I think progressive Dems have responded to Trump 2 better than the moderates.
But on economics, Trump 2 winning on unworkable economic policies is emboldening their instruct to do the same.
I don’t think the Katie Porter of 2019 would have proposed no income tax in California.
And it is not a “cabinet government” because the centre is good at delegation.
It is so by accident because the centre has very little ideological direction, which is another thing many people want in theory but falls apart in practice.
I would go as far to argue that a key point of a representative rather than direct democracy is “we need people to reflect public opinion but also look into things.”
Both r key job descriptions. Only doing the former (if that) is still being a bad policymaker.
I feel like we encounter this on the doorstep all the time. People would say “we can just do X” when clearly we cannot.
One thing for some of the public to think that. Policy is not their job. An entirely different situation when policymakers buy into that, which is just being bad at their job.
This is a good point. I didn’t mean to understate their success. And the party is actually doing well.
But trying to replace either of the major parties under FPTP feels risky. It would have to expand to a quite different group of voter from its current base. Not impossible, but a gamble.
Fiscal constrains just don’t feature in U.S. politics as they do in the UK. There r no “fiscal headroom” discussions.
“There is never a lack of money, just a lack of resolve” is a genuinely common belief.
I know this is not the case on policy. But in electoral math, I almost want to compare them to… Plaid?
They have a strict ceiling as their votes concentrate in one area (for different reasons obviously), but they r gonna at winning those seats.
It’s okay. We can have our revenge by engaging extra hard on their follow-up consultation for which wildlife.
Nature was not my choice. But now that we r where we r, I demand a highland cow on the banknote!
Genuinely bewilders me how this thing went from “a nerdy survey I did just for fun” to “twitter faux outrage”
I did the same thing. Voted for historical figures and innovation (I think).
The thing is, if BOEwent with historical figures, some people would manage to find faults in these figures.
Culture wars r imaginary, and the human imagination is infinite.
This is the thing. The gov is not having a bad strategy on HE. It doesn’t have one.
These r anchor institutions vital to certain local economies. If it is anything other than HE, the gov would be keeping it alive at high cost.
This tells me that the neglect is not rational or strategic.
So the London-centric equity finance is not caused by market failure or large investor bias.
Rather than increasing capital into large cities, the Gov needs to focus on enabling infrastructure: workspace, transport, business support, etc.
Get the basics right, and the capital should follow.
For example, firms in London seem to scale much larger than firms in large cities.
This is evident by the fact that even if they have similar deals in early stages, by exits, firms in London have much larger valuations.
Equity value is more lopsided: London, Oxford and Cambridge have an advantage over large cities elsewhere, even after considering the investable base.
But this has more to do with London having larger businesses, and Oxbridge specialising in some capital-intensive sectors (e.g. life sciences).
There is not as much market failure as one would think.
The number of equity deals can be broadly predicted by the number of businesses more likely to seek equity finance (a very small share of a place's business base).
This was fun to write!
The Government is trying to rebalance the nation's equity finance landscape, making it less London-centric.
It is committing public money and encouraging private investments.
All good goals, but is a shortage of finance the real reason behind the geographic unevenness?
This does feel like the kind of symbolic concessions that could have mitigated some backbench unhappiness.
Is the assumption that being anti-immigration equals infinite political capital?
A thing my friend noticed: a question on the test asks who elects the speaker of the house. But because the question never specified of which house, the question should have two right answers, not one.
Maybe that is corrected now. But there was a test maker who didn’t think about the lord speaker.
“They keep saying political nostalgia is on the rise. They never said it didn’t include good-old oil shocks.”
At least the songs r more likely to be good in ur case.
Hard to find things to rhyme naturally with “Strait of Hormuz”
Quite. It is a good thing that they r not succeeding.
But also with that much power, they don’t need to come close to success to cause unspeakable damage. Just look at, like, everything.
His inner circle just does not seem sufficiently competent for a job that big.
In a functioning democracy, they would have been impeached. In a functioning autocracy, they would have been purged.
The U.S. is somehow neither atm, so here we r.
Considering how much the GOP is panicking, I am not sure even his party believes they can do it.
Just creating inconvenience is not enough to discourage the high-engagement coalition the DEM has.
U would have to hard rig it, and I have trouble seeing their pull it off.
The idea of two groups within the “struggling many:” one is locked out of the economy, the other struggling in it. Policy interventions would differ for the two.
And socially, how helpful is to deduce a “working class” position on cultural values when it covers two very different groups?
@labour4transrights.bsky.social is doing very important work now more than ever.
Really excited to see what is to come.
That is right I think. The salience of some of those issues has caused people to self-sort: 1 social con view is enough to draw one to a con environment, and vice versa. People then get conditioned by their group on other views.
IMO, This explains a lot of “were they always like this?”
My odd take is that comparisons of UK-US politics is often of worse quality than UK-others.
With other countries, people go in with a sense of “the UK is quite different culturally.” With America, it *looks* similar enough that people don’t have that awareness and end with bad takes.
So I think I lean towards needing both delivery and vibes.
Weirdly, I struggle to define this government’s outlook on this. I sort of think there r people on both extremes in Gov.
We have extreme stances on both end of the “is it vibes or is it material conditions debate?”
In the U.S., I think Trump 2 has an entirely vibe based approach. And Biden was all about economic fundamentals with no vibes. Both failed.
On aggregate, direct taxes in the UK *are* progressive.
The very richest pay more than five times more in income tax than the poorest.
Council Tax is the big exception. It absorbs only about 1 per cent of income at the very top, but nearly 5 per cent at the very bottom.
