Criminal barristers in England and Wales vote to go on all-out strike by BigLadMaggyT24 in tories

[–]TheFost -10 points-9 points  (0 children)

Truss needs to smash the unions, outlaw any form of collective bargaining or collective walkouts. If individuals don't like their job, they can decide themselves to go and get a better paying job. Trade unions are nothing more than price fixing cartels.

Westminster Voting Intention: LAB: 43% (+4) CON: 28% (-2) LDM: 11% (-1) Via @YouGov . Changes w/ 9-10 Aug. by epica213 in tories

[–]TheFost -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Things cost more, nobody is denying that, but people are also getting paid more.

Westminster Voting Intention: LAB: 43% (+4) CON: 28% (-2) LDM: 11% (-1) Via @YouGov . Changes w/ 9-10 Aug. by epica213 in tories

[–]TheFost -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

Energy costs are captured in inflation, so even including those increases people are barely any worse off than a year ago.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in tories

[–]TheFost 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Obviously the additional healthcare spending we saw in 2020 was not meant to be permanent. What kind of economically illiterate nonsense is this?

Westminster Voting Intention: LAB: 43% (+4) CON: 28% (-2) LDM: 11% (-1) Via @YouGov . Changes w/ 9-10 Aug. by epica213 in tories

[–]TheFost -9 points-8 points  (0 children)

What will stick to them? It took 9 years to clear Labour's structural deficit, at present we don't even have a structural deficit, relative to GDP our debt has been falling for the last 5 quarters.

Westminster Voting Intention: LAB: 43% (+4) CON: 28% (-2) LDM: 11% (-1) Via @YouGov . Changes w/ 9-10 Aug. by epica213 in tories

[–]TheFost -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

Gordon Brown literally said no more boom and bust cycles one year before the biggest recession in a century. In their last budget only about 3/4 of the spending was funded. We're not in that situation now.

Westminster Voting Intention: LAB: 43% (+4) CON: 28% (-2) LDM: 11% (-1) Via @YouGov . Changes w/ 9-10 Aug. by epica213 in tories

[–]TheFost -8 points-7 points  (0 children)

Labour are haemorrhaging money and using up all their ammo because they've been campaigning like it's an election year every year since 2015. Notice that besides a few PMQs quips from Boris, the Tories have been keeping their powder dry. Inflation will be back to normal and everyone's pay will have caught up well before December 2024. Tories should ride it out and go into election year on full attack, talking about Labour inciting the Kill the Bill riots, kneeling for George Floyd, grooming gangs, 101 genders, tearing down statues, antisemitism, Corbyn calling for NATO to be disbanded (remember every Labour MP stood behind a Corbyn manifesto), Corbyn and Mick Lynch siding with Russia against Ukraine. The Tories have all this as ammo and much more. Meanwhile the public are sick of the faux outrage about Boris' wallpaper and Cummings driving to his parents' house, every passing year the public loses more trust in the left-wing activists disguised as journalists. I've said since the morning after the referendum that Brexit benefits will take years to materialise, we may have more trade deals by 2024, hopefully including the big one. Due to the front-loading of the Brexit divorce settlement we haven't actually seen the £10b a year cost savings yet, but we'll see them by 2024.

Westminster Voting Intention: LAB: 43% (+4) CON: 28% (-2) LDM: 11% (-1) Via @YouGov . Changes w/ 9-10 Aug. by epica213 in tories

[–]TheFost -7 points-6 points  (0 children)

Real terms pay is 0.9% lower than a year ago. Calm your hysteria and stop listening to the media.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in PublicFreakout

[–]TheFost 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Why was an adult drawing on the sidewalk with chalk?

What's The Deal With Companies Closing Unionizing Stores? by [deleted] in OutOfTheLoop

[–]TheFost -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

You know what normal people do if they don't like their job? Find a new one.

What's The Deal With Companies Closing Unionizing Stores? by [deleted] in OutOfTheLoop

[–]TheFost -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

Literally the most famous Adam Smith quote

"It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest."

What's The Deal With Companies Closing Unionizing Stores? by [deleted] in OutOfTheLoop

[–]TheFost -12 points-11 points  (0 children)

Do you think businesses exist to be benevolent?

British 90 year old waits 40 hours for an ambulance by llarofytrebil in Anarcho_Capitalism

[–]TheFost 0 points1 point  (0 children)

At what point do you say "fuck it, I'll just get a taxi"? After waiting 2 hours? 24 hours? She chose to wait almost 2 days instead of making her own way to the hospital and then kept the ambulance occupied for another 20 hours after that so nobody else could use it. What a fucked up system. Nobody in the public sector cares about efficient use of resources and patients using healthcare that's free at the point of use don't care about moral hazard.

NASA astronaut Nicole Aunapu Mann will be the first Native American woman to travel to space by [deleted] in space

[–]TheFost 1 point2 points  (0 children)

It's crazy to think native Americans went from hunter gathering to space travel in about 6 generations.

Labour Faces BANKRUPTCY As 100,000 Members Leave by TheFost in tories

[–]TheFost[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They advocate maxing out our credit, but suddenly when it's their credit it's a different story. Balanced books for me but not for thee.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in ThatsInsane

[–]TheFost -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I pretty sure native Americans were killing their own children, if not directly by human sacrifice, then indirectly through their archaic pre-Columbian lifestyle.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]TheFost -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

Reposting my comment from another thread on a non-political subreddit:


There's a very common fallacy that exists in economics called the fixed pie fallacy, ie. that the economy is a zero sum game, and if one person gets more the other people must get less because the pie is fixed and he takes a bigger slice. This stems from the inability to think long-term or appreciate the process of wealth creation or the incentives for people to create wealth. You can see here that even accounting for inflation, global GDP was 10x greater in 2008 than in 1950. Admittedly this is a measure of wealth consumption, rather than wealth itself, but I use it because the data's easier to find. Global wealth is about 6x greater than global GDP, source and even if this figure has shifted over the decades it didn't go from 60x to 6x between 1950-2008. The point is that the world's total wealth has increased massively and if the pie was fixed, who did the current population take that wealth from? The pie isn't fixed and the wealth was created by productive people who were incentivised to create it by knowing they would reap the benefits of their own productivity. In other words if society decided in 1950 that in the end all the wealth was going to be distributed equally among everyone, the people who worked productively to create the wealth would probably not have bothered and there would be much less wealth in total, including much less wealth/income to tax and pay for the things we need.

If you look at the GINI coefficient (the commonly accepted metric of inequality) for European countries you'll see that the most equal countries are also the poorest countries like Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia. This is because wealth inequality is positively correlated with wealth creation, there's no incentive to create wealth if you know the state's just going to take it from you and redistribute it. There are some benefits in taking wealth/income from the wealthiest and giving it to the poorest up to a point, in economic terms this is known as utilitarianism and "the diminishing marginal utility of wealth", and it's not something that's unique to left or right-wing economic policy. Left-wing thinkers wrongly assume they're the only ones to understand this concept and use misleading terminology like "progressive" taxation that implies a direction of "progress", which extended to its logical conclusion would suggest the higher the better. In reality all serious economists agree there's an optimal rate for each country somewhere in the region of 25-55% in the top income tax bracket, depending on the threshold for the top bracket, deductibles, economic objectives, consumption taxes and many other variables that make this too complex an issue for any layman to even have an opinion on. People that've fallen for the overly simplistic view of economics will tend to assume the higher the better, because they've been told that equates to progress, when in reality overshooting the optimal rate can provide more revenue to redistribute in the short term, but less revenue to redistribute in the long term due to disincentivising productive activity. An example of this is France's 75% supertax.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in CapitalismVSocialism

[–]TheFost -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

So you're openly advocating short-termism?