Life expectancy

[turnbull for england]

Stagnated or even decreased unless you live in a rich area.

Bodes well for the next decade then
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51619608?#_=_

[SydneyRover]

They are certainly kicking some goals tfe, it's a pity they're own goals, life expectancy stalled for the first time in a century and worst growth for two centuries.

[BillyStubbsTears]

This is a national outrage. We should hang our heads in shame.

[nikkireed]

it depends on the many factors but mainly it all depends on nature.

[Axholme Lion]

When half of the country is addicted to Mcdonalds and KFC what do you expect?

[DonnyOsmond]

When half of the country is addicted to Mcdonalds and KFC what do you expect?

So it's not the EU's fault this time?

[DonnyOsmond]

Lack of nurses, police, funding for the NHS, etc. Life expectancy stagnating. To anyone left or central can hopefully see this is austerity. Anyone on the right for some reason doesn't think austerity is a thing and blames immigrants, the EU and now McDonalds. Maybe we need a referendum on KFC.

[selby]

  Pushing drugs up their noses, eating ready made food,  smashing themselves up in road accidents, binge drinking, having a stabbing contest at the weekend, all seem to be the new pastimes of the young, and will soon bring the age groups down.
 

[BillyStubbsTears]

There are some truly ignorant and unpleasant views on here.

Alcohol consumption by the young has been falling for years.
Road deaths have been falling for years.
People of my generation and older were reared on saturated fat with every meal.
Stabbing deaths are barely a blip on the overall mortality figures.

The REAL reason is staring you in the face if you want to look at it. It's the Austerity policies of these bas**rds in charge. A decade of suppressed wages and savage cuts in benefits for the people at the very bottom. A decade of insufficient funding of the NHS.

We've a national scandal going on here. Chickens coming home to roost after a decade of a Govt that has only ever been supported by the old. And some folk in here just want to use this as an excuse to demonstrate their bitterness.

[Hounslowrover]

Sir Michael Marmot, author of the report, was on radio this morning, didn't mention any of Selby's or AL's missives, but he did mention austerity, so please don't be so ignorant or unpleasant as BST says

[DonnyOsmond]

Austerity deniers are up there with flat earthers.

[selby]

  Weil it makes a change from Syd and friends hope that all the old ones would snuff it before another (cough) referendum you hoppo's were wanting, it looks like a few of the young uns couldn't stand the pace.
 Get snorting, everything will look better in the morning, the younger the better.

[selby]

  Hey, now you lot are popping off earlier, should our pensions be going up?

[Hounslowrover]

Keep digging Selby.

[Axholme Lion]

I'm sick and tired of hearing the word 'austerity'!
To the likes of me that is off to work every day and never gets a penny in benefits what does it mean?

[BillyStubbsTears]

AL

It's very simple what it means. Being against Austerity is not about giving money away to scroungers. It's about making us all richer. Supporting Austerity makes all of us poorer. Here's why. It's very simple, but also one of the most powerful principles of economics.

It's about the amount that the Government spends to buoy up a struggling economy. When the economy is struggling, there's not enough demand for the goods that business could make. People and companies are worried about their debt and their future prospects. So they reduce their spending. But reducing spending also means reducing buying. Which means even less business is done. So companies make lower profits and give lower wage rises, or lay staff off, or don't employ new staff. And it's a vicious circle.

The way out of that vicious circle was discovered by the British economist John Maynard Keynes in the 1920s. He said the trick is that, to fill the gap between what business COULD deliver and what a the depressed economy is prepared to spend, GOVERNMENT must increase its spending, effectively buying stuff from the public sector. This pumps money back into the economy and gives companies more confidence that they can sell their products. So they make more. And they sell them. And they make profits. So they can take on more staff, or pay higher wages. And those staff, on higher wages, go out and buy other stuff. Which supports other businesses. And the economy takes off again. After which, the Govt can stop spending so much, and pay off the debt it has incurred through the taxes it gets from the active economy.

It is a beautifully simple and blindingly obvious economic principle. And it works. It's the reason we've never had another Great Depression (we used to have them regularly before Governments learned about Keynes).

And then the Tories were elected in 2010, and they chucked all of that out of the window. They said that the real problem was Govt debt. And that Government spending had to be reduced. Even though the economy was on its knees still after the Great Financial Crash.

So they cut back spending all over the place. They cut back on flood defences. They cut back on school building and on teacher numbers. They cut the increases in funding that went to the NHS. They cut back Govt spending on Universities and made students take on debt to cover the costs. They cancelled several plans to electrify railway lines. They put no money into the fibre optic network. And yes, they also cut back benefits. Which was a spectacularly stupid thing to do, because the one group of people who spend pretty much every penny they get are those on benefits, because they only have enough to scrape by - and getting people spending is PRECISELY what you need to do to get the economy moving.

And the result? We've now had a decade of the economy growing between 0-1.5% per year. Prior to that, from the end of the War to 2010, the average rate of growth was 2.3% per year. You don't notice that difference over one year. But over ten years, it's massive. It tots up to about £1trillion in lost economic activity over a decade.

And THAT is why we've just had the worst decade for pay increases since the end of the Napoleonic War. It's why the NHS is creaking. It's why so many places are vulnerable to floods. It's why travelling on roads and railways is such a horrific experience. And it's why life expectancy is going down. Because these utter, soulless, callous bas**rds chucked out the most important rule of Economics. THAT is why I f**king well bang on about Austerity.

[Axholme Lion]

AL

It's very simple what it means. Being against Austerity is not about giving money away to scroungers. It's about making us all richer. Supporting Austerity makes all of us poorer. Here's why. It's very simple, but also one of the most powerful principles of economics.

It's about the amount that the Government spends to buoy up a struggling economy. When the economy is struggling, there's not enough demand for the goods that business could make. People and companies are worried about their debt and their future prospects. So they reduce their spending. But reducing spending also means reducing buying. Which means even less business is done. So companies make lower profits and give lower wage rises, or lay staff off, or don't employ new staff. And it's a vicious circle.

The way out of that vicious circle was discovered by the British economist John Maynard Keynes in the 1920s. He said the trick is that, to fill the gap between what business COULD deliver and what a the depressed economy is prepared to spend, GOVERNMENT must increase its spending, effectively buying stuff from the public sector. This pumps money back into the economy and gives companies more confidence that they can sell their products. So they make more. And they sell them. And they make profits. So they can take on more staff, or pay higher wages. And those staff, on higher wages, go out and buy other stuff. Which supports other businesses. And the economy takes off again. After which, the Govt can stop spending so much, and pay off the debt it has incurred through the taxes it gets from the active economy.

It is a beautifully simple and blindingly obvious economic principle. And it works. It's the reason we've never had another Great Depression (we used to have them regularly before Governments learned about Keynes).

And then the Tories were elected in 2010, and they chucked all of that out of the window. They said that the real problem was Govt debt. And that Government spending had to be reduced. Even though the economy was on its knees still after the Great Financial Crash.

So they cut back spending all over the place. They cut back on flood defences. They cut back on school building and on teacher numbers. They cut the increases in funding that went to the NHS. They cut back Govt spending on Universities and made students take on debt to cover the costs. They cancelled several plans to electrify railway lines. They put no money into the fibre optic network. And yes, they also cut back benefits. Which was a spectacularly stupid thing to do, because the one group of people who spend pretty much every penny they get are those on benefits, because they only have enough to scrape by - and getting people spending is PRECISELY what you need to do to get the economy moving.

And the result? We've now had a decade of the economy growing between 0-1.5% per year. Prior to that, from the end of the War to 2010, the average rate of growth was 2.3% per year. You don't notice that difference over one year. But over ten years, it's massive. It tots up to about £1trillion in lost economic activity over a decade.

And THAT is why we've just had the worst decade for pay increases since the end of the Napoleonic War. It's why the NHS is creaking. It's why so many places are vulnerable to floods. It's why travelling on roads and railways is such a horrific experience. And it's why life expectancy is going down. Because these utter, soulless, callous bas**rds chucked out the most important rule of Economics. THAT is why I f**king well bang on about Austerity.

Thankyou. They are good points and well made. Surely though reducing the debt of the nation is also very important. I would have thought ideally it would be a balance of the two?

[BillyStubbsTears]

AL.

Now you get onto the second point.

You can't efficiently cut Government debt by cutting Government spending when the economy is struggling. That sounds illogical but it's actually very simple. Here's why.

Government debt comes about because of two things: Government spending is one, the other is the money Government gets back, mainly through taxes.

Look at the earlier argument. If you cut Govt spending when the economy is struggling, the economy stays struggling. So there's less economic activity. So there's less tax paid to the Govt.

Back in 2010 when Austerity started, the Govt was spending a lot more than it got in taxes. That is to say, we had a high deficit and therefore the debt was increasing. That was because tax receipts had collapsed because the Global Financial Crash had been so severe. The Tories said that if they cut Govt spending, this wouldn't harm the economic recovery and the deficit would be reduced to zero by 2015. After that, the debt would start to come down.

In fact, the economic recovery from the GFC stopped. Tax income stalled. And we still had a big deficit in 2015. We still haven't eliminated the deficit yet. In fact the Govt now says it will be the late 2020s before it is eliminated.

That was all predictable and predicted in 2010 by economists who understood Keynes. The fact that the Govt didn't understand basic economics, taught to 1st university economics students is the biggest UK economic disaster since the War. We've had a year of lost economic opportunity AND we've still got an increasing deficit.

Keynes's approach is simple. You get the economy booming through Govt spending. THEN you cut back spending, when private business has got it's mojo back. He said "The time to cut the debt is during the boom, not the bust."

Simple. Obvious. Totally ignored by this incompetent bas**rds. To all our costs.

[SydneyRover]

  Weil it makes a change from Syd and friends hope that all the old ones would snuff it before another (cough) referendum you hoppo's were wanting, it looks like a few of the young uns couldn't stand the pace.
 Get snorting, everything will look better in the morning, the younger the better.

You have a very jaundiced view of today's young people selby, is it because you don't to understand them or just make very silly generalisations reflecting what you read or listen to?

[BillyStubbsTears]

Right in cue. The IFS today has pointed out that "We have already had 16 fiscal targets in a decade."

That's 16 times the Govt has said "We are going to get the deficit down to X in Y years" and failed to hit that target. Because they don't get the basic economics.

AL. If you want a real laugh, get this one.

When Austerity started in 2010, George Osborne justified it by referring to a recent academic paper by a Harvard professor of economics. The paper studied loads of cases of countries that had high Govt debt. It concluded that, if your Govt debt got above 90% of GDP, your economy suffered for decades.

Other economists were sceptical, but that's what the data said.

Osborne and other right wing Finance Ministers around the world jumped in this. They said "See! We TOLD you you had to get Govt debt down." They didn't want Keynes to be right because, ideologically, they don't want Govt involved in funding business. So they were delighted to be vindicated in their desire to shrink Govt spending.

And that was that. The argument was over.

Except...

Except 3 years later, a young woman doing a PhD at a much less prestigious university was trying to check the numbers from that paper. And something didn't seem right. So she e-mailed the famous Harvard professor and asked if he would share his data. He agreed. Sent her the Excel spreadsheet that he'd crunched all the numbers on.

When the young woman checked the spreadsheet, she immediately found a glaring error. The famous prof had totted up a column of numbers wrongly.

When you did the calculation the right way, there was no cliff edge at 90% debt to GDP. And the data suggested the cause and effect went the other way - countries got into debt because their economies were weak. They didn't get weak economies because they had got into debt.

That stupid mistake enabled TGE most destructive economic policy since the Great Depression. It has cost us about £1trillion. Wrecked countless lives. Given us a decade of lost opportunities to upgrade our crumbling infrastructure. Depressed wages for a decade.

[Axholme Lion]

AL.

Now you get onto the second point.

You can't efficiently cut Government debt by cutting Government spending when the economy is struggling. That sounds illogical but it's actually very simple. Here's why.

Government debt comes about because of two things: Government spending is one, the other is the money Government gets back, mainly through taxes.

Look at the earlier argument. If you cut Govt spending when the economy is struggling, the economy stays struggling. So there's less economic activity. So there's less tax paid to the Govt.

Back in 2010 when Austerity started, the Govt was spending a lot more than it got in taxes. That is to say, we had a high deficit and therefore the debt was increasing. That was because tax receipts had collapsed because the Global Financial Crash had been so severe. The Tories said that if they cut Govt spending, this wouldn't harm the economic recovery and the deficit would be reduced to zero by 2015. After that, the debt would start to come down.

In fact, the economic recovery from the GFC stopped. Tax income stalled. And we still had a big deficit in 2015. We still haven't eliminated the deficit yet. In fact the Govt now says it will be the late 2020s before it is eliminated.

That was all predictable and predicted in 2010 by economists who understood Keynes. The fact that the Govt didn't understand basic economics, taught to 1st university economics students is the biggest UK economic disaster since the War. We've had a year of lost economic opportunity AND we've still got an increasing deficit.

Keynes's approach is simple. You get the economy booming through Govt spending. THEN you cut back spending, when private business has got it's mojo back. He said "The time to cut the debt is during the boom, not the bust."

Simple. Obvious. Totally ignored by this incompetent bas**rds. To all our costs.

Good post. I found that very informative. Thank you.

[SydneyRover]

This speaks for itself.

The IFS analysis also illustrates quite how severe the cuts to public spending have been over the past decade. It says that day-to-day non-NHS public spending per head is 26% lower than it was at its peak in 2010, and that welfare cuts currently in the pipeline are set to take colossal sums away from some low-income families. Here is an extract (bold type from the IFS original).

Outside of health, day-to-day public service spending per person remains 26% below its 2010 peak. £54bn would be required just to return to real 2010 levels.
No department will see cuts in 2020–21. Beyond that there are commitments to increase spending on the NHS, schools, defence and overseas aid. Simply to avoid any further real-terms cuts elsewhere over the following three years the chancellor would need to find an additional £3bn by 2023–24. Maintaining spending on unprotected services as a share of national income would require an additional £6.5bn.

This would still leave cuts to means-tested support for low-income families with children slowly working their way through the system. The removal of an additional tax credit payment for the first child will eventually lead to around 3.2 million households getting £550 per year less than they would have received, while the two-child limit in means-tested benefits will eventually lead to around 750,000 households losing an average of £3,600 per year.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2020/feb/26/pmqs-boris-johnson-corbyn-barnier-speech-day-to-day-spending-per-head-on-non-nhs-public-services-down-26-from-2010-says-ifs-live-news?page=with:block-5e562f

[DonnyOsmond]

  Pushing drugs up their noses, eating ready made food,  smashing themselves up in road accidents, binge drinking, having a stabbing contest at the weekend, all seem to be the new pastimes of the young, and will soon bring the age groups down.
 

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/datasets/deathregistrationssummarytablesenglandandwalesdeathsbysingleyearofagetables

Here you go. Compared to the 70's the percentage of deaths from 16-24 year olds have halved and when you take that into consideration with the population numbers.

Ignorance is bliss.

[BobG]

And, of course, the interest of the press and its offshore owners is.....

Yep. Scare mongering. Being economical witth the truth. Lying. Let me tell you a true story.

Some years ago I took voluntary redundancy from BT. I set up my own personal services company and went off to work on my own account. Over the years you learn more and more of the tricks of the trade. One of the very first things I noticed was that whilst my gross income approximately doubled, my overall tax bill (corporation tax+ income tax) roughly halved. Fantastic eh?

And then you dig a bit deeper. As my son is now over 16 years of age I can legally appoint him as a director of my company. But as he is still at school, he has no income. So, his £11,500 tax allowance can be very usefully used by paying him 'directors fees'.  Not only does that money come tax free, but it also takes it out of corporation tax too. It's a legitimate cost to the business. That's tax worth 39% of £11,500 saved then. Now, if I were to give my lad one share in my company, I can then 'distribute' dividends in his direction to the value of £2,000 a year. And guess what? That is entirely free of income tax too.

The tax free dividend policy was introduced by Osborne. In its first year it was actually £4,000 you could give out tax free. It is middle class theft. It costs the country real money. Way more than benefit fraud and such like. Yes there are losses from that kind of fraud. But the scale of the legalised theft by the middle classes is simply stupendous.

And don't get me on about the really rich. It's even better for them.

'Why is it this way' I hear you ask? And the answer is simple: because the Tories know who their electorate is/are. They bribe us all. They attempt to make us all into little Tories and they really don't care about the hurt they cause to those who fail to join the favoured group. They seek to ensure we all aim to scramble onto the bandwagon - thus ensuring an ever growing supply of Tories and an ever diminishing supply of socialists.

So, along with Billy's brilliant analysis of failed Tory economics, we can add their egregious commitment to legalised theft from the state by the supporters of one party - but not the other. They, instead, are demonised to provide a smoke screen behind which to hide the real theft that's going on. And that nicely brings us back to my first point - the press. When was the last time you saw or heard anything in those august organs decrying the utter sickness of our tax system and the policies it follows? They never will. It'd be like asking a bear to shit in its own den. But how many days is it since you last saw or heard a headline or TV programme screaming 'Benefit scrounger'?

I onced worked out the overall tax burden of two people, both earning £50K a year: one paying PAYE and the other being a good old Tory bumboy. Both having 2 usefully aged children. It's 2.5 times as much tax the poor old PAYE mug pays. The employee, with no hope of making it rich, of owning shares, of dishing out tax free income to himself, pays 250% of the tax paid by the bumboy. Oh. And did I mention that even when you've used up your £2,000 tax free dividend allowance, any further dividends you award yourself, you know, like income, is taxed at exactly 6.5%. It's effing true.

This country is politically bankrupt. That idiot from Telford wanted to fight a class war from the 1930's. The Tory party is far more clever.

BobG

[SydneyRover]

Thanks Bob and further making contractors of everyone pushes the issue although many of them are better descibed as sole traders with most struggling with a poor hourly rate.

[BillyStubbsTears]

Bob.

The single most evil thing that the Tories did happened in the first month after they came to power.

Gordon Brown was driven by the idea of giving people opportunities. A core policy of his was Child Trust Funds. He wanted parents to be encouraged to save for their kids - give them a leg up when they left school. But he knew that many people don't have a lot left when they've paid the bills. So his idea was that the Govt would put in two deposits of £250 each into accounts set up for every child. It meant that at least the poorest kids got something. And to encourage parents to save, he gave every account a £1200 per year tax free limit. You could put up to £100 per month in and the interest the money made wasn't taxed.

These f**king bas**rds, the Tories, when they took over in 2010, said we couldn't afford that anymore. Deficit and all that. So they stopped the £250 payments and the automatic enrollment into the accounts.

But although we couldn't afford that, we COULD afford something else. They upped the amount you could put into the accounts tax free to £4000 per year.

What does that mean? Well, if you have 4 kids and you have a spare £1400 per month knocking about (hey! who doesn't), you can put that into their accounts and pay no tax on the interest. After 18 years of paying that in, if your kids' accounts are growing at 5% per year (which is not unreasonable if you opened a stock market investment account) you'd save about £6000 that year in tax. You'd have saved over £50,000 in tax over the 18 years.

That was money taken straight out of the hands of the very poorest in the country, and stuffed into the pockets of the children of millionaires. Pure and simple class warfare. That's the Tories for you. Utter heartless bas**rds.

[BobG]

I should perhaps have added that the Bumboy never ever pays tax at 20%. Or at 40% either unless he's a fool. He pays himself about £8K a year to ensure he stays within the lower rate of National Insurance but still keeps his entitlement to his well deserved Old Age Pension. And then he pays himself however much dividend he wants - free of tax for the first £2,000 and thereafter at a rate of 6.5%. If he should be such a fool as to trip into the 40% band, well, then he's knackered. He pays the same as you and me. But standard rate tax? it's not for the Bumboy.

And let me tell you another Tory dream scheme: all these wonderful people serving the community by borrowing money from banks and such like to ensure that there are homes available to rent. When the Bumboy decides he's made enough through house price rises caused by Tory failure to govern well enough allow sufficient houses to be built, he sells the rented place and his accountant works out the Capital Gains tax that's due. And guess what? It's taxed at 18%! If the gain is enough to take him into the higher rate bracket, well, oh dearie, dearie me. It's taxed at 28%.

It's really great being a Tory!

And Billy - yes. Legalised theft. I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but Mrs Thatcher, looking back now, was a relatively decent woman. This last 10 years the Tory Party has lost all sense of propriety. It's a corrupt club today concerned only with its own continued well being. I wonder what that says about Brexit....

BobG

[BillyStubbsTears]

I do agree Bob. While I was vehemently opposed to Thatcher's policies, I do think she was driven by a desire to (as she saw it) make the country a better place.

I don't see any of that from most of the current generation. They are a bunch of spivs, chancers and class warriors without a principle between them, much less a vision of what they want the country to be.

[BobG]

The thing that gets up my nose more than just about anything else about Boris is that a month before the referendum he was writing articles, plural, in the Daily Torygraph, (for £200K a year incidentally) trumpeting that we had to stay in the EC. Come the chance of knifing David Cameron, he immediately changed his tune. Ergo the man in not only unprincipled, but he is also opportunistic, self centred, vicious, a liar and power crazed. And that is absolutely indisputable. His behaviour has proved it. All of it. And that doesn't even begin to address his conspiracy to commit violent crime with his old Eton mate of course.

How often do you read or hear our wonderful press talking about that? Or about Boris's refusal to acknowledge, let alone accept responsibility, for a child he fathered? Or beat up his girlfriend... You can just keep going with this bloke. Or drop in the shit that poor woman in goal in Iran. Or spend tens of millions on a bridge no bugger has ever seen or ever will see.

Principles? The man doesn't know the meaning of the word.

BobG