Will

bsky.app/profile/lucy...

Always been set by the government, but ministers love hiding behind opaque processes and institutions

Why is it implausible that they can keep shrinking debt to GDP as they have been for a while now?

Extraordinary: "UK abolishes its "de minimis" rules which exclude cheap imports below £135 from paying tariffs"

It's my favourite time of the year: year n+1 outlook release szn

Oh dear

What reforms might alleviate the issue?

youtube.com/shorts/UOZRQ...

Would you change your mind if you saw an interview with an aspiring small boat crosser who says they want to come to the UK because they want to play for Liverpool Football Club?

COVID schooling edition

Speaking of unearned wealth..

Average is over

46% of the 170,000 jobs lost from company payrolls since June last year are from those under the age of 25 – the equivalent of more than 150 jobs lost per day.

Healthcare in the UK is ~11% of GDP and is rationed rather than priced

A tiny percentage is private provision and a tiny percentage of public provision is priced. Only 5-10% of people pay for prescriptions, for example

The more contentious the more important that ministers take responsibility rather than passively delegate to quangos

The LPC was bound to push minwage much higher than the I'd guess the initial proponents would be comfortable with but current ministers seem unaware of this

bsky.app/profile/will...

Another example of passive governance; Ofgem gets to decide the prices via it's rolling cap and more mysteriously enact various cross subsidies i.e., bill forgiveness with minimal government oversight(?)

The cross party consensus was strongest following the Russian invasion of Ukraine including the infamous Truss budget. A 2.5k cap was linked to an up to £150bn subsidy scheme that brought down her premiership.

The subsequent Sunak price cap remains today.

Another clear example is energy where Miliband ran in the 2010s on energy price controls and May concurred in her 2017 inaugural Party conference speech as leader before she promised to revive a plan to cap energy prices for an extra 12 million consumers, saving them an average of £100 a year.

Osborne's budget speech in 2016 follows the rhetorical logic that Torsten Bell ran the RF with

Rapid minimum wage hikes, large increase in personal allowance and fiscal drag are all pretty key for post-tax and transfer compression

The RF critique is partly that the Tories basically agreed to much of their economic logic with the result being consistent emphasis on distributional impacts at every budget

If the government doesn't make the economy work for young people then they'll vote for volatility

The status quo in the UK is that unearned wealth has accumulated among the 50+ and it drives a wedge in housing affordability, economic and geographic mobility and worsens younger people's social lives

@jburnmurdoch.ft.com highlights the cross country trend in economic disengagement of the young with particular idiosyncratic drivers in the UK including minimum wage policy

Is that the dividend payout ratio or total payout ratio (incl. share repurchases?)

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Resolution Foundation's Nye Cominetti also cautious: in his comment in the FT, he urges CX "to protect workers from more pain in her upcoming Budget and avoid adding further costs to employers"

See also below

Martin Wolf warning against minimum wage hikes in his FT comment piece

So we're losing a tenth of employment every month at the moment

Where are the jobs being gained and lost?

The largest increase in the Public administration sector, with a rise of 16k employees; the largest decrease was in the wholesale and retail sector, with a fall of 71k employees.

Gov is actually spending it's budget, that's been the key factor all year

I'm sceptical that inquiries are the answer to anything, but this doesn't seem like it needs any extraordinary explanation..

Why we went undercover for the BBC to expose crime in the Kurdish community - BBC News Two men who helped expose a network behind illegal High Street businesses tell their story.

Not that other journalistic outlets missed the story either once they committed the resources to the job

Why we went undercover for the BBC to expose crime in the Kurdish community - BBC News share.google/vi9tODPLeWaB...

Operation Machinize: Hundreds of barbershops targeted in NCA-coordinated crackdown Barbershops and other cash-intensive businesses across England have been targeted by police and other law enforcement officers during a three-week crackdown on high street crime.

NCA arguably more competent than the Daily Mail

Operation Machinize: Hundreds of barbershops targeted in NCA-coordinated crackdown - National Crime Agency share.google/yEZz336Dto4e...