Brian Dixon
- Location: Dover
- Registered: 23 Sep 2008
- Posts: 23,940
Brian Dixon- Location: Dover
- Registered: 23 Sep 2008
- Posts: 23,940
howard mcsweeney1- Location: Dover
- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 62,352
so in summing up george is saying in the vein of young mr grace "you're all doing very well".
on a lighter note i do feel sorry for younger people who are confronted with endless austerity and having to work until they are about ready to drop. the one's with decent jobs have no real prospect of entering the property market - generation rent they call it. those without jobs or on zero hours contracts in work are likely to stay that way into the foreseeable future.
Keith Sansum1
- Location: london
- Registered: 25 Aug 2010
- Posts: 23,942
not good for the young on pensions
ALL POSTS ARE MY OWN PERSONAL VIEWS
Jan Higgins
- Location: Dover
- Registered: 5 Jul 2010
- Posts: 13,897
I never knew the young could get a pension.
Sorry Keith I could not resist the above as your sentence shows how easy it is to mislead people however unintentional.
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I try to be neutral and polite but it is hard and getting even more difficult at times.
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Guest 698- Registered: 28 May 2010
- Posts: 8,664
Jan I am 60 and I consider myself still to be young. I shall probably still be perfectly fit and active in 10 or even 20 years time so why should the taxpayer pay me a pension while I am still able to fend for myself?
I'm an optimist. But I'm an optimist who takes my raincoat - Harold Wilson
Guest 653- Registered: 13 Mar 2008
- Posts: 10,540
That crept up on you very quickly Peter (being 60). Hope you continue to be fit and healthy for many years to come.
With people living so much longer, it was I guess, inevitable that the age would rise. People who are in their 60s should still be able to find a job, but ageism it still rife because it can be hidden so easily.
Roger
Guest 716- Registered: 9 Jun 2011
- Posts: 4,010
All at the expense of Joe public ............
Courtesy Independent....
Balancing the state's books at the expense of households
To reduce the nation's debts, Osborne needs consumers to run up theirs. Ben Chu explains the hypocrisy at the heart of his plan
Q. That was good news, wasn't it?
A. On the face of it, yes. George Osborne was able to stand at the Dispatch Box of the House of Commons and announce the biggest upward revisions to a set of official growth forecasts since 1999. At the time of the March Budget, Robert Chote's Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) was expecting growth this year of 0.6 per cent. Yesterday it more than doubled that figure to 1.4 per cent. In March the OBR expected 1.8 per cent growth in 2014. Now it sees growth coming in at 2.4 per cent in that year. On the OBR's forecasts Britain will be back to its 2008 levels of economic output next year.
Q. So does that mean the deficit is falling faster too?
A. Yes - it will descend quicker than forecast in March. The OBR estimates that the Treasury will borrow £111bn in 2013-14, some £9bn less than it estimated at the time of the last Budget. Borrowing will be lower in every subsequent year too, as the first chart shows, resulting in a cumulative state borrowing bill £70bn lower than anticipated in March. There will even be a slim budget surplus of £2.2bn in 2018-19, which will be the first time the Government's annual books have been balanced since 2001-02.
Mr Osborne will comfortably meet the first part of his fiscal mandate to eliminate the structural deficit on day-to-day spending over five years. He's still set to miss the second part, namely ensuring that the public sector net debt peaks as a share of GDP by the end of the Parliament. But the national debt will still peak a year earlier (2015-16) on this measure than the OBR expected in March.
Q. Isn't there space for the Chancellor to ease off on austerity now?
A. The short answer is no. And the reason is that, despite the rosier near-term headline GDP forecasts, the OBR has not revised up its estimate of the growth potential of our economy. Thus it thinks the economy's so-called "output gap" is smaller than it believed in March. This means that over the next few years the structural deficit on current spending (the part of public borrowing that will not naturally be eroded as output snaps back to potential) will actually be larger than it expected back in March.
One can see this in the second chart. In this respect the hole in the public finances can be said to have got worse, not better. The upshot is that there is not actually much spare room, in the OBR's eyes, for Mr Osborne to ease up on his schedule of cuts - at least not if the Chancellor wants to stick to his self-imposed fiscal mandate.
Q. But will the recovery even be sustained?
A. Many are doubtful. The recovery we have experienced this year - which took the OBR and most other forecasters by surprise - has been driven by a surge in household spending and underpinned by the reviving housing market. The growth forecast upgrade this year is due to primarily to consumer investment.
The OBR also noted yesterday that this household consumption has been financed by reductions in saving, rather than higher wages or incomes. The breakdown of the OBR's growth forecasts by expenditure component (see chart 3) suggests that this reliance on consumption is set to continue into 2018. Household spending contributes half of all growth. Strikingly, net trade (imports minus exports) is set to deliver no boost to GDP whatsoever.
It is also striking to compare this with the OBR's forecasts at the time of the 2010 election, when it saw net trade providing a fifth of all the growth in 2014 and 2015. Most of the heavy work was supposed to be done by trade and business investment. But that "rebalancing" has pretty much gone by the board.
Another way of looking at this is to examine the OBR's forecasts for the so-called "sectoral balances". As a matter of arithmetic, government borrowing in any given year (the deficit) always has to be offset by an equal amount of business and household saving or foreign lending. So for government borrowing to fall, as the deficit is closed, business and household saving has to fall, too. Under the OBR's forecasts, business saving does come down over the next five years, but it remains in the black. Most of the rebalancing is achieved by households taking on more credit.
Q. Does that mean households will go back into debt?
A. In one important measure, yes. The OBR's figures show that the UK's aggregate debt-to-income ratio, which has been falling in recent years as people have sought to improve their finances, is set to rise.
The fourth chart shows that the ratio will go up from around 140 per cent of incomes to 160 per cent by 2018, a steeper rise than was expected nine months ago. This is largely because the OBR thinks more people will take out mortgages in the coming years in order to buy expensive houses. It says that house prices will be some 10 per cent higher by 2017-18 than it expected in March, something the watchdog attributes to Mr Osborne's mortgage subsidies. Help to Buy will also help to push Britons into debt.
Q. That doesn't sound like such good news after all...
A. Things just about hold together under the OBR's forecasts. Despite its pessimism over the economy's growth potential (which one would normally associate with the threat of inflation) the OBR sees prices remaining under control over the forecast period. Consumer prices inflation is set to descend gently to the Bank of England's 2 per cent target in the coming years and then to stay there. The unemployment rate is seen as coming down more rapidly than in March. But it does not fall so fast to the Bank of England's 7 per cent forward guidance threshold that it risks triggering a potentially destabilising interest rate hike from the Bank. This is reflected in the OBR's benign forecast for interest rates. If this is right, households should be able to service their new debts and continue to support the economy through spending. But it will be a stretch.
And the OBR has been very wrong before. In June 2010 it forecast the economy would have grown by 9 per cent by the middle of this year. In fact the expansion was a third of that. For the sake of this fragile recovery, we need to hope that the OBR has managed to do a better job this time.
Guest 716- Registered: 9 Jun 2011
- Posts: 4,010
Full story Telegraph............
Autumn statement 2013: George Osborne's recovery is built on sand.
Guest 655- Registered: 13 Mar 2008
- Posts: 10,247
Reg Hansell wrote:Full story Telegraph............
Autumn statement 2013: George Osborne's recovery is built on sand.
Sand piled into place by the Labour government and he has just not dug deep enough into it by being far too timid with spending cuts, not cutting taxes enough and by insufficient supply-side reforms.
Brian Dixon- Location: Dover
- Registered: 23 Sep 2008
- Posts: 23,940
and a partridge in a pear tree.
[just trying to get into the christmass spirit.]
Brian Dixon- Location: Dover
- Registered: 23 Sep 2008
- Posts: 23,940
Brian Dixon- Location: Dover
- Registered: 23 Sep 2008
- Posts: 23,940
howard mcsweeney1- Location: Dover
- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 62,352
dave would probably disagree with those articles brian.
Guest 655- Registered: 13 Mar 2008
- Posts: 10,247
Brian anyone dumb enough to take Maguire and the Mirror as any kind of authority on economics deserves the poverty that would result from it.
Brian Dixon- Location: Dover
- Registered: 23 Sep 2008
- Posts: 23,940
well that makes 20 million plus then and riseing,
Brian Dixon- Location: Dover
- Registered: 23 Sep 2008
- Posts: 23,940
Guest 655- Registered: 13 Mar 2008
- Posts: 10,247
ahhh Brian the political wing of the BBC/Grauniad/Mirror alliance....
howard mcsweeney1- Location: Dover
- Registered: 12 Mar 2008
- Posts: 62,352
all much of a muchness, we mostly read what we know will tell us what we want hear - for brian it is the mirror and for barry the spectator.
both different sides of the same coin.
Keith Sansum1- Location: london
- Registered: 25 Aug 2010
- Posts: 23,942
and barryw the daily telegraph
and tory mail
ALL POSTS ARE MY OWN PERSONAL VIEWS
