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Never really got my head round VAT, always advised to avoid getting involved. Looks like a case of findingthe missing £20!

I sell you a chair for £100 + vat so you give me £120, you then get the £20 back from government which means I must pay the government £20 so why bother, it is like that tenner that goes back and forth in a birthday card where there is no gain.
If I, (or a business) as the purchaser of your chair at £120 are not VAT registered, the VAT cannot be reclaimed and so you send the £20 into GOV with your VAT return.
 
Your argument makes sense but where and when did the government do this? Are you talking about the 3m excluded from furlough etc of which I was one ?

I'm saying that, if you inject a whole bunch of cash into a system, it doesn't matter if "everyone gets some". Sure, everyone may get some numbers on their bank account, but unless there is more "stuff", all the existing "stuff" just has increased demand (costs more).

So if i give you a tenner, and everyone else a million quid, im actually making you poorer. Even though the numbers on your bank account show an extra tenner.

Over the covid period, the government injected vast sums of money into the economy. Wormholes and bonfires aside, that cash (still) exists.

Unless you have [total money injected / population of the uk] extra in your bank account, then someone else has it in theirs. If you don't have the approximately extra £15k per individual in your household, then you have got poorer. And someone else has gotten richer. Which is wealth redistribution.
 
If you disagree, look at COVID. What was the government spend? 600 billion or something? I forget the numbers, but i think it works out about £15k for each human in the uk. So my 4yr old daughter should have £15k more in the bank... I should have. You should have. Your child, or grand child should.


So we have just given "the rich" the lions share of £600 billion. And yet we are in this current situation. The proof is in the pudding. It just doesn't work giving out cash to the wealthy.

Indeed your local hairdresser, pub, sports club, all needed financial support to remain solvent during Covid. - 'The Rich' as you call them or the lifeblood of our communities.

Once people manage to see beyond the shores of our land, you can see that all countries in the world, yes including Europe, are in the fiscal mire.

https://www.reuters.com/business/fi...=Reuters Global Investor - 2021 - Master List
Though with lazy uniformed economics it is easy to just blame it all on the Tories.

Remember it was the oil crisis in the 1970's which caused 24% inflation and interest rates of 14%. Then we were in such deep trouble we had to take out the biggest loan ever from the International Monetary Fund.
As I recall someone called James Callaghan was prime minister at the time at the head of the Labour Party.

Some interesting links for those who wish to be informed on a non political basis.

https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/171099/economics/britains-new-winter-of-discontent/


Joe Bloggs, blog (above) is very informative for the novice.
 
Proper capitalism looks after others in the pile as it is long term more beneficial - tread on everyone and you become the top of a heap of dead bodies - not very exalted - but support those who need help and you build a good work force, educated people, and open the doors to all - but you don’t need to stop the opportunities at the top to do it - so true capitalism should have a socialist element to it but sadly often doesn’t- however true socialism shouldn’t be the current embittered mess that tries to bring everyone down

So for me our current version of capitalism is better than our current version of socialism and then I do what is possible to help others (as indeed have my ancestors over the centuries demonstrating a strong commercial value in doing so)
I'd be quite happy with a model whereby the successful do well, but are taxed (and actually pay it) at a rate that means those at the bottom of society (who often are the plebs doing the work) are not in poverty. Whether that's capitalism with a dose of socialism I don't know. Put more simply; I don't care if one man has a Fiat and another has a Ferrari; what I object to is a society in which some have to decide between putting food on the table or paying the rent, and others have to decide which of their homes they're living in this weekend. Something very broken about that.
 
really? When a poor person pays a wealthier person something voluntarily, that's redistribution?

i'd bet that there's a whole lot of correlation between people who save money continuing to work and putting that money in retirement accounts vs. spending it. Those who don't and maybe don't ever work more than they have to do as sean said - they bought time with the money, or purchased the ability to not work.

Some would have done that by choice.

I put every stimulus penny in my retirement accounts. I didn't have the choice to work less - my workplace got busier rather than the other way around. I suppose I could've stopped working, but that wouldn't have been a good idea.

My neighbor who makes about $1000 a week as a tradie found that he could receive about that with the bolstered unemployment and he didn't work until the plus unemployment stipend went away. We are still dealing locally with union trades having employees who just don't want to work full time and especially not OT. It's across the board. They have willingly traded earnings for time - to the extent that many are going on medical leave. Half of some work crews.

I think I received about $8k over two years. My neighbor received about that less the amount that was provided per child (his one child is grown). He also collected an enormous amount of unemployment that he probably shouldn't have been able to collect (you have to make yourself available for work to get UC here - he didn't do that. When his spouse responded to a UC office caller that he wasn't available for work, they didn't check his steward, but rather called him back a day or two later and were "double checking" and of course, he said he was available.

They also advised him that there was some additional legislation passed that funded eligible prior UC from weeks before the first program so that all of it could be trued up.

if you're following this, they knew he wasn't available for work, but called so he could change the answer that his spouse gave, and then gave him another $7K.

This kind of thing was rampant. He's back to work now and made the comment that it's not money-safe to be at home with nothing to do (meaning he blew all of the money).

In your model, received something as an individual like about 8 times what my household of four received, and since I put my money in my retirement account, and he spent his, that's wealth redistribution.

Really bonkers.
 
Indeed your local hairdresser, pub, sports club, all needed financial support to remain solvent during Covid. - 'The Rich' as you call them or the lifeblood of our communities.
.

My local hairdresser has two kids, so a four person family.

I wonder if they have an extra £60k in the bank?

If not, someone else has that money.

I wonder who - do you know?
 
My local hairdresser has two kids, so a four person family.

I wonder if they have an extra £60k in the bank?

If not, someone else has that money.

I wonder who - do you know?
I doubt it. The financial support distributed during the pandemic will have been spent by most self employed recipients on their living expenses and covering the fixed costs of their business (rent etc). Undoubtedly not all with have done so and some people defrauded the taxpayer with false claims which due to mixture of inefficient implementation and a desire to get money to those who needed it quickly were not spotted at the time.
 
I'm saying that, if you inject a whole bunch of cash into a system, it doesn't matter if "everyone gets some". Sure, everyone may get some numbers on their bank account, but unless there is more "stuff", all the existing "stuff" just has increased demand (costs more).

So if i give you a tenner, and everyone else a million quid, im actually making you poorer. Even though the numbers on your bank account show an extra tenner.

Over the covid period, the government injected vast sums of money into the economy. Wormholes and bonfires aside, that cash (still) exists.

Unless you have [total money injected / population of the uk] extra in your bank account, then someone else has it in theirs. If you don't have the approximately extra £15k per individual in your household, then you have got poorer. And someone else has gotten richer. Which is wealth redistribution.
I’m sorry but we are going to have to agree to disagree on this.
 
My local hairdresser has two kids, so a four person family.

I wonder if they have an extra £60k in the bank?

If not, someone else has that money.

I wonder who - do you know?

Did someone take it from them, or did they spend it? My neighbor spent his, I didn't spend mine. Nobody took anything from either of us. He doesn't plan ahead a whole lot and things that should be relatively minor in life (car unexpectedly not passing inspection) really knock him off of his stool for a while.

There may not be a human right to be a hairdresser and save $60K if you're supporting a family of four. If you'd like to tell me that a married hair dresser with a blue collar employed husband can't save that much money, you'd have to meet a now-deceased uncle of mine. His wife was a hair dresser all her life. He worked in a manufacturing plant as an assembler. They retired on a 115 acre farm and had a second house.

My parents were both college educated teachers. My hair dresser aunt and my factory worker uncle got turned on to squeezing pennies and putting money into the stock market back in the 1980s. Maybe you wouldn't have been able to accept the lifestyle they lived on the amount they didn't save, but they chose to be fine with it.

We're not talking about a fine hair dresser or someone assembling lamborghinis, either. My aunt had a salon - her price was below the cost of the franchise places that employ marginal beauty school graduates and cut and color hair for everyone (kids and all), and she worked a day a week cut rate cutting hair at a nursing home.

What I think is missing is the chance for a lot of people to observe why they may want to put aside 10-20% of their income and if they can't, work either more or at something different so they can.

perhaps 10% of the crowd that doesn't do this will have life circumstances that prevents them from being able to do it. To tell the whole group that it can't be done leads to people claiming wealth is redistributed because they spent their money.
 
My uncle and aunt didn't have two kids, by the way, they had three. They didn't pay for college for any of them, so none of their kids went to college - but these days, on their level of income and low amount of kept accessible money (retirement assets are usually not counted when it comes to financial aid needs), they could probably have a good student pay little for private college.

They lived really stingy, I guess. I didn't notice it when I was a kid because they were never out of money and they didn't complain about it and I don't think they felt like they were socially beneath a two income white collar household just because the latter would've had more income. Personally, I don't think they were, either.

Neither do I resent my neighbor for taking advantage of the system here and practicing *actual* wealth redistribution. The system was set up for him to walk by and pull the fruit off, I guess. I don't think I could handle being off of work for half of the year - it would be hard to come back from being idle like that.
 
Did someone take it from them, or did they spend it? My neighbor spent his, I didn't spend mine. Nobody took anything from either of us. He doesn't plan ahead a whole lot and things that should be relatively minor in life (car unexpectedly not passing inspection) really knock him off of his stool for a while.

There may not be a human right to be a hairdresser and save $60K if you're supporting a family of four. If you'd like to tell me that a married hair dresser with a blue collar employed husband can't save that much money, you'd have to meet a now-deceased uncle of mine. His wife was a hair dresser all her life. He worked in a manufacturing plant as an assembler. They retired on a 115 acre farm and had a second house.

My parents were both college educated teachers. My hair dresser aunt and my factory worker uncle got turned on to squeezing pennies and putting money into the stock market back in the 1980s. Maybe you wouldn't have been able to accept the lifestyle they lived on the amount they didn't save, but they chose to be fine with it.

We're not talking about a fine hair dresser or someone assembling lamborghinis, either. My aunt had a salon - her price was below the cost of the franchise places that employ marginal beauty school graduates and cut and color hair for everyone (kids and all), and she worked a day a week cut rate cutting hair at a nursing home.

What I think is missing is the chance for a lot of people to observe why they may want to put aside 10-20% of their income and if they can't, work either more or at something different so they can.

perhaps 10% of the crowd that doesn't do this will have life circumstances that prevents them from being able to do it. To tell the whole group that it can't be done leads to people claiming wealth is redistributed because they spent their money.

You missed my earlier query about netflix and avocados?
 
Why cannot he agree to disagree?!

He can, and evidently does. My comment was that I thought, by his questions, that he was genuinely interested, and then the "agree to disagree" comment implied that he had solidified to a position, of which I was previously unaware.

The curiosity is that the comment that he eventually "agreed to disagree" on was not even opinionated economics, but simple maths.
 
D.W. et. al. (especially Jacob)
Your Aunt and Uncle sound not disssimilar to the wife and I.
Synopsis, what you earn is not as important as what you do NOT spend.
Simples.
Which does not mean it is easy.
But it is simple.
Seriously.
 
Wages are allowable expenses and not taxed. Wage rises means less profit and lower corporation tax.
https://www.unbiased.co.uk/life/sma...oration tax,minus any overheads and expenses.
Yes and no. LOL

Yes that they (and other things) are deducted from income to arrive (eventually) at Profits Subject to Tax.

No - you have to pay Employers NI, so a tax of a kind.

Although if you have 2+ employees (and you meet other conditions) there is something called Employment Allowance that gets you the 1st 5K off, so to speak.

https://www.gov.uk/claim-employment-allowance
 
BALDKEV

(he shouted again)

Looks to me like this topic might end up in the invitaion only 'controversial subjects' forum - rightly as its so far off topic and people are starting to be rude. If there is anything you want to keep hold of, a few good thoughts from various contributors early on, maybe copy it soon before it goes into that black hole.
 
Where did the Covid money go

The government borrowed ~£400bn from banks, pension funds etc for a furlough scheme, business support, PPE. vaccines etc. It gave cash to businesses, individuals etc to spend on supplies - food, raw materials, labour costs etc. Some may even eventually be repaid (business loans).

Shared across a UK population of ~70m is ~£6000 per person. This is not owed by individuals - it is a government obligation incurred on our behalf, upon which interest charges will accrue, until the loans are repaid. Repayment will be through total tax revenues raised by the Treasury.

The cash borrowed has simply been redistributed, ultimately to food producers, track and trace systems, pharmaceutical companies etc. This is not some gigantic fraud - cash (and credit) is the means of exchange without which developed economies could not function.

At an individual level, furlough payments were effectively a gift - rightly underpinned by a policy of providing support to limit hardship and job losses. No work was done for the cash received with no obligation for individual repayment.

To a material extent this will have driven inflationary pressures - cash chasing a reduced supply of goods and services has only one outcome - increased prices. Inflation devalues savings effectively placing part of the burden of repayment on those with cash assets.

Taxation

In many ways tax is just a business expense. Business seeks to minimise tax costs, as they do with all others - labour, energy costs, raw material, rents, communications etc. Suppliers compete to provide the best value - not just cost but quality, reliability etc.

Tax only differs from all other expenses in that it is imposed and collected by government.

Governments compete to provide the most attractive location for businesses with a mix of policies related to tax, regulation, infrastructure, stability, labour force etc.

Companies may exhibit social responsibility - building brand, compliance with best practice, even personal charitable initiatives (Cadbury, Gates etc). This would be short lived without profit which drives shareholder wealth, job security, decent pay, further investment etc. It is no surprise that:
  • companies arrange their affairs to maximise profitability/reduce costs
  • prioritise which markets they address based on strategic and tactical imperatives
  • invest in locations offering the best investment returns
  • may choose to exit markets which erect barriers to trade
 

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