Massive benefits cuts planned

[Woodchopper]

Will 100% of people be able to get jobs involving full time home working. Of course not.

But its likely that some of them will. Lots of people have transferrable skills and diverse qualifications and experience. Someone who has worked as an in-person manager might also be good at managing people in a wholly digital environment.

So what is important is the likely proportion, in terms of policy there's a big difference between 5% and 95%. That is an empirical question which I suspect that others have looked at already. So someone could just look it up.

[bjn]

One example of of delayed treatment of a significant healthcare issue leading to loss of income and a reliance on benefits. Treatment was meant to be within 18 weeks of seeing the consultant, it’s likely to be 60 weeks. This person has had 40 years experience in her trade and expecting her to retrain to work from home is nuts, when what she really wants to do is get her hip operation and get back to work.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/202 ... efits-chef

[IvanV]

Now we have had a proper look at the budget, it comes over as smoke and mirrors. The average tax burden will not be reduced, indeed it is forecast to continue to grow. Because what was loudly given with one hand was silently taken away with the other. The main silent increase was the failure to index income tax thresholds. Letting the higher rate tax bands be eroded by inflation is useful redistribution in the right direction. But failing to index at the bottom is also redistribution but in very much the wrong direction. It is forecast increase the number of people paying tax by several million in the fairly short run. Fiscal drag, at recent high inflation rates, increases public sector income very powerfully.

Similarly increases in benefits to some will be paid for by reductions in benefits to the more vulnerable, and the poverty and disability charities are extremely unhappy about it. So that is more unhelpful redistribution.

Meanwhile the amount of money for public services will continue to be eroded by inflation. The chancellor refers to that favourite myth of theirs, to justify that, cost savings, in a sector whose costs tends to go ahead of inflation because it is labour intensive. A lot of the "cost savings" we have seen in the public sector in recent years, resulting from reduced real-terms budgets, have been in the form of not maintaining buildings, etc.

My initial reaction was, how can he get away with this when Liz Truss didn't? And now I know the answer is, because he isn't really cutting government income, at least nowhere to the extent that Truss/Kwarteng did. His tax cuts and benefit increases are funded by tax increases and benefit cuts, just the former were more visible than the latter.

Some generous capital allowances for industry. Thatcher tried that, and the accountants quickly came up with tricks to take advantage of it that were not useful investment. I hope they have learned from that. It is focused on plant and machinery, which is great for our small manufacturing sector, but less valuable for the services sector which is where we are much stronger and employs most of us. As a sector, manufacturing does seem to be doing quite well of late, though a notable growth sector driving a lot of that is food preparation.

So, lpm, in the end, I think there is relatively little here that a Labour chancellor should be proud of. Some positive redistribution, but outweighed by negative redistribution. Unfortunately, it is rather reminiscent of the kind of smoke and mirrors Gordon Brown used to get up to while he wrecked our tax system.

[lpm]

One example of of delayed treatment of a significant healthcare issue leading to loss of income and a reliance on benefits. Treatment was meant to be within 18 weeks of seeing the consultant, it’s likely to be 60 weeks. This person has had 40 years experience in her trade and expecting her to retrain to work from home is nuts, when what she really wants to do is get her hip operation and get back to work.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/202 ... efits-chef

She could have used £10k of her £30k savings to get the hip replacement done privately and be back to full earnings by now.

Free has a powerful impact on our primitive brains. The offer of free things on the NHS can lead to individuals making bad mistakes. As a society I'm all for trying to save the NHS but as individuals we have to live in the world as it is, not how it pretends to be. The reality of our world is that hip replacements are currently not available on the NHS.

[IvanV]

One example of of delayed treatment of a significant healthcare issue leading to loss of income and a reliance on benefits. Treatment was meant to be within 18 weeks of seeing the consultant, it’s likely to be 60 weeks. This person has had 40 years experience in her trade and expecting her to retrain to work from home is nuts, when what she really wants to do is get her hip operation and get back to work.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/202 ... efits-chef

She could have used £10k of her £30k savings to get the hip replacement done privately and be back to full earnings by now.

Free has a powerful impact on our primitive brains. The offer of free things on the NHS can lead to individuals making bad mistakes. As a society I'm all for trying to save the NHS but as individuals we have to live in the world as it is, not how it pretends to be. The reality of our world is that hip replacements are currently not available on the NHS.

When you've had a long working life paying taxes that in principle pay for your healthcare, but since that was likely the healthy period of your life, in practice paid for other people's healthcare, it's a big ask to pay that proportion of your savings for something that you have already paid for.

The NHS is like insurance, and insurance is above all for the big stuff. Hip replacements is the big stuff. Above all, the NHS should paying for people's hip replacements. If people have to contribute more to their healthcare, then it should be their ingrowing toenails, not their hip replacements. If people knew in advance they had to pay for big stuff hip replacements and cancer investigation, to get it in timely way, they'd probably have got their own top-up insurance.

The only way to increase funding of the NHS in a civilised way, if we need more than comes from our taxes, is to have fair rules about it, not chaos and law of the jungle that are ruthless overlords currently prefer. And prioritise sensibly.

[bjn]

What Ivan said. Even if the woman in question did pay for her hip replacement, there will be many more in similar situations who cannot afford to do that. So they become a double ‘burden’, having to claim benefits while not earning and paying taxes.

And having how many hundreds of thousands of folks paying for private healthcare won’t fix much, as there isn’t a pool of health care professionals filing their nails and doing wordle waiting to treat you on the spot. You’d be removing staff from the NHS, effectively queue jumping and denying treatment to others, which they have paid for through NI. In the process you’d also be creating a queue in private care.

[lpm]

You are both conflating optimisation of society with optimisation for individuals, even though I expressly separated the two.

This is another cost our incompetent government imposes on our economy. Bad information is an economic inefficiency. The government lies about the state of the NHS and people inevitably believe the falsehood that they'll get a hip replacement. If the truth was transparent and people were told of a 4 year wait then more optimal decisions would be made. This particular individual suffers from the lies when she would have been financially, physically and mentally better off if she had understood the truth.

I agree that Labour should try to save the NHS but unfortunately I think they will continue to lie - because I don't think they'll succeed. The harsh reality is that people need to grow out of their old beliefs of a functioning NHS and start to accept the new NHS. That means individuals must get insurance and savings to cover major health needs. What appears to be free NHS healthcare is anything but free, as this person discovered, and for the next couple of decades individuals need to acclimatise to the real world.

[dyqik]

You are both conflating optimisation of society with optimisation for individuals, even though I expressly separated the two.

This is another cost our incompetent government imposes on our economy. Bad information is an economic inefficiency. The government lies about the state of the NHS and people inevitably believe the falsehood that they'll get a hip replacement. If the truth was transparent and people were told of a 4 year wait then more optimal decisions would be made. This particular individual suffers from the lies when she would have been financially, physically and mentally better off if she had understood the truth.

I agree that Labour should try to save the NHS but unfortunately I think they will continue to lie - because I don't think they'll succeed. The harsh reality is that people need to grow out of their old beliefs of a functioning NHS and start to accept the new NHS. That means individuals must get insurance and savings to cover major health needs. What appears to be free NHS healthcare is anything but free, as this person discovered, and for the next couple of decades individuals need to acclimatise to the real world.

Or they could insist that the NHS is actually fixed.

[Woodchopper]

You are both conflating optimisation of society with optimisation for individuals, even though I expressly separated the two.

This is another cost our incompetent government imposes on our economy. Bad information is an economic inefficiency. The government lies about the state of the NHS and people inevitably believe the falsehood that they'll get a hip replacement. If the truth was transparent and people were told of a 4 year wait then more optimal decisions would be made. This particular individual suffers from the lies when she would have been financially, physically and mentally better off if she had understood the truth.

I agree that Labour should try to save the NHS but unfortunately I think they will continue to lie - because I don't think they'll succeed. The harsh reality is that people need to grow out of their old beliefs of a functioning NHS and start to accept the new NHS. That means individuals must get insurance and savings to cover major health needs. What appears to be free NHS healthcare is anything but free, as this person discovered, and for the next couple of decades individuals need to acclimatise to the real world.

Or they could insist that the NHS is actually fixed.

For someone like the woman in the article the NHS isn't going to be fixed in time.

If Labour can get a decent majority at the 2024 election then improvements may start happening by 2025-2026. More fundamental changes will probably need to wait for Labour's second term (eg by 2030).

People shouldn't expect a Starmer government to be like the Blair years. Back then Labour rode a wave of ten years of strong economic growth whereas the next few years look to be at best stagnation. Its going to be much more difficult this time around.

[IvanV]

You are both conflating optimisation of society with optimisation for individuals, even though I expressly separated the two.

This is another cost our incompetent government imposes on our economy. Bad information is an economic inefficiency. The government lies about the state of the NHS and people inevitably believe the falsehood that they'll get a hip replacement. If the truth was transparent and people were told of a 4 year wait then more optimal decisions would be made. This particular individual suffers from the lies when she would have been financially, physically and mentally better off if she had understood the truth.

I agree that Labour should try to save the NHS but unfortunately I think they will continue to lie - because I don't think they'll succeed. The harsh reality is that people need to grow out of their old beliefs of a functioning NHS and start to accept the new NHS. That means individuals must get insurance and savings to cover major health needs. What appears to be free NHS healthcare is anything but free, as this person discovered, and for the next couple of decades individuals need to acclimatise to the real world.

Certainly telling the truth, and the detailed truth, about the service offered and provided, would be an important step forward.

It is why I was so very pissed off with Tony Blair when he became PM, for refusing to acknowledge that capacity was not sufficient for demand even then, 25 years ago. For it was already a clear issue then. If he had told the truth, and then come to the consequence of saying what is the service, and what your options are, and building that into the system, then we would be in much less of a mess than we are now.

[lpm]

Or they could insist that the NHS is actually fixed.

We all know our electorate will insist it is fixed while also demanding tax cuts

I don't believe we can fix the NHS in my lifetime. I think we're talking about 20 years to rejoin the EU and get cheap home grown energy, then 30 years of economic growth to invest in healthcare. The demographics will ease off in about 50 years.

Until then it's 2 tier. Anyone wanting free treatment will have to accept very poor service.