Who will win the UK election ?

GunJack

seven-day-weekend wrote: »

Agreed, so that everyone can have a bigger slice of pie (and some will have bigger pieces than others). Under lefty policies, everyone has equal shares of a smaller pie.

however, 3% of !!!!-all is !!!!-all, but 3% of £100k+ is worth having, this is why gaps between rich and poor are ever-increasing....if it's done on percentages rather than actual cash. This spills over onto the personal tax allowance for e.g., in the grand scheme of things, iro £10 a month less tax is firmly in the !!!!-all category but the tories hail it as some major event. Change the tax allowance to let me pay £100 less a month and that would actually be useful....

vivatifosi

I've been flying through the latest Coursera courses and noticed that they have one coming up on the General Election that people may like:

https://www.coursera.org/course/ge2015

One of its aims is to provide people who will vote in the election a place to find what they need to make an informed decision.

Thrugelmir

StevieJ wrote: »

I agree with you Gen but the problem is NOW, stagnating wages since 2007 are contributing to reduced 'tax take' and probably badly affecting productivity (worst productivity growth since the war).

The world is now truly global. The UK may be an island but cannot think inwardly as it has done in the past. As it will simply get left behind. Other people want to enjoy the lifestyles we believe we have a god given right to. Like our forefathers they are willing to work hard and industrially to achieve this goal. The era past 2007 has merely illustrated how we were living an illusion with the aid of credit to fund consumption. Now we live with a debt burden that has to be addressed in order to make positive progress.

TheBlueHorse

seven-day-weekend wrote: »

Agreed, so that everyone can have a bigger slice of pie (and some will have bigger pieces than others). Under lefty policies, everyone has equal shares of a smaller pie.

no, under lefty policy, criminals, layabouts and scroungers get a bigger share of the smaller pie, and those who have the audacity to work have more of their hard earned money ripped out of their pockets to pay for it.

Generali

ukcarper wrote: »

Not against responsible capitalism and I don't think you can really call the modern Labour Party socialist not in the true sense.

So what is socialism in 'the true sense'? Presumably it's not what Marx and Engels discussed in the C19th.

I'd describe socialism as being an ideology which seeks to appropriate a large part of people's income or wealth against their will to be distributed to others.

TBH I'd describe the Labour party of the C21st as a fascist party. Not that they want a new Holocaust obvs but that they see the private part of the economy, you and I deciding to buy and sell stuff to each other, as a vehicle to be used to coerce people into behaving and acting in particular ways to suit the ends of politicians. The Tories believe the same thing to a lesser extent.

Thatcher was probably the only senior politician not to see things like this. I reckon Farrage doesn't support fascist economics either but he's still a d!ck.

StevieJ wrote: »

I agree with you Gen but the problem is NOW, stagnating wages since 2007 are contributing to reduced 'tax take' and probably badly affecting productivity (worst productivity growth since the war). Manufacturing PMI is up but is that a result of cheap bodies being thrown in rather than investment in technology? It doesn't look good for the future
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/n...ses-fears.html

Wages aren't stagnating in real terms any longer.

Manufacturing isn't all the economy and nor should it be. Economies are ultimately all about consumption.

There's an article on the interwebs about where the profit from designing, making and selling a Barbie Doll goes. Have a Google and a read as it makes a lot of very interesting and counter-intuitive points.

The TLDR version is that if you want to make money from Barbie Dolls then design them, market them or retail them. The manufacturer makes next to nothing.

zagfles

padington wrote: »

Updated from betfair hourly ...

http://www.electionwatch.co.uk

For a minute I thought there was massive arb possibility - with Bet365 offering 17.0 on a Labour majority!

Then I noticed this at the bottom of the site:

"Updates every hour. Last Updated: 10:00:26, Tue 22 July 2014" :rotfl:

Meanwhile back in the real world, the real betfair odds are here:

http://www.betfairpredicts.com

• Hung Parliament 82%
• Conservative majority 13%
• Labour majority 5%

Loughton_Monkey

Generali wrote: »

...IMHO the best thing you can do for much of the poor is to increase the size of the pie to be divvy'd up rather than divvying it up differently.

Generali wrote: »

.....Yes, sometimes incomes for rich people rise faster than those for poor people and sometimes it's the other way around but if everyone is getting richer that's a good thing, right?....

When you analyse it, there are two pies.

Putting the public sector aside for one moment, we have business empires. Those people who set up and developed a business are few and far between, and [rightly] are generally to be found in the top 1% of wealth. The 'pies' are the businesses that millions of us work for. Or to be precise, the profits of those businesses. Rightly or wrongly, each business will make its own decisions and decide to pay £500K gross to a good Marketing Director, but only £15K gross to the lad who packs all the goods into boxes.

That's how each of us gets our slice of the pie.

The second pie is made out of the first. Ingredients come from our own slices, and it is made a bigger pie by the amount skimmed off in taxation at company level. We divide up our own slice ourselves voluntarily as between the food, housing, transport etc. that we provide to our families, but government takes a rather large part of our slice of the pie whether we like it or not.

By increasing the first pie we have a chance of increasing our own pie. Surely this implies incentivising the very few entrepreneurs to develop new and existing businesses and their profits? They deserve the biggest slice of what they created.

The second pie equates to the total cost of the public sector. It comes from slices of the first pie, and the second pie. But most of us are concerned primarily about the first pie, and then how much of that we are allowed to eat.

It is the second 'pie' that's more interesting. To roughly 20% of the workforce, their pie comes from the slices of the pie of the other 80%. It gets extremely complicated when you consider the taxpayer-paid workers who administer eating the pies of others, who themselves have part of their own pie taken away to recycle into the very same public sector. It's truly pies, within pies, within pies......

But I conclude that 99% of argument and 99% of politics should be focused on increasing the size of the first pie, since it is the primary influencing factor on everyone's pie. Our beloved Labour party clearly does not see it this way. They prefer to concentrat 100% on adjusting the crumbs from everyone's pie while presiding over the demise of pie-makers who are forced to go overseas, or simpy decide it's not worth making pies any more.

[I have not been at the G&T yet, today, but I did have Pork Pie for lunch. This is why I know all about pies.]

antrobus

GunJack wrote: »

... Change the tax allowance to let me pay £100 less a month and that would actually be useful....

Well, the current lot have changed the tax allowance from from £6,475 to £10,600 thereby letting you pay £68.75 less a month, so at least they're over half way there.:)

Generali wrote: »

...Manufacturing isn't all the economy and nor should it be....

Manufacturing isn't even 10% of the economy these days.

GunJack

antrobus wrote: »

Well, the current lot have changed the tax allowance from from £6,475 to £10,600 thereby letting you pay £68.75 less a month, so at least they're over half way there..

But doing it year--on-year £10 a month it just gets lost in the weeds of living, if it was £70 a month in one go it would be more useful...

CLAPTON

antrobus wrote: »

Well, the current lot have changed the tax allowance from from £6,475 to £10,600 thereby letting you pay £68.75 less a month, so at least they're over half way there.:)



Manufacturing isn't even 10% of the economy these days.

only if you are 20% tax payer