Comments by "Michael RCH" (@michaelrch) on "UK economy to do ‘worse than Russia’, warns IMF on Brexit anniversary" video.

Rising inequality is strangling the economy. Tax the rich and spend the money on the people's priorities - healthcare, education, transport, homes and cheaper energy.
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@Dave-gn4yt I left the UK a few years ago. I now pay higher tax than I would in the UK both from my work and from income from my company. And also from the value of my property. I pay income tax ON ALL MY INCOME at a rate of about 42% - no lower rate for dividends or capital gains. I pay for health insurance on top of that. I pay about 0.7% wealth tax every year. And it's worth every single penny. The public services are excellent. The transportation system, both in my city and around the country, is world class. The public facilities like swimming pools and sports grounds are either free or cost next to nothing to use. And no one is on the streets. And I mean no one. The reason for this is that rich people here, understand that they have a responsibility to their communities. They cannot just get rich and let the rest of their country go hungry. Paying taxes is still seen as a patriotic thing to do here. So yeah, I'm a millionaire and I advocate for higher taxes on the rich. In the UK they would work wonders given how little tax the rich currently pay, and how much unearned wealth they have accumulated. Just remember this. During COVID the government spent about £600 billion to keep the economy afloat. That is £10,000 per person. So if you arent £10,000 richer than before then someone else has your £10,000, and I can tell you who that it. It's the 1% who own your house, or who own your mortgage or who own the company that you work for, or the company your pay your energy and shopping bills to etc That's why the number of billionaires shot up during COVID. It was an absolutely bonanza for the very rich.
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@Guru316 Wealthy people don't hold lots of cash. They hold lots of assets, like houses, offices, companies, bonds etc. You cannot take an office block or a company operating in the UK etc and just walk off.
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@thegoat11111 funny thing is that real capitalists don't like corruption. It messes up the system that is making them rich. Some will just be too greedy and can't help themselves, but the guys with real money will tend to oppose corruption, though for purely selfish reasons.
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@jjefferyworboys8138 That's a result of very concentrated wealth an income with the richest, not because they pay high tax rates. They pay significantly lower rates because they get most of their income from dividends and cap gains which are taxed at lower rates. And they can't just pick up their buildings and companies and move because that's not something you can do with buildings and companies.
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@thatundeadlegacy2985 giving corporations tax cuts doesn't make them invest in more employees. It makes them give their shareholders higher dividends. This is demonstrated over and over and over. When Trump gave corporations a $2 trillion tax cut, they used 94% of the savings to pay higher dividends to their shareholders and higher pay to their top executives. Corporations don't just expand in the hope that their will magically be more demand . They expand BECAUSE there is more demand. And that demand comes when the general population has more money in the form of higher wages. The main reason for the Great Depression in the US in the 1930s was because inequality had got so bad that the corporations had actually starved their own potential customers of the means to buy their products, so the economy went into a tailspin. The only way out was for government to dramatically redistribute wealth and income. FDR took credit for "saving capitalism from itself".
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@Land-of-reason oil and gas rocket in price causing a cost of living crisis and you are blaming the cheapest energy you can buy for inflation 🤦‍♂️
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@dulls8475 oh boy. Sorry to break it to you but that Laffer curve nonsense about lowering tax rates increasing tax receipts was debunked literally 30 years ago. It does not work. At all. Trickle down is a lie. Its a fairy story that rich people and their pet economists tell the media and the people to justify endlessly cutting their own taxes. Lowe tax neoliberal economics has delivered the highest inequality and the lowest trend growth in G7 countries in history. Lets look at trend growth in the US for example. In the 50s-70s, top tax rates where between 75 and 90%. The inequality was low and stable. Bosses earned on average 20 times their median worker. Growth was 4-6&5 over that period. Since 1981, when Reagan brought in low-tax low regulation policy with real force, trend rate growth fell and fell and fell. It is not about 2%. Meanwhile, inequality has skyrocketed. the average big corporate boss earns 400x his media worker. There has been a transfer of over $40 TRILLION in wealth to the top 1% and workers real wages have stagnated. In the UK, since 2010, real wages have fallen faster than at any time in the last 200 years. Yes, 200 centuries. This is the worse fall in living standards in the UK since records began. What caused this? Lower taxes on the rich starved the government coffers. The government instituted austerity which literally killed over 130,00 people, took about a million off the payrolls because they were too sick to work and left millions highly vulnerable and unable to pay for the basics, let alone go out and enjoy their lives. That has a massive impact on the economy because poor people can't buy the stuff that makes the economy run. So yeah, lowering taxes on the rich does nothing for the economy. It actually reduces investment, it incentivises profit taking, it drives share buybacks and dividends. It allows companies to keep making money without improving productivity. And it starves public services which makes peoples lives worse and the whole economy more precarious. Which is precisely what we are seeing now.
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@carlwide6594 lol. People are leaving the U.K. because it's living standards are falling like a stone. 12 years ago, Brits and Germans had the same median income per capita. Since then, the U.K. has fallen behind Germany by nearly £10,000 per year per person. Low taxes don't drive growth. They disincentivise investment in favour of dividends and stock buybacks and they starve the government of the funds it needs to maintain a well functioning society. The Trump tax cuts in 2017 handed 87% of the benefits to corporations and the wealthy. Corporations spent less than 3% of the savings on investment. They spent over 90% on stock buybacks as dividends. Ie the money was pocketed by the wealthiest in society.
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@Joker-yw9hl and I refuted what he said.
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@stephen2975 Re benefit fraud, it's a relatively tiny problem and it's blown up out of all proportion. You are 23 times more likely to be prosecuted for benefit fraud than for tax fraud, even though HMRC loses 8 times more in evaded tax that the government does in overpaying benefits. The system is rigged in favour of the rich. People like Nadhim Zahawi and Mrs Rishi Sunak. The rightwing press never talks about tax evasion and fraud because it's the rich that are doing it as a matter of course. But they bleat on about poor people getting paid too much in benefits even though it's a much smaller problem, because it deflects attention to where they want it. Divide and rule the working class. It's their mantra.
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@stephen2975 I think the fact that some people live dependent on benefits say much more about how low wages are, how poor the education and training system is and how happy the government is to let people who have fallen behind rot in their poverty. Being in work is not just good for the society, it is good for people's mental health. People in these dead end situations are not happy and fulfilled. The problem is that many of them have zero confidence or skills or wherewithal to get into work. This exact pathology can also happen to people who have worked for years and then become long term sick due to things like chronic back pain or diabetes etc. People lose contact with the world of work, they lose their confidence, they lose their self-belief and they fall into depression and withdraw. BTW this almost happened to me. I was mostly off work for 4 of the worst years of my life. I would not wish what I went through on my worst enemy. I was very lucky that I had a lot of support from my family and my company to get back to normal. But many people arent that lucky. That can be fixed, but it takes a long time and lots of patience and support. It requires the re-socialisation of these people in some cases. This requires the kind of commitment to helping unfortunate that this government doesn't have one iota of.
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@stephen2975 when a few people do something wrong or stupid, blame the people. If millions of people do something wrong or stupid, there is a systematic cause. I don't begrudge people who need my taxes to pay for food and heating when I would only spend it on more pointless stuff, holidays and expensive dinners out. I also grew up on benefits. My dad left when I was 3. We were broke most of the time. Benefits saved our lives. I did well at school, got an elite education and started a successful business. Years later, I got a serious back injury and was out of action, in continuous and debilitating chronic pain for 3 years. Sometimes bad things happen to good people and a civilised society looks after people in need. It doesn't ask why you're in need first. We don't make ourselves. We are the sum of our genes and our experiences. Everyone is just as entitled to a good life as you or me. Throwing strangers who you think are unworthy on the scrap heap is the hallmark of a callous and inhumane society. I suggest you stop looking for scapegoats at the bottom of society and turn your attention to the sociopathic oligarchs at the top who have made our society and our economy such a basket case. Trust me. I know them personally. They and their system needs to be taken down for the good of everyone.
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@stephen2975 you're right. I am not in touch with people on benefits. For the sake of this discussion, I am rich and I am paying some of the taxes that pay for people in benefits. And they are welcome to my money. They need it more than me. What's also worth noting about today vs when I grew up is that work is no longer a way out of poverty for very many people. 40% of households with someone working full time are claiming universal credit. Inequality is such that you're better off being in the bottom 20% by income in Slovenia than in the U.K.. Literally millions of working households are now forced to use food banks. If jobs don't pay enough to feed, cloth and house your family, is it any wonder that people won't do them. I wouldn't do them. Whose fault is this? It's not the fault of people who have no well paid job to go to. It's the fault of a government and a system that have robbed millions of workers of their rights, their bargaining power and their dignity. And remember, the flip side to working poverty is staggering wealth for the top 1% and top 0.1%. That wealth is only possible at the expense of the poverty of millions of other people.
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@stephen2975 I am not suggesting that we leave everything to government. Nor am I suggesting that we should treat people not doing something productive as a good state for most people. I am saying that there are systemic issues as to why people aren't productive, and that we will not make those people productive by just yelling at them. As I said, nearly everyone is personally better of with a sense of purpose and a sense of satisfaction from the work they do. Even people who have been in work and know this can often get left behind and end up losing the opportunity and confidence to work. Add to that that many people's only a choice of work is poorly paid, hard, stressful and insecure work that leaves them poor anyway. And of the about 1 million people who left the U.K. labour market in the last 10 years, half of them did so because a failing NHS is leaving them chronically ill or injured. So they not only don't work but they live with pain and disability. You have to try to get past the habit of ascribing personal failing to things that are actually caused by systemic flaws. It is unfair to the people concerned but it's also guaranteed to NOT fix the problem because you are simply not dealing with the flaws which cause the problems in the first place. Lastly, and this is perhaps the most important point, you say we could live in a society of plenty. The tragedy is that we ALREADY DO. The reason it doesn't seem like that is because an obscene amount of the wealth and income in the country going to a tiny fraction of people. If you give 90% of wealth to 1% of people, is it any wonder that the other 99% don't feel very well off? And btw I say that as someone in the 1%. I should pay higher taxes on the dividends I get. I should pay higher taxes on the capital gains I get, and on the top end of my salary. Tbh what people at my level of wealth would contribute is not where the real action is. It's actually with the top 0.1% and 0.01%. When you are into hundreds of millions and billions, those guys are paying next to nothing in tax so they just get richer and richer and richer.
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@stephen2975 mostly true. I propose - more democracy with a ban on behind-the-scenes corporate lobbying - change the voting system in all elections to PR - decentralise power to cities and regions - more public and municipal ownership of industries and services that don't work better with a market - more municipal wealth building which invests in local housing, services and facilities - more democracy and worker representation within corporations - more worker owned enterprises and public funding to get them started or buy out existing capitalist enterprises - higher taxes on income fro wealth - a tax on wealth (and don't believe that it doesn't work - look at Switzerland which has had successful wealth taxes for ages) - higher tax on income above 100k and above 250k - higher threshold on the 40% tax rate (this is a tax cut) - extend NI to tax all income - lower VAT to 17.5% then 15% (VAT is regressive tax) That kind of thing.
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@stephen2975 I agree that democracy is in deep trouble but I disagree with you about why that is. Democracy is specifically about decentralised, shared power. One person, one vote. The current economic system does the exact opposite. It rapidly concentrates power in the hands of a few people. Those people use their power to corrupt, disrupt and neuter democracy. They use the media to manufacture consent among voters for a system that maintains and furthers their power. If you are not familiar with "manufacturing consent" then you will definitely find this documentary reeeally enlightening. It's long but I promise it's worth every minute. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li2m3rvsO0I The whole point of a working democracy is that it does NOT put unaccountable power in the hands of a few people who you have to rely on to be honest and altruistic. Because people who get power in a democracy rarely are. And in a capitalist democracy, they are usually the exact opposite.
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@thatundeadlegacy2985 you are missing an important feature of how capitalism works. It's the workers that create the value that makes the profits that make the owners rich. If you sack all your workers, you don't have a business and you don't get any profits. The very rich don't make their money from labour. They make it from accumulation of profits.
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@stephen2975 who are the lazy people in society? The poor who work full time jobs and still qualify for universal credit because their pay is so low, or the rich who literally live off the income from their assets without doing a stroke of work?
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@stephen2975 productivity is calculated based on the hours people work. It takes no account of people who are not employed. In fact productivity is a perfect illustration of how the economy isn't working due to low wages. When wages are low, then companies are not under pressure to invest in processes that reduce the amount of labour they have to buy. Instead of buying new machinery to make their processes more efficient, they just buy in more labour because it's cheaper. As wages rise, companies are under a competitive pressure to invest in more plant and machinery to reduce the amount of labour they need. Low productivity is a very common feature of, weak, low wage economies. The solution is to raise wages, drive up demand AND drive up investment to keep long term business costs down.
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@stephen2975 > That is a stupid analysis. It is literally mainstream classical economic analysis. It is not vaguely controversial. > People in business want to make profit and if they see a way to improve they invest! They don't invest when there is no market for their products though. > A disinterested workforce is no incentive. What about higher pay makes workers "disinterested"? On the contrary, the research on this shows that better paid workers are more productive all other things being equal. Why would that be? Well it's because the feel more vaklued, more personally invested in the company and they are not stressed about paying their bills. > The idea that pressure drives investment is nonsensical! If you are in a competitive landscape and you have to do more with less, then you HAVE to invest to stay competitive. If labour becomes a more expensive commodity then you will find ways to do more with lees labour. Again, this is economics 101. Not even vaguely controversial, and its borne out by decades of research. > Confidence drives investment, and Confidence in the workforce plays a huge part! Yes, confidence that you have a market to sell your goods and confidence that you have stable regulatory regime, and confidence that you will have access to goo infrastructure and well educated workers. > You have got it wrong, no, real improvement must come from the bottom up! That is literally what I am arguing. Give workers a larger share of the economic pie and not only will the vast majority of people live better, but the entire economy will function better. > The Chinese economy has grown exponentially, and partly because of the people's attitude to work, yes there are many other factors but without this component it would have failed! China has a heavily state-directed economy and that drives massive investment in new infrastructure and technology. This is partly what the US did in the 1950s-1970s. Which is why during that period they had the highest sustained growth in the country's history. Once Regan got in and slashed taxes and regulation, trend rates for growth and productivity declined. And worker pay actually stagnated for 45 years while the top 1% got $40 trillion richer. Yes, 40 trillion. > Years ago, in the 80s I encountered working with the Japanese, and I soon realised why they were more successful than ourselves! It was mainly their attitude to work! Traditional Japanese working practices also lead to high levels of social alienation, depression and suicide. And it isn't necessary. France has much higher productivity than the UK. The lazy, idle French with their long lunch breaks and long vacations. Why? Because government economic policy drives higher wages, higher investment in public sector infrastructure and higher investment in private sector plant and machinery. UK economic policy is a smash-and-grab. It constantly incentivises short term profits without any view to the long term. Which is why UK productivity and growth are in the toilet.
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@stephen2975 it is mainstream because it is backed by decades of hard empirical evidence. If you want to deal with selfishness, start at the top of the pile, among the multi-millionaires and billionaires who evade their taxes and buy off our governments, and destroy our environment and exploit and under pay workers, just so they can get richer and richer and richer. That is where the actual sociopaths are.
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@stephen2975 > Of course the rich buy off government, they always have! but it takes corrupted officials to oblige them! We need a generation that will truly work for the public good: that will take a moral revolution! I would love that but that isn't how power works unfortunately. Greed always seeks its own ends. In our economic system, money is power. It is power over people's jobs. It's power over the companies that operate a large part of the economy. It is the power to control the media and the stories and narratives that people hear everyday about why the world is as it is. We must create a countervailing power against that. The only way to stop the powerful concentrating ever more money and power in their own hands is to democratise that power - to share it out among more people, and to create systems that enforce accountability. Our current system of low taxes and low regulation does the opposite. It allows mosey and power to pile up with a tiny elite of people who are so powerful that if politicians don't do as they are told, they rich destroy them. The solution will not come from politicians who are part of this system. As you said before, the solution comes from the bottom up. It comes when ordinary people refuse to accept this system anymore, when they refuse to play along with this rampant inequality, and the unfairness, and the corruption, and the betrayal of the people by the political class. We have to make it so that the political class cannot afford to ignore the people as they currently do. The elite have concentrated power and wealth. But we have massive numbers. And we operate their companies. Without the workers, shareholders of companies have nothing. They don't work. They cannot operate their profit machines without workers. We need a mass movement of solidarity - a mass movement of the people against the wealthy and corrupt elites. That is how you get the moral revival you want - when people stand up for each other in the face of oppression. That is the greatest expression of our humanity.
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Neoliberal capitalism is destroying our public services, it's returning pathetic growth, it's supercharging inequality and it's impoverishing workers. Time for this horrific and discredited ideology to be abandoned.
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