Sound money

Outstanding debt is not a concern if countries can afford the interest on it. The UK’s problem now (well, one of them) is that debts now maturing will cost four times as much to extend.

Must admit I was scratching my head at some things. If we are going to reduce tax then surely why not raise the threshold at which it starts to be paid, so assist the lower earners before the higher earners. And then we do need to find a way to stop wasting money. If we are going to have a Scandinavian type social care system (and I can see the benefits), it needs to be waste-free otherwise it is totally unaffordable.

The only place that governments get money to pay for things is taxing the private economy. If tax is too high, people stop working (just like the own-goal of taxing doctor's pensions, so they all retire giving headaches to NHS managers) so tax must always be the lowest it can be in balance with the demands of the state and the reasonableness to the taxed.

But as we are constantly reminded, hundreds of economists told Mrs Thatcher that she was wrong and in the end, she was right (about the economy). I fear that there is too little time for this scheme to prove it's worth so that, just as wth Gordon Brown who benefitted from the economic changes designed by the Torys pre-1997, a Labour government post 2024 will benefit from Kwasi's plans.

All we can hope for is that we manage to export lots of stuff with a weak pound and attract lots of tourists. Certainly the Israeli Shekel is now worth more than double what it was in 2005/6 and the number of suitcases being loaded onto the El Al plane when I flew a few weeks ago was impressive. Primark and M&S did particularly well if the bags were anything to go by.

I really must steel myself to look inside the Telegraph to see how you got to that, Esp. Laffer Curve, trickle-down tax cutting failed for Reagan, and he had the world’s reserve currency and a labour force swelling with new-entrant women. Truss has a currency already self-harmed by Brexit and a labour force that’s struggling to retain the people it has, never mind attracting new workers.

You’re deluding yourself if you think there’s hidden wisdom here. It’s idiocy born of dogma and entitlement. John Redwood, who’s having a good day if only his eyes swivel, was on R4 this morning singing its praises. That should tell you all you need to know.

EIII, as with most Thatcher fans and Tory devotees, you appear to be re-writing history a little if you are asserting that the the 1979-1997 Tory governance period was one of untrammelled economic success. I personally remember a very sharp, prolonged recession and housing price crash, Black Wednesday and the ERM crisis. Why do we think Gordon Brown's choice of the words "an end to boom and bust", fallacious though they proved to be, gained so much traction?

Well if there's a housing crash now, I hope it'll recover to a new peak in 7-8 years time. That'd be perfect timing for me.

Of course it would be far better if we had a country and economy in which building paper wealth on the back of an essential resource such as housing wasn't the only way people (by which I mean ordinarily salaried, non-plutocrats and hedge fund manager friends of the Chancellor, people such as teachers and NHS workers for example who have no way to "go out there and earn more money", as we're now being urged by the Tory party to compensate for their disastrous, ideological management of the country) born since the late 60s could depend upon to provide for their retirement, but as it's the only game in town I'm going to have to play it. And by play it I mean hang on and hope for the best.

I broadly agree, Esp, but I think that error has been compounded by the post-Thatcher obsession with property as a store of accumulated wealth. It means that any move now to level the playing field for those too young to have caught the property bus at the time (and what’s a bus doing on a playing field anyway?) risks the wrath of those whose property it would tax and/or devalue, and the newspapers that tell those people how to vote.

By analogy, if a small sector of society were to control all the country’s water, and make it prohibitively expensive for anyone else to get any, there’d be uproar. We have sleepwalked into this ‘property-owning democracy’ that doesn’t really offer much of either.