Private pensions popular in UK but not in France, Germany, Spain

Terron

nigelbb wrote: »

No, they looked at different dates. This graph is more detailed & if you hover the mouse pointer gives actual year by year percentages. In 2009/10 it was 7.59% while in 2019/20 it was planned to be 7.07%

https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/news-item/70-years-of-nhs-spending


While the increase necessary to keep pace with demand is 3.6%.

GNP had dropped 4% but NHS payments did not- hence the unusually high figure for 2009/2010, but that is too unusual a year to use for measuring trends, as opposed to producing propaganda. Note that there were similar spikes for all but one of the other recessions noted. Still it is interesting to note that 2009/10 was the first year to pass 7% and it has remained above 7% ever since.



The massive increases in spending under Blair were not accompanied by equally massive improvements in quality of treatment,.There is no direct link between performance and spend

Even if demand increases 3.6%pa one would hope that the spend would increase less rapidly with improved efficiency. However the NHS is a bit unusual in that improvements in efficiency may increase costs (due to patients living longer).

[Deleted User]

nigelbb wrote: »

While the increase necessary to keep pace with demand is 3.6%.

My demand is a personal helicopter. Sadly, my budget does not keep pace with my demand.

Borrowing from our kids to live beyond means today isn’t as great an idea as it seems.

nigelbb

Deleted_User wrote: »

My demand is a personal helicopter. Sadly, my budget does not keep pace with my demand.

Borrowing from our kids to live beyond means today isn’t as great an idea as it seems.

There is no need to borrow as there is plenty of money available it's just not being spent on the NHS, social care, reducing homelessness etc

We need to pay more taxes to pay for this stuff if we want to have a decent society. I am in the top 3% of wage earners & paid over £30K in income tax & £5K in NI last financial year. I have a very comfortable life but if my income tax was increased by 10% it would have little or no effect on my lifestyle nor I dare say on that of other high earners.

Anonymous101

nigelbb wrote: »

There is no need to borrow as there is plenty of money available it's just not being spent on the NHS, social care, reducing homelessness etc

We need to pay more taxes to pay for this stuff if we want to have a decent society. I am in the top 3% of wage earners & paid over £30K in income tax & £5K in NI last financial year. I have a very comfortable life but if my income tax was increased by 10% it would have little or no effect on my lifestyle nor I dare say on that of other high earners.

I absolutely agree that we need to pay more taxes if we want increased services. Its absolutely not sustainable to be running at a deficit as we have for the last decade or more. Its especially worrying as this period has been particularly healthy for business and employment levels have been consistently high.


The issue I think a lot of people have is that they don't feel like they get good value from their taxes. Whether its a true impression or not I'm not sure but people in the UK do think that the government waste their money. I contrast this to the Scandinavian countries which from afar seem happier paying more in.

nigelbb

Anonymous101 wrote: »

I absolutely agree that we need to pay more taxes if we want increased services. Its absolutely not sustainable to be running at a deficit as we have for the last decade or more. Its especially worrying as this period has been particularly healthy for business and employment levels have been consistently high.


The issue I think a lot of people have is that they don't feel like they get good value from their taxes. Whether its a true impression or not I'm not sure but people in the UK do think that the government waste their money. I contrast this to the Scandinavian countries which from afar seem happier paying more in.

Scandinavia, France, Germany etc are high wage, high tax, high benefit, high productivity countries. The UK by contrast has become a low wage, low tax, low productivity economy with greater inequality between rich & poor. The greed encouraged in the Thatcher era started the rot with the government selling off the family silver to fund tax cuts for the wealthy.

We need to pay more tax to fund better public services which is a virtuous circle for as the NHS, roads, schools etc improve then people feel happier paying higher taxes as in Scandinavia.

jimi_man

nigelbb wrote: »

Scandinavia, France, Germany etc are high wage, high tax, high benefit, high productivity countries. The UK by contrast has become a low wage, low tax, low productivity economy with greater inequality between rich & poor. The greed encouraged in the Thatcher era started the rot with the government selling off the family silver to fund tax cuts for the wealthy.

We need to pay more tax to fund better public services which is a virtuous circle for as the NHS, roads, schools etc improve then people feel happier paying higher taxes as in Scandinavia.

And yet when you look at the World Happiness Index - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Happiness_Report#2019_report

...the UK is consistently above France and Germany in most of the categories and in Social Support and Generosity, the UK is very near the top. In Generosity, Malta is the only other EU country in the top 10. Also the UK is one of the top five countries in the world for migration, so we must be doing something right.

Maybe it's not doom and gloom after all and the UK is still a reasonable place to exist.

Notepad_Phil

nigelbb wrote: »

Scandinavia, France, Germany etc are high wage, high tax, high benefit, high productivity countries. The UK by contrast has become a low wage, low tax, low productivity economy with greater inequality between rich & poor.

I remember listening to the radio on catchup fairly recently (probably the radio 4 show "More or Less") and hearing that one of the big reasons for the productivity gap with (I think) France was a difference in how the countries counted the actual hours worked.

There was also a bit about corporation tax (possibly the same show) where they said that actually the UK has one of the highest rates of actual tax paid by companies across Europe. This was because although the corporation tax rate is low, there were very few reliefs that a company could offset the tax against. Whereas European companies could vastly decrease the amount of tax they had to pay by making full use of them.

So maybe you shouldn't just trust that all numbers that reinforce your opinion are right, especially when differing national bodies are compiling them and that they might just be the starting point to get at the actual real numbers.

nigelbb

Notepad_Phil wrote: »

I remember listening to the radio on catchup fairly recently (probably the radio 4 show "More or Less") and hearing that one of the big reasons for the productivity gap with (I think) France was a difference in how the countries counted the actual hours worked.

There was also a bit about corporation tax (possibly the same show) where they said that actually the UK has one of the highest rates of actual tax paid by companies across Europe. This was because although the corporation tax rate is low, there were very few reliefs that a company could offset the tax against. Whereas European companies could vastly decrease the amount of tax they had to pay by making full use of them.

So maybe you shouldn't just trust that all numbers that reinforce your opinion are right, especially when differing national bodies are compiling them and that they might just be the starting point to get at the actual real numbers.

This must be what you are thinking about. https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/017a99aa-fc72-11e8-ac00-57a2a826423e
To quote from one of the authors of the OECD report

“This doesn’t explain the productivity slowdown,” he said, instead it shows the UK is not as far behind France and Germany as thought, though the gap is “still quite significant”.

[Deleted User]

I do find it incredible that anyone can quote France, a country with almost 10% unemployment and about 25% youth unemployment as an economic paradigm. That’s an economy in a dire situation.

Sweden’s unemployment rate is lower than in France (as is the tax burden), but it’s still 75% higher than in the UK. The real problem is bigger. I have some family in Sweden as my brother’s in law’s wife is Swedish. Several of her relatives are FORCED to take work abroad. Wives and kids stay home while husbands go abroad to earn some money. That’s surprisingly wide spread. Swedish taxation has been going down for quite some time as they realize there is a problem.

Germany has similar tax burden and similar unemployment rate to the UK. Total tax burden in Germany is 37% vs 34.6% of GDP in the UK). Germany is a “funny” country to compare with as its export driven economy uniquely benefits from the Euro and the ECB interest rates set to favour its economy.

In general, taxation is not a zero sum game. You don’t necessarily increase government income by raising taxation. The impact can be the exact opposite.

bigadaj

The problem other the NHS is that it is an inefficient organisation, which is understandable given its public sector and so huge. So additional spending on it hasn't translated very well into increased outcomes be improved performance. Whilst it doesn't have the accounting costs of soem systems, like the us, the amount soend in management rather than frontline care is disproportionately large.

You may have read the case of the management consultant in north wales who was based in Spain, charging around £400k per year, whose main suggestion to improve matters was to cut nurses breaks payment, which in total didn't even pay for his billing.

NHS funding is the one area that hasn't been cut through austerity.

It's very difficult to get objective data in health but there is an oecd document from 2016 that compares outcome and spending, and the U.K. Comes out second worst of developed economies, Denmark being the only country below it.