Comment by mattmanser
9 days ago
That happened a long time ago, the realization was the 70s.
Thatcher reversed the feeling by selling off the nation to rentiers and foreigners in the 80s, we rode that money in the 90s, and the wheels came off in 2008.
Brexit may have been the emotional response, but like most it didn't help.
Is "emotional" supposed to trivialise the complaints? People would vote the same way now, most likely. The opinion hasn't shifted around much…
>People would vote the same way now, most likely. The opinion hasn't shifted around much…
I don't know where you're getting this information, but it's in stark contrast to all of the statistics I've ever seen on the matter.
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/51484-how-do-britons-...
Even Nigel Farage has called it a disaster.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-leave-...
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Oh, it really has shifted. A lot.
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/52410-nine-years-afte...
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Not sure why this was downvoted, maybe the use of "foreigners" is a bit loaded, but this is basically it.
Every inch of our economy is now owned by some faceless fund. All serious capital generated in the country is extracted out into the pockets of fund managers and Californian pensioners.
We're screwed until we can stem the outflow. I always thought taxing money leaving the country might be interesting way to approach the problem.
It’s true that too much of the U.K. is a piggy bank for those who don’t live there, but that is true of much of the West now.
> taxing money leaving the country might be interesting way to approach the problem.
This would end very poorly because what the U.K. sorely needs is investment (to create new productive capacity). For example, Americans invested huge sums in North Sea oil and created an entire industry (before we destroyed it). Conversely, if you force people to keep wealth in the country then you just make things more expensive: they will bid up the price of property and the like. Nothing is added to the UK’s real economy by increasing the number of pounds flowing around in it - it’s only helpful if it’s invested. So what you actually want is tax breaks for foreign investment, but with some kind of ownership cap.
The problem is that the investment in this day and age is entirely extractive. Strip the assets, do minimal infra, and jack up the prices. Water here is a classic example. Investors want their returns, and the best way to get it is by rent-seeking and minimal outlay. I'd go so far to argue that "investment" is the problem.
There's been enough in the way of tax breaks and "derisking". A huge part of the problem with our public finances is being on the hook for some very ill-advised "investments".
The money going out exceeds the money going in, because that's what an investment is. An opportunity to make money.
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The response of "we cannot stop water companies dumping raw sewage into our rivers and lakes because it might impact profits of their Saudi Arabia investment funds" is really all we need to know about the issues. It's sickening.
This is not true. There is no Saudi ownership of Thames Water. 90% or so is owned by Australian, European, and Canadian pension funds. Specifically it was the Macquarie Group (Australian) that loaded it up with debt and pushed it off a cliff.
>I always thought taxing money leaving the country might be interesting way to approach the problem.
Even China with extreme capital controls and pervasive surveillance can't stop money leaving the country. Unless the UK was willing to go fully authoritarian and ban its citizens from spending money overseas, and ban crypto (and build all the internet firewall/DPI infrastructure that doing so would require), it wouldn't stand a chance. And attempting to do so would destroy the value of the pound, because nobody with any options would want to hold a currency that could only be spent in the UK.
Surely you see the difference between ordinary citizens buying online and spending money abroad while on holiday and big foreign companies taking their billions of profits out of the country?
Go learn what dividend, royalty and interest withholding taxes are.
> I always thought taxing money leaving the country might be interesting way to approach the problem.
Capital controls. By the time they are applied it's always too little, too late, and they only ever apply to the plebs -- the wealthy always have ways to move money out (and back in, later -much later-, if it becomes necessary or advantageous). Always too little too late because -I suspect- capital controls don't really work -- not against the wealthy.
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Everyone needs a scapegoat. Why not mention Carter and the near double-digit inflation Reagan faced at the beginning of his admistration and the fact that it was nearly half by the end of it?
In the 90s, it brought us some of the best economic times we will ever see.
So sure, lets rewrite history.
You can only do the financialization trick a few times and each time it is more damaging than the last. The end comes when it is no longer possible to outrun the delayed negative consequences. There is an attribution problem, like the straw that let broke the camels back, but for the final straw the back may not have broken, but responsibility lies with the weight in its totality.
Oh hang the economy. I don't care about money, I care about people. I care about the incalculable number of folks who have suffered and died from the politics of austerity, in my country and the UK. I care about government services that no longer function because of this case of brain worms that tells people when a government office doesn't work, the solution is to cut it's funding because that's definitely going to help. I care about the alienation of everyone from everyone and everything, all of us trussed up in our little homes, completely disconnected from the effects we have on our communities because of this libertarian fantasy of you being and island and accountable to nothing and no one but your own piddly, small notion of what moves you forwards.
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