The banker loving, baby-eating Tory party thread (regenerated)

[ciggiesnbeer]

7 minutes ago, ml1dch said:

I'm not offended in the slightest. I simply corrected your misunderstanding that you would pay less SDLT than you thought you might. And with that new info you thought that moving to a different country might be a good way to mitigate the additional money that you might have to pay.

I make no judgement on that. Your life, your money.

But I'd definitely suggest firing the "UK tax guy" who told you that you'd be a first time buyer when you're clearly not.

Thanks I have not yet hired my UK accountant I hope to use the same firm I use in the USA we shall see. I will be doing so next year as thats when my initial Europe/UK home scouting trip will happen.

Edited September 27, 2022 by ciggiesnbeer

[ciggiesnbeer]

7 minutes ago, bickster said:

I'm not picking you up on anything in your post, it's just this little phrase has been thrown about by a lot of people in the Tory Party of late and it reminded me. The UK doesn't have an unemployment problem, it has an employment problem. There are more vacancies than people to fill the roles already

Thanks! No worries. Yeah  the UK has a highly educated skilled labour force (which is a good thing) I should have written something like "create high paying opportunities for UK tech workers"

btw the people of the UK can rest easy I will never vote Conservative. I am a council house kid I have never forgotten where I came from.

Edited September 27, 2022 by ciggiesnbeer

[KentVillan]

1 hour ago, bickster said:

It won't. All cutting Stamp Duty will do, is increase the price of houses

We don't have enough builders and we don't have enough building materials or enough people to make building materials

I disagree on this, actually. It’s one of the few things Truss did that makes “unideological sense”.

SDLT disincentivises *sales* of property as much as it disincentivises purchases. This has the effect of encouraging people to not do things like downsizing, etc which allocate property more efficiently.

The IFS did a good piece of research on this, and concluded SDLT should be replaced with higher council tax with more bands:

(Bowman is an IEA / Tufton St guy, so take him with a pinch of salt, but Paul Johnson at the IFS is sound, and you can’t really argue with the logic here.)

[Mr_Dogg]

44 minutes ago, ciggiesnbeer said:

btw the people of the UK can rest easy I will never vote Conservative. I am a council house kid I have never forgotten where I came from.

You wouldn't vote in a party that are creating such an advantageous situation for you?

[NurembergVillan]

5 hours ago, Demitri_C said:

Who knows if any of us would still be here today if he never got those vaccines in early while the EU was dithering.

Hmmm... Given that the population of the EU wasn't even close to being wiped out, I'm fairly confident his other **** ups during the pandemic outweigh the one positive thing he took credit for.

[Jareth]

The IMF now telling Kwasi off. Who'd have thought it would be a tory chancellor that agitated the world's financiers. At what point do they U-turn?

[Rolta]

6 hours ago, Demitri_C said:

Who knows if any of us would still be here today if he never got those vaccines in early while the EU was dithering.

The rest of your post i agree with absolute shit show and scumbag behaviour

I'm still alive over here in Spain. We also only ever had the one, very first lockdown while you guys had plenty. But vaccines. The death toll was far higher in the UK, so I guess getting the vaccines in early (by paying extra for them) mitigated a tiny bit of that extra death toll.

[Genie]

They can’t u-turn on their big, fanfare, new era tax cut pledges can they? 

It would be utterly humiliating and immediately show them up for what they are.

[Jareth]

31 minutes ago, Genie said:

They can’t u-turn on their big, fanfare, new era tax cut pledges can they? 

It would be utterly humiliating and immediately show them up for what they are.

I can’t see they have any choice - it’s that apparently or killing the nhs. Uh oh! 

[Chindie]

Kwarteng has allegedly tried to curtail the pounds kami-Kwasi dive by appealing to the city bankers directly about how great his plans are, so it's unlikely they'll turn back on this any time soon.

[Chindie]

Of course there is the argument that this is all part of the plan. Tank the country, bin the NHS because it's unaffordable.

Anyone fancy investing in a guillotine firm? I can see a boom in the market for them in a few years.

[ciggiesnbeer]

2 hours ago, Mr_Dogg said:

You wouldn't vote in a party that are creating such an advantageous situation for you?

They havent. Conservatives created the Brexit disaster and Labour have now decided to collaborate with them. The budget goes a minuscule way to addressing the damage Brexit has and will continue to do until we rejoin. The fact that in a small way it financially helps me in my rare situation is no substitute for the far greater damage Brexit has done to myself and every other UK citizen. Being stripped of my EU citizenship and explicitly prohibited from voting against it by the Tories during the referendum is not something I will ever forget or forgive.

Oh and part of the reason I left the UK broke, with no qualifications was because of the opportunities taken away from me by Thatcher.  Conservatives get no credit for me making a life for myself in the USA.

But of course I am going to make sure I legally and ethically use any UK law and regulation to grow my business and invest in the UK. I want us to Rejoin the EU as soon as possible. I have no desire to hurt the UK economy more than Brexit already has done, I want it to be as healthy as possible so it makes our EU reentry as easy as it can be.

 

Edited September 27, 2022 by ciggiesnbeer

[CVByrne]

12 hours ago, bickster said:

It won't. All cutting Stamp Duty will do, is increase the price of houses

We don't have enough builders and we don't have enough building materials or enough people to make building materials

Interest rate hikes will crush demand as will the looming economic uncertainty. I can't see house prices rising at all. I think transactions will fall off a cliff and everyone will just wait it out for next few years. 

[CVByrne]

12 hours ago, ml1dch said:

No biggie, just one the very few economists (and one of Truss's three economic advisors) who didnt think her plan was suicidal from the start admitting that actually, things might be f****d after all.

 

 

People need to remember, companies need to borrow to invest and they borrow at higher rates than UK Government. This will slow the economy more than any of the tax cuts will benefit it. Truss has to reverse or postpone the 45% rate cut asap and propose the usual set of Tory cuts to public spending. 

I don't think it's all doom and gloom however. I think the Fed in the US has made a big error in being wrong about inflation so much they've had to hike rates so fast this year. It'll tip US into recession and they'll need to cut rates next year. This means dollar will fall and we get inflation down with a falling dollar. 

Crazy times. 

[Genie]

6 minutes ago, CVByrne said:

Interest rate hikes will crush demand as will the looming economic uncertainty. I can't see house prices rising at all. I think transactions will fall off a cliff and everyone will just wait it out for next few years. 

Prices my way dropping already. I still have old Rightmove alerts running and plenty of houses having their prices cut. 

[Panto_Villan]

14 hours ago, Davkaus said:

Lots of people have jumped on the Labour point, but I wanted to address this. Not if it was invested in sensible places it wouldn't be.

A national budget isn't like a household income, no matter how much politicians try to trick people into thinking it is, but to use an analogy, it's a poor idea financially to borrow money to buy a big telly and speaker system you can't afford. It might not be such a bad idea to borrow money to go and study a course that will cost you money, but massively increase your earnings long term. Or for a tradesman to borrow money to invest in new tools that will then let him complete future jobs more quickly or to a higher quality.

Likewise, it might be a poor idea for a country to borrow loads of money and do stupid things with it (like giving it all to their mates), but not necessarily to borrow money, at record low levels, to then invest in massive infrastructure projects, driving more investment into the country, creating a need for more skilled workers, and providing other long term non financial benefits.

This is a good point, although I’m not sure your point about household income vs national holds here - as you say, it’s still a good idea for a household to take out loans for valuable education or tools that increase your earnings in the long run. National finances work the same in that regard.

The question mark regarding the tail end of new Labour is whether that borrowed money would be put to an economically productive use. Because lots of physical infrastructure (roads, bridges, railways, broadband etc) falls into that category but there’s only so much of that stuff and it’s much more debatable whether services do the same - whether say throwing money at the NHS provides the same long term economic benefits, or just improves peoples lives a bit during the period that the increased spending occurs - a bit like a cheap Netflix subscription you still can’t really afford, to use your household analogy.
 

[CVByrne]

11 hours ago, KentVillan said:

I disagree on this, actually. It’s one of the few things Truss did that makes “unideological sense”.

SDLT disincentivises *sales* of property as much as it disincentivises purchases. This has the effect of encouraging people to not do things like downsizing, etc which allocate property more efficiently.

The IFS did a good piece of research on this, and concluded SDLT should be replaced with higher council tax with more bands:

(Bowman is an IEA / Tufton St guy, so take him with a pinch of salt, but Paul Johnson at the IFS is sound, and you can’t really argue with the logic here.)

Yes transaction taxes on assets are poor. We should replace Stamp Duty and Capital Gains with annual taxes on assets. This means as people accumulate wealth the tax they pay increase with it. It also fosters liquidity in the market as you say because it removes the barrier of capital gains selling an investment home and stamp duty buying a new one. This will help the overall system and is a progressive tax that taxes those who have benefited so much from the asset growth of the last 13/14 years

[Panto_Villan]

11 hours ago, KentVillan said:

I disagree on this, actually. It’s one of the few things Truss did that makes “unideological sense”.

SDLT disincentivises *sales* of property as much as it disincentivises purchases. This has the effect of encouraging people to not do things like downsizing, etc which allocate property more efficiently.

The IFS did a good piece of research on this, and concluded SDLT should be replaced with higher council tax with more bands:

Yes, this is true and is an interesting debate. I read a long article about it a few months ago that made some good points. Stamp Duty also discourages people from moving from areas with few jobs to more jobs, which is another economic harm.

But abolishing it does also require an increase in council tax and then that extra element being diverted to the central government - and higher taxes on house worth would be politically unpopular, and depress house prices too so I can’t see it happening.

One reason why SDLT is unlikely to disappear is that it’s one of the easiest taxes to collect and it’s impossible to fiddle. Unlike with council tax where there’s a subject element to the valuation, this just goes on the sale price and the government can refuse to transfer ownership until it gets paid. So it’s very efficient in that regard.

[CVByrne]

4 minutes ago, Genie said:

Prices my way dropping already. I still have old Rightmove alerts running and plenty of houses having their prices cut. 

Yeah, most people locking in 5Y fixed rates this year and paying the penalty fees to get out of their old 2Y fixed. People are going to stay put for years now. I think it might be like post Brexit vote where people were not selling lower than they thought their homes worth and properties just stayed on market unsold for years. So I can see a pull back of the crazy rises seen since post Covid boom, but not a real market collapse in prices. That only happens with mass unemployment ala 2008/9. We're at record lows in terms of unemployment and we have a worker issue due to Brexit. 

So property prices a mild pull back to last year and then stable with low trasactions for a few years until economy comes back and rates drop.

[Panto_Villan]

3 minutes ago, CVByrne said:

Yes transaction taxes on assets are poor. We should replace Stamp Duty and Capital Gains with annual taxes on assets. This means as people accumulate wealth the tax they pay increase with it. It also fosters liquidity in the market as you say because it removes the barrier of capital gains selling an investment home and stamp duty buying a new one. This will help the overall system and is a progressive tax that taxes those who have benefited so much from the asset growth of the last 13/14 years

The problem with this is the valuations. It’d be pretty much impossible (not to mention extremely tedious) to reliably calculate your net wealth every year.

How much has your laptop or phone depreciated this year? Do fluctuations in the commodities market mean your wedding band has increased in value this year, or does the scratch it got this year cancel that out?

Whereas PAYE is a straightforward way for the government to calculate and collect the right amount of money each month. And it also doesn’t mean that tax take falls to zero during a recession when the price of assets decreases.