Comments by "" (@lonevoice) on "The New Statesman" channel.

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  5.  @BigHenFor  I sometimes wonder just what they do teach at these PPE courses at Oxford. Free markets with no state intervention and tax cuts to minimise the tax burden on wealth creators is naive. Under Cameron we saw corporation tax slashed from 30% down to 19% with 5% chopped off the top rate of income tax but it did little for growth and inward investment remained pitiful. How does this square with Truss? The affluent are in the main unable or don't want to spend more than they regularly do, so if you give them even more through tax cuts, it just increases their annual surplus of income over expenditure. That money then is used to buy assets such as shares and property which then increase as more and more money is chasing them. It also then acts inhibit the functioning real economy as increasing amounts are plowed into asset purchases. Despite Truss's view of minimal state intervention recent evidence from the US indicates that the state can have an important and successful role in focusing and aiding investment. Tesla supposedly only got started through a $480 million loan US government loan. Mazzucato makes a good case for a state / private sector partnership: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eR2NqQWI6FM. Then Truss wants to scrap inheritance tax but that points to a discussion that we aren't even having! Why do we have student loans? I think that the accepted answer is that costs within this sector of public expenditure were escalating too much for what wanted to be achieved. But doesn't this also apply to healthcare on an even greater scale? A study in the US showed that 80% of healthcare costs arose from the older generation and I suspect that the UK is similar. We have a funding problem with healthcare so why aren't we applying the student loan model to it? For example, the over 60s could receive a healthcare loan for any significant treatment that they have and that loan could either be repaid from their estate when they die or be written off at that stage. At present, inheritance tax is a poor and crude alternative to such a system and one that Truss would like to scrap.
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