Exhibit One:
Rural areas in England and Scotland have been allocated nearly £363m to improve their broadband connections. Cumbria gets the largest share of the £530m pot, with over £17m to cope with its 96.2% notspots. By contrast, London gets nothing as it assumed that private investment will cover all parts of the capital.
In plain English: rural NIMBYs don't want to live in the horribly smelly towns with the little people; but they want the advantages without the disadvantages, so the self-same little people can cough up half a billion to subsidise the value of their homes, thank you very much.
Exhibit Two:
Millions of over-50s fear they will be forced to sell their family home to cope with the soaring cost of living, research reveals today. One in five worry they will have to ‘downsize’ to generate enough cash to pay the bills, according to a report from Saga. They fear that the rising price of everything from domestic energy to petrol and food, as well as higher taxes and rock-bottom savings rates will squeeze them to the point where they will have to sell up.
Righty-ho. We all face rises in the cost of living, but over-50s who haven't paid off the mortgage by now only have themselves to blame, by and large their mortgage repayments are tuppence ha'penny. To whom to they hope to sell their houses? To under-40s, perhaps?
Now, let's remind ourselves that the over-50s are demanding, on average, about £70,000 more for a house that the under-40s are willing or even able to pay - which is partly due to the "rock bottom savings rates" which self-same over-50s have engineered in order to prop up house prices even further. And that the under-40s face the same rises in the cost of living as well as the cost of bringing up children. If the over-50s can't even afford basics, how on earth do they expect the under-40s to pay for all this and the huge mortgage on top?
Something has to give somewhere, doesn't it?
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16 comments:
And one should not forget that those "over 50s" typically have much larger salaries than under 40s, because they are further on in their careers.
A big "hear hear" from me on the broadband thing as well. In fact, satellite broadband provides 10 MB connections now, nearly as fast as these new ones will be, and is available everywhere.
But obviously it makes sense to use taxpayers' money to subsidise BT to put fibre optic cables out to remote villages, doesn't it??!
AC: "those "over 50s" typically have much larger salaries than under 40s"
In managerial, professional or bureacuratic jobs, yes, in manual jobs, probably not, so I didn't include that as a factor.
rural people want the advantages of town , and some other people deliberately buy houses in developing towns and then complain about development. Some folks are funny like that.
I'm 68 and I bet you lot take home more lolly than me and most of my "baby boomer", "home owning" compadres. It would seem that you lead a gang of thieves every bit as bad as the "looters" and "rioters" that have filled our screens (yawn) for the past couple of weeks.
The colours are showing now and I must ask you to answer, truthfully, are you, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party.
Anon, I am not a Commie, certainly not, yawn. I'm more of a small-government-free-market-liberal, if truth be told, along the lines of Milton Friedman.
But a young person starting off married life now, bringing up kids etc needs to earn about £30,000 a year more gross than a Baby Boomer to have a similar lifestyle, because he also has to pay for the higher cost of the mortgage, the higher cost of old age pensions, the massive public sector debt which has accrued, the uni tuition fees etc.
'Something has to give' - you're not wrong there, pal. But what?
Not just house prices, but tax 'n spend as well.
Personally, as an over 50's homeowner my biggest cost is subsidising my (four) children who are struggling under the burden of excess tax and rent payments and in the case of my youngest struggling with the entirely dysfunctional Studen Loan Scheme bureaucrats, one of whom yesterday could even speak the Queen's fucking English, if you see what I mean.
>are you, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?
No. In fact the economist Malthus (who aligned with the left) was the opponent of an economist called David Ricardo...
I think of GeoNomics as Hyper Capitalism as it doesn't give land owners a subsidy and pays out a dividend. One must wonder if those Home-ownerists are akin to communists demanding a subsidy for holding the land. Where-as geonomic folk merely want land-holders to be charged based on the value that a private holder would charge.
AC1
Inspiration! Let the Student Loans Company run the Land Value Tax system. That'll do the trick.
AC1, alternatively, you could argue that those willing and able to pay more tax at least get something in return, namely they get to live in the nicest houses or trade from the best premises. Under Socialism/Home-Owner-Ism, you get allocated the housing which The State deems suitable according to some arbitrary system.
L, D, vaguely income-based things like Student Loans or welfare are doomed to end in chaos. Compare that with low collection costs and very high collection rates for Council Tax or Business Rates.
"rural NIMBYs don't want to live in the horribly smelly towns with the little people;"
Not everyone who lives miles from anywhere is a NIMBY. Most people who were born and bred in the countryside are very much for new developments, it's the incomers who want to preserve everything just as it was when they moved there from horribly smelly towns. It's just it will never make commercial sense to provide these people with some services: without government assistance many farms in remote places would still be without electricity or telephone lines.
I thought the broadband thing was an interesting contrast to the news about rail fare hikes. Both you could argue were about investment in national infrastructure yet for one public subsidy is promoted but for the other it is derogated.
B: "Most people who were born and bred in the countryside are very much for new developments"
I'll take your word for it that this is true. At least that gives me one small glimmer of hope for humanity.
"without government assistance many farms in remote places would still be without electricity or telephone lines."
The same applies to a lot of Big Things which require the force of the state to railroad (sic) them through - railways, sewers, utilities, national grid, motorways or even broadband (NTL needed permission to dig up pavements), clean air acts, clean beaches act, whatever.
All this stuff is things which 'the free market' would not provide because individuals think on much smaller scales and ignore the wider benefits.
That's all fine by me, provided IF and only IF the additional LVT receipts from the benefitted areas more than recoup the subsidies. Oh - we don't have LVT, so sod it, frankly.
DNAse, to be fair, railways are subsidised (although it is very haphazard), and probably rightly so (see my reply to Bayard).
But again, this is futile - the main winners from railways are landowners, so what the commuter gains in subsidy he pays twice over in extra rent.
Ah! "Land-holders" now is it boyo?
from "land owners" to "Land-holders", next step "land keepers" final step "confiscate".
Malthus connected economics with demography theorising that a rise in income begets a rise in population begets famine, war and pestilence.
I would contend (through experience) that the rise in incomes from about the mid 60s caused a drop in the birth rate in the UK. The necessary famine being engineered by the idiotic "set aside" agricultural policy and paying farmers not to keep dairy herds will soon bring about the planned war and pestilence.
Malthus was wrong.
Anon, Home-Owner-Ism has a lot in common with USSR type Communism. It is an observable fact that neither system works.
AFAIAC, the private collection of publicly generated land values and the public collection of privately generated incomes is "confiscation" twice over. Far better to just have public collection of publicly generated land values and net the whole thing off to nothing.
And the "set aside" policy of which you speak is even worse, it is private collection of publicly collected taxes, but of course, it is carried out under the cloak of Home-Owner-Ism, i.e. "I am a home owner, I deserve subsidies, he owns thousands of acres of land therefore he deserves much more in subsidies".
Ah! back to "land owners", make up your mind.
Anon, what's your point? You can call it land owner, home owner, landlord, owner-occupier, land holder, freeholder, long leaseholder, mortgage lender or anything else. It's all the same thing.
Perhaps you'd like to fully address the points I raised in my comment of yesterday at 21.25 pm? If not, can you please stop wasting our time.
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