely quite soon and very likely within the UK. These pounds are not completely wasted and lost forever, they just temporarily pass through the seller on the way to somewhere else.

Now there is a point that the GDP per person reduces while the Romanian is in your country - but how much are you personally worse off? Maybe he spends the pound on a doughnut and the greater demand for doughnuts pushes the price of flour up as there is only a limited amount of flour being produced n the UK and now the Romanian is using some of it, rather than staying in Romania and using Romanian flour. Maybe the increased cost of flour causes a suicide somewhere. That would be a negative. Maybe after a few months on the street he moves to a better job and starts producing more than he consumes. That would be a positive.

Maybe he gets beaten up for being homeless and foreign which requires some extra police time. Of course, police resources are scarce so that's not great, but on the flipside perhaps we can all chip in to pay for some more police resources and in doing so create more employment for policemen. Every cloud, and all that?

ehhhhmmm so you made all those condescending comments about understanding economics, and you have an A level in it?

the point about the romanian big issue seller is that they are likely to take out more in benefits/ NHS etc than they pay in. i'd type of expect that the british government should be looking after british citizens ahead of foreigners.... ok it could be argued that spending money on the romanian will boost the economy by the keynesian wealth multiplier effect, however i'd still prefer the government to get the wealth multiplier effect by giving to people that don't take the money out the UK...

even if you never covered keynes on your A level, surely you'd have to accept that unskilled big issue sellers are not really the type of immigrant we want in the UK.

where i stay you have to be a "local" to do some jobs like taxi driver. i have to admit that i think it works, if anyone could drive a taxi it would mean that indian drivers would come over and work for peanuts, it would also mean the indians spend their money earned in india. by restricting who can do certain jobs certainly keep unemployment down and keeps money in the local economy.

go on tell me, what did you get in your A level? i'd put money on a C.

jem16

doughnutmachine wrote: »

ehhhhmmm so you made all those condescending comments about understanding economics, and you have an A level in it?

Did you miss the rest of the sentence about the undergraduate degree containing courses in economics or did you just choose to ignore it?

where i stay you have to be a "local" to do some jobs like taxi driver. i have to admit that i think it works,

Is this in your Middle East home or have you been ousted by the Middle East countries trying to reduce expat workers?

bowlhead99

doughnutmachine wrote: »

even if you never covered keynes on your A level, surely you'd have to accept that unskilled big issue sellers are not really the type of immigrant we want in the UK.

where i stay you have to be a "local" to do some jobs like taxi driver.

Thanks for the info on Keynes. I will have to go look him up.

Yes of course we covered Keynes, at school and university. I think he was mentioned in business studies class at GCSE level as our teacher was also one of the economics teachers and would happily go off topic if we were interested. So basically I've received both structured and unstructured education in economics and related business matters through GCSE, A-level, degree, postgraduate professional qualifications and a career in the finance industry to director level. As mentioned, I'm not suggesting I'm any more qualified to talk about economics than anyone else, because you don't need paper qualifications to do this. But hopefully it gets me a seat at the table.

I've also worked offshore in a location where you typically need a sponsoring employer to get housing if you're not a millionaire. So I know different countries have different systems, which work for them. Presumably this unspecified Middle East location of which you speak does allow Indians in the country, to be labourers etc? If they weren't allowed in at all, they wouldn't need rules about them not being taxi drivers.

When I lived in New York, many of the taxi drivers were first or second generation immigrants. The city was vibrant and multicultural and there was enough money going around to keep it moving. Whether the city's public finances were in great shape or all financed by government debt, is another question. But it was certainly a great place to be, as a working resident alien myself.

It stands to reason that having a lot of people in a country working long hours (whether taxi drivers or labourers) is generally good for a country's productivity and GDP. Working long hours for low pay is one of the things that immigrants will do. As mentioned, in Dubai, it has built skyscrapers out of a desert. Not that we would necessarily want to, or be able to, emulate the cultures or economics of UAE or Saudi or wherever you are.

I'm not suggesting that our ideal immigrant is a Romanian Big Issue seller. I hope, by the way, that there are no Romanian Big Issue sellers reading this as they will be getting something of a complex, by now. Are you going to personally stand at our country's gates and make everyone fill in a form to state their greatest intended accomplishment during their tenure here, and if they tick the box saying "sell Big Issue" you will deny them entry? Remember there is more than one gate, and some of the applicants may lie.

Should you need a local license to sell the Big Issue as is required for taxi driving in some unspecified part of the Middle East? After all, that £1.25 per paper sold could be going to a plucky Brit. It is an affront to the charitable objectives of the organization, that someone selling 20 newspapers over three a days should be able to amass £25, and then after taking a couple of nights in a shelter and buying some food and a wooly scarf off a british business, take his £1 remaining cash and buy a cheap plane ticket to Romania whereupon he places the surplus in a Romanian bank account.

It is true that someone, at the lower end of the scale, immigrating to the UK may consume more resources than they produce over the course of their lifetime, and dilute the long-term lifestyles of you and I. It is difficult to ascertain this at point of entry. As mentioned by someone 40 posts ago, we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater.

By the fact you are passionate about keeping Britain for the Brits, I presume you intend to return here some day after you have taken what you can from the Middle East. You are over there to take their resources and bring them back home. This is not necessarily the same for everyone who comes into a country. They may settle, and do good for the country in situ.

And while you are outside the UK for now, there is arguably space in our country in terms of housing and space on the roads and in the hospitals to accommodate a Romanian immigrant. Sure, it will take him a while to find his feet, but over time, we may be better off with him than with you.

To be honest, I don't have a perfect immigration policy all documented and ready to put into the hands of our government. I'm just here to pick holes in what you say for easy entertainment. It is the internet, after all. There are plenty of potential counterpoints to my comments, and likewise for yours. I at least have the good grace to be self deprecating about it, while you can't believe that you are perhaps not right.

If I write a lengthy considered response, you will ignore the 99% of it which adequately rebuts your ill-thought-out comments and say, "yeah blah blah blah but you still haven't answered my question about [xxx]", as if a decent debate is going to happen by you throwing out two or three bullet points and me walking you through them in baby steps until we can move on to your next inane question. Some of them have more merit than others. But in summary, you want us entirely out of Europe and to keep out the damn foreigners. I am not so sure that is for the best, and have explained why. I guess we can leave it at that.

go on tell me, what did you get in your A level? i'd put money on a C.

I only got a B. In my defence, I was a seventeen year old lad, easily distracted, and one of my classmates had tremendous norks.
:beer:

badger09

bowlhead99 wrote: »

I only got a B. In my defence, I was a seventeen year old lad, easily distracted, and one of my classmates had tremendous norks.
:beer:

:rotfl:

Familiar story, except I was the one with the norks (not tremendous, but never had any complaints ) and he was a scrum half with a romantic streak and a penchant for poetry. A combination I found far more attractive than my 4 A levels

bowlhead, if she paid more attention than you she might now be an 'investment-grade single lady' in which case you should track her down and re establish contact. She could be your perfect match