RAACed with guilt?

[El Pollo Diablo]

Sunak refused to fully fund repairs of England’s crumbling schools, says ex-official

Fun one to watch.

[IvanV]

And Jeremy *unt says the money now promised for RAAC fixing is not new money, but will be deducted from the existing education capital budget. So he's no better.

[IvanV]

Sunak refused to fully fund repairs of England’s crumbling schools, says ex-official

Fun one to watch.

Sunak was defending his record. He was proud of announcing funding for a programme of 500 school build/refurbishes over 10 years. 50/year was the rate of the preceding decade, the established level of progress.

Sadly no one pointed out that with about 23,000 state schools in England, 50/year is fine if they only need replacing/refurbishing once every 460 years. 50/year under the last decade of austerity is precisely the reason there is now a large backlog.

[headshot]

The Education Secretary wants more f*cking credit for the plan she might come up with soon...

[TopBadger]

Guilt? The Nasty Party doesn't feel guilt!

Oh the number of chickens coming home to roost just keeps growing doesn't it? I'm so looking forward to the results of the next GE. I think folks are sick to the back teeth of the current lot.

[bjn]

Guilt? The Nasty Party doesn't feel guilt!

Oh the number of chickens coming home to roost just keeps growing doesn't it? I'm so looking forward to the results of the next GE. I think folks are sick to the back teeth of the current lot.

BUT WHERE WILL ALL THE MONEY COME FROM*???? YOU COMMUNIST!!!!!

Tory return on investment is pretty grim. Highest taxes in forever, highest national debt since the post war period, and country getting grimmer each day.

[Lew Dolby]

why don't we all insist every tory MP with school age kids send them to schools in danger if collapse ??

Bet we'd see some constructive action and decent funding then !!

[bjn]

FWIW, Gove cancelled the Schools For Future scheme in 2010 when the Tories took over. It was a 20 year £55 billion pound plan to renovate and refurbish schools. We got Free Schools as a consolation prize. It's a case of the Tory Government believing the best way to save money on their car is not to check the oil or have it serviced regularly.

[TopBadger]

BUT WHERE WILL ALL THE MONEY COME FROM*????

Entities that have too much money...

Rich people... via usual routes of taxes (e.g. on non-doms) and removal of perks (e.g. VAT exemption / charitable status for private education).

Profitable businesses... our corporation tax is pretty low.

[bjn]

Or they could print some, like they did with quantitative easing (where the new money went to financiers rather than investment). Ivan will no doubt have an opinion and tell me why I'm wrong.

[dyqik]

Or they could print some, like they did with quantitative easing (where the new money went to financiers rather than investment). Ivan will no doubt have an opinion and tell me why I'm wrong.

It's hard to come up with a financially better use for new government debt than paying British companies to employ labour in Britain for 5 years or so to improve education and thus earning power of future taxpayers.

[bjn]

But is it debt?

[lpm]

Massive labour shortage... crippling inflation... schools that have attempted rebuilds have failed to find any contractor willing to take the job...

Imaginary money doesn't lead to real resources.

Until we divert human labour from the indulgences of the prosperous to the needs of society, none of this will happen.

There is insufficient skilled labour. The 5 million unemployed need to work. The 5 million workers wasted on trivial luxuries need to be redeployed.

[bjn]

You do that by spending money on the things that are important, like training and education.

[IvanV]

Or they could print some, like they did with quantitative easing (where the new money went to financiers rather than investment). Ivan will no doubt have an opinion and tell me why I'm wrong.

You asked for it.

Quantitative easing has effects similar to reducing the interest rate, and is done when the interest rate is already so low you can't reduce it any more. We are now in a situation of substantial interest rates. Reducing the interest rate is not something the Treasury wants do to at the moment, and quantitative easing would have the same effects that it doesn't want. As you say, QE is like printing money, but it is printing money for other people to use, not printing money for the government to spend it. Printing money for government to spend is also possible, but is rather different.

When the Argentineans or Zimbabweans or Turks attempt to print money, for the government to spend it, because it would like to spend more than it can raise and has difficulty borrowing it to spend, the result is hyper-inflation. So it does matter what the conditions are in which you attempt to print money to spend it. Britain as a better reputation for repaying its loans than those countries, so it can raise debt higher than those countries before panic sets in. But there is a point...

Printing money to spend ihas similarities to other methods have for spending money you haven't got, like borrowing it. To some extent you can print money, and if it is within reason you just get some modest inflation from it, and that is like a tax on other people's holdings of money, which reduce in value. It is even called "inflation tax". We have had a bit of that recently. If you have some savings or investments, probably your interest rates or other investment returns have recently been below inflation. So your savings have reduced in value in real terms. The government has implicitly sucked that value in to itself as the money issuer. That's one of the privileges that money issuers earn, the ability to pull off a bit of modest inflation tax from time to time. Go too far with that kind of thing, and conditions become Argentinean. That's essentially the trick that Kwarteng tried to pull off in his budget. He reduced government income rather sharply without reducing government outgoings to anything like the same degree. Everyone knew there was a gap to be filled with some rather accelerated borrowing or inflation tax, and it all went horribly wrong.

So at the moment, with our borrowings rather high, and spending already exceeding income, there are limitations on how much we can spend without matching it to public income increases through taxation or whatever other sources can be devised. We can also continue increase our borrowings to a degree. But do either thing too fast, like Kwarteng tried, and the market gets the heebeejeebees and it all comes crashing down.

[lpm]

You do that by spending money on the things that are important, like training and education.

Yes.

Which is why we are looking at a generation of high taxes, alongside high investment in education/training (along with investment in mental health, physical health). A 30 year program.

And it also requires of making work pay - a far bigger gap between benefits and minimum wage / lower pay grades. Real world wage increases are what we've lacked for many of the last 40 years. This can be done by increasing both benefits and minimum wage at inflation +1% or +2% each year.

[IvanV]

You do that by spending money on the things that are important, like training and education.

Yes.

Which is why we are looking at a generation of high taxes, alongside high investment in education/training (along with investment in mental health, physical health). A 30 year program.

And it also requires of making work pay - a far bigger gap between benefits and minimum wage / lower pay grades. Real world wage increases are what we've lacked for many of the last 40 years. This can be done by increasing both benefits and minimum wage at inflation +1% or +2% each year.

Useful training or education ought to give you rather better than the minimum wage, or at least a promise of it fairly soon, so I'm not sure you really need that wedge. I don't think we have much of a problem of people not working because being on benefits is too attractive: benefits remain available for the low-waged, that's one of the improvements that has been made to the design of the benefits system (among all the other rubbish) that has reduced the disincentive effect of benefits that was more important in the past. Our peer countries on the continent pay better benefits than Britain, and have lower poverty in consequence.

The main problem we have had with training/education for work programs in Britain over the last few decades is that govts have contracted them out to companies who take lots of money and who provided crap training and education that failed to get people into useful work. Probably they were blinded by visions or promises that it could be done on the cheap. Or maybe it was handouts to their mates.

[lpm]

Useful training or education ought to give you rather better than the minimum wage, or at least a promise of it fairly soon, so I'm not sure you really need that wedge.

Concertina, not a wedge.

Minimum wage and basic levels up 10%. Next level up gets nudged up 9%. Next level 8%. Eventually a level with 0%. Then higher levels nudged downwards via high tax. Inequality (post tax income) gets squashed inwards from both sides.

I don't think we have much of a problem of people not working because being on benefits is too attractive: benefits remain available for the low-waged, that's one of the improvements that has been made to the design of the benefits system (among all the other rubbish) that has reduced the disincentive effect of benefits that was more important in the past.

We have a massive problem. 5 million not in employment, of which only 1 million actively looking for work.

Incentivise these people with the lure of higher income. We need a steep upwards line of £ to hours put in, at the bottom levels of the pay scale.

[Sciolus]

It's hard to come up with a financially better use for new government debt than paying British companies to employ labour in Britain for 5 years or so to improve education and thus earning power of future taxpayers.

But is it debt?

I would argue that it's paying down debt. The failure to maintain infrastructure over the last decade or so is a debt that will have to be repaid in the future when people finally decide they don't want to live in a delapidated shithole country. And unlike government cash debt, it has a phenomenally high interest rate.

[Grumble]

Rivers is one thing, but this is actually endangering children. There’s always somewhere worse to go, but I really hope we don’t get there.

[monkey]

We have a massive problem. 5 million not in employment, of which only 1 million actively looking for work.

I get your point - inactivity is a drag on the economy even if your not nudging people into certain jobs, but I think your numbers of available people are wrong. Or wrong in the way that there is a solution as simple as just increasing wages at the low end of the scale (which I am not against, lots of good reasons to do that).

There are almost 8.7 million people who are economically inactive* (which does not include the unemployed) according to the ONS - clicky. The BBC did a breakdown here when Jeremy *unt did the budget with policies that were an attempt to get these people into work - clicky (I do not know how effective those are/were). The vast majority of the economically inactive seem to have a good reason - in education, sick, or caring, mostly. So the pool is smaller than you think. If you want to get most of these people "active", raising low wages won't work, because that won't cure chronic disease, or make getting a degree less useful. For example, you have to provide the time for a carer to not have to care by employing a carer.

TLDR: I think raising wages will help some, but you need to do more than that.


*Did you subtract students already, or maybe under 18s? That'd be about your 5 million, I think.

[lpm]

Getting 1 million would add 3% to the workforce. Getting 2 million would be 6%. Probably can't get more than that.

I did mention the need for investment in mental and physical health. At the risk of sounding Sheldrakey, it's unacceptable that our society pays ill people to sit on benefits at home, when an investment in mental health would return people to happier lives, get them into the work force, and lead to further health improvements from the self esteem benefits of rewarding jobs.

We also need to acknowledge that jobs can now be done without a commute and with a laptop and a headset.

If there are not enough builders available to rebuild more than 4 RAAC schools a year, our society needs to pay this job more and lure people out of other employment. Once people are lured out of other employment, obviously you need to replenish the workforce from the non-active potential pool.

[bjn]

How many of the ill, whether physical or mentally, would like to get back into stable employment if they could? How many of them are currently not able to do so because of a lack of timely access to health services? I dare say not a small proportion. Chronic underinvestment in health, along with education, just stores up trouble and costs you more linger term. Stitch in time and all that.

Also, thank you Ivan for you reply. I’m aware of all of what you wrote, I’d take some inflation in return for a better education and health service, which should grow the economy and improve people’s lives, unlike Kwarteng’s budget which wanted to print money to fund tax cuts.

[El Pollo Diablo]

You do that by spending money on the things that are important, like training and education.

Yes.

Which is why we are looking at a generation of high taxes, alongside high investment in education/training (along with investment in mental health, physical health). A 30 year program.

And it also requires of making work pay - a far bigger gap between benefits and minimum wage / lower pay grades. Real world wage increases are what we've lacked for many of the last 40 years. This can be done by increasing both benefits and minimum wage at inflation +1% or +2% each year.

Lol, you're funny.

I heard the Tories described yesterday as asset strippers, which is about right.

Network Rail's recent Strategic Business Plan states openly that they're not being given enough money in the next 5-year control period to keep asset condition where it is now, and that performance will worsen as a result. HS2's capital budget has been knocked back (hence why Euston is being deferred), due to Sunak's economically insane decision to limit all spending, including capital investment, for two years, to an arbitrary amount. As we've seen for the last few days, the Tories scaled back investment in new schools when they first came to power, and are currently operating a renewal rate which implies the asset life of schools is 460 years. NHS buildings are falling down, water infrastructure is f.cked, electricity generation isn't growing anywhere near fast enough to meet the demand for electric cars, and all of this ignores the fact that just to maintain a baseline operating performance, we'd need to be investing more than the average we should've been investing over the last 50 years because climate change f.cks everything. Even f.cking Parliament is collapsing and MPs are singularly incapable of actually solving the problem.

Even if Labour were minded to actually do something about any of this, which seems an increasingly more forlorn hope as each day passes, they'll only be in power for 10 years max, and then we get the shiny shitlords back in for another 15 f.cking years, claiming that Labour spent all the money and they need to cut back and the skin-eating plague of 2035 means we should privatise Defra, or something. The British people remain as steadfastly incapable of understanding that good services means high investment which means higher taxes, and will continue to fail to vote for parties who show even the vaguest inclination to create good services.

[IvanV]

Also, thank you Ivan for you reply. I’m aware of all of what you wrote, I’d take some inflation in return for a better education and health service, which should grow the economy and improve people’s lives, unlike Kwarteng’s budget which wanted to print money to fund tax cuts.

We have "some inflation" at the moment, and it is particularly hurting the less well off. Some of that inflation is due to external factors, what the Ukraine war has done to commodity prices, for example. I think the less well off might not thank you for keeping that inflation going by printing money to spend it.

That's why I think it would be better to fund the better education and health services I would like too from explicit taxes, rather than inflation tax, as explicit taxes can be focused on the better off.

Only a little thing among many, but I'd put a big tax on large cars.