Britain is a rich country with the world’s 6th largest economy and the highest tax income for decades, which raises a simple question - why do we seem so broke?
Because we’re heading back to the Victorian era in terms of inequality. At that time we were the pre-eminent world power and yet we had masses of people living in abject poverty.
Because we’re heading back to the Victorian era in terms of inequality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_era
In the history of the United Kingdom and the British Empire, the Victorian era was the reign of Queen Victoria, from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901.
That doesn’t look a lot like Victorian-era levels of inequality to me.
I think that the points highlighted in the article are probably stronger. For example, the author mentions housing:
Advocates of tax rises point out that actually, middle income families face lower taxes than in many other developed nations, and that’s absolute true, but it overlooks a glaring problem: housing costs. Britain’s houses are cramped, ancient and in the wrong places leaving workers with longer, more expensive commutes. And we get to pay more for the privilege, almost single-handedly reversing the relative wealth of many British families versus their European counterparts. It’s a cliché that every other policy problem in Britain resolves to a housing problem, but in this case punishing rents and mortgage payments are consuming a large percentage of the income that other countries would tax.
It’s true that the UK has exceptionally small per-capita space allocated to housing compared to similarly-wealthy countries. I suppose that one could argue about whether that’s a positive or negative — I think that many people have made a valid point that people here in the US are purchasing housing that’s inefficiently large, putting too much of their assets into real estate — but it’s an aspect where the UK really is unusual compared to peers.
kagis
This is just the first result that comes up. It isn’t a per-capita visualization, but I think that it definitely drives home the point:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/house-size-by-country
goes looking for a per-capita measurement
Here we go; I’ve seen this visualization before.
It is poor. The City bled billions/trillions of pounds out of the economy into tax havens for decades, and the GFC and COVID accelerated the process.
Its worldwide and it all comes down to wealth disparity. Just look at the disparity in even the top ten or 100 lists of wealthiest people and corporations. Musk is like double the person below him most of the time. That is why he can fuck things every which way and stay on top. The numbers are insane. Over a hundred people for people and market caps in trillions for corps while regular folks are trying to get by and thousandaires.
If you don’t tax the rich, you lose your country
Because the money is being siphoned off and away from the population to just exactly the places you would guess. It is more evident in Britain as we are a later stage capitalist state than most.
Redundant question when the government have just announced they’re taking money from disabled people but are considering not taxing huge tech orgs.
It’s insane. No one does anything until they start losing money. It’s all fucked and I hate it.
A few thoughts: we’re not that poor, a lot of the current distribution of wealth and government spending aims are the result of neoliberal ideology first and foremost.
That said our nominal GDP growth has been harmed by neoliberal policies which have shifted the UK away from producing very much and towards playing many silly games with money. We measure how much we move abstract representations of currency around (which usually represents some probabilistic measure of value of money, which in itself is really just numbers with no intrinsic value) and go “hey, great job, we’ve really grown the economy!”
We saw the financial crisis in 2008 and apparently thought to ourselves “let’s have some more of that”.
So we’re in a situation where our overseers are seeing our GDP failing to grow as it should, panicking, and implementing more of the same policies that cause that situation in the first place. The UK isn’t poor yet but it will be soon. The young and the poor are the ones who are feeling the bleeding edge of this trend but it’s filtering through to the middle class now as well.
