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Who should pay for social care ?

Unless the state seized all property, it always will be. The problem of course is the lack of council houses. Thatcher selling them all was a mistake in hindsight.
The lack of housing is the issue and it would help if blocks of flats being built in a few cities were available to local to purchase and were not marketed exclusively in China. Of it's more complex than that but it's simple enough to discourage or prevent foreign exploitation of our market...which have enough issues to begin with. Other countries manage to heavily foreign investment buyers.
 
It was a mistake that was obvious to most at the time

I’d argue the mistake was not to build more capacity distributed lightly across new areas. The idea of selling a percentage of properties and lifting areas into both council and private ownership isn’t a bad one at all and I’d have thought would help avoid the god awful sink-estates the north is still littered with. So much social housing planning just did not work and has resulted in ghettos, no-go areas etc. Much as I hate to admit it I suspect Thatcher had more of a positive impact here than Blair, who failed to build anything new, though that bar is set exceptionally low.
 
In this context the Tories are hampered by the Nimby mindset, which is strongest amongst their own supporters. Like the 'who should pay for social care?' question, there's an obvious answer which is however politically unpalatable, and so the issue is kicked further down the road for 'somebody else' to deal with.

I remember when my sister bought her first house (and indeed the only house she's owned), her then-husband looking out over the surrounding fields and saying 'Of course, they can never build on this, it's all Green Belt land'. Needless to say, her house is now surrounded by more houses rather than fields.
 
I’d argue the mistake was not to build more capacity distributed lightly across new areas, a sort of Marxist Thatcherism! The idea of selling a percentage of properties and lifting areas into both council and private ownership isn’t a bad one at all and I’d have thought would help avoid the god awful sink-estates the north is still littered with. So much social housing planning just did not work and has resulted in ghettos, no-go areas etc. Much as I hate to admit it I suspect Thatcher had more of a positive impact here than Blair, who failed to build anything new, though that bar is set exceptionally low.
Yes, there is a tension between social provision and personal responsibility. Perhaps we need a combination of the two, a sort of Marxist Thatcherism! In the case of social housing it could be that social housing is conditional, i.e. that social housing is provided at a reasonable rent, but that provision is conditional on the tenant maintaining the upkeep. For example, mowing the lawn a minimum number of times per month in the summer with a local authority run hire centre to rent out lawn mowers. Perhaps the rent could be discounted on condition the property was maintained according to a clearly defined schedule?
 
Yes, there is a tension between social provision and personal responsibility. Perhaps we need a combination of the two. In the case of social housing it could be that social housing is conditional, i.e. that social housing is provided at a reasonable rent, but that provision is conditional on the tenant maintaining the upkeep.

I’m obviously no expert here, I have no relevant education or knowledge, but living in so many different parts of the country has made me convinced it isn’t the buildings themselves. As an example many 60s and 70s brutalist tower-blocks are highly desirable properties in some parts of the world, as they are in parts of That London. Up here in the north they are often concentration camps in all but name. Just hell holes where people who lack the education or opportunity to get out are stored fairly cheaply by the state. This is the most catastrophic failure of all manner of state disciplines imaginable; town planning, education, social care etc etc, yet it exists absolutely everywhere. The UK is littered with such failed housing strategy and the social problems created are now multi-generational.

My suspicion is mixed use is the key. That London is such a desirable place to live social housing on one side of a street is usually overlooking private property worth millions, that raises the area up. There are parts of Europe where tower blocks are built with social housing on the lower floors and private property on the upper, again this lifts the social housing up. It will never become ghettoised in such an environment. I’m convinced our problem is slums and ghettos being allowed to exist at all, social housing needs to be distributed far more widely.
 
Why would anyone buy a property not to use it? I mean I could buy a bicycle and never use it, 'my choice', but if there was an unused bicycle tax it would be my own fault.

The tax is there for the very reason that the property is unoccupied, to dissuade that that sort of thing. A legitimate use of taxation. It's the same reason smoking is taxed.

Imagine you're Russian, with a shed load of Roubles, and hope to live another 30 years, even longer maybe than Putin.
 
I’m obviously no expert here, I have no relevant education or knowledge, but living in so many different parts of the country has made me convinced it isn’t the buildings themselves. As an example many 60s and 70s brutalist tower-blocks are highly desirable properties in some parts of the world, as they are in parts of That London. Up here in the north they are often concentration camps in all but name. Just hell holes where people who lack the education or opportunity to get out are stored fairly cheaply by the state. This is the most catastrophic failure of all manner of state disciplines imaginable; town planning, education, social care etc etc, yet it exists absolutely everywhere. The UK is littered with such failed housing strategy and the social problems created are now multi-generational.

My suspicion is mixed use is the key. That London is such a desirable place to live social housing on one side of a street is usually overlooking private property worth millions, that raises the area up. There are parts of Europe where tower blocks are built with social housing on the lower floors and private property on the upper, again this lifts the social housing up. It will never become ghettoised in such an environment. I’m convinced our problem is slums and ghettos being allowed to exist at all, social housing needs to be distributed far more widely.
Yes, architecture will have a large part to play.
 
Hand in hand with the depletion of social housing is the dereliction of social housing from lack of maintenance.
Sadly there are families who will never respond to the raising up idea from people around them-it only takes one family to trash a street/block.
There was a small estate in Birkenhead(North) that suffered at the hands of one family and over the years the decent tenants had to get out, the vacant properties were than filled with more problem tenants and that estate was effectively demolished by its feral occupants-such was the carnage their local then Labour MP called for such tenants to be housed in shipping containers....
 
Neither Venezuela nor Zimbabwe have ever adopted anything remotely approaching MMT views. Venezuela constantly adopts monetary policy that contravenes the idea of sovereign currency. Zimbabwe clearly issued above resource capacity. People persistently invoking these as some sort of 'proof' are not even aiming at their intended target.
I think I've already amply outlined why and what mainstream macro-'economists' haven't got right - including a completely erroneous explanation of money issue, banking operations; reasons for and use of taxation; reasons for debt issue; very often the propagation of falsehoods regarding insolvency of sovereign currency issuers; nonsense about the inflationary spending... There are plenty of economists not following the neo-classical/monetarist ideology employed in and outside academia who advise both companies and governments. Whether a government or company chooses to take the advice is something else. Bill Mitchell is inundated with consultant offers from companies who are far more canny than governments (he turns them down).

Yes I am both an economics graduate and have worked in economics jobs. Not that I think it is entirely relevant or in any way verifiable on a forum.

Thought you might have some background from your posts which makes it all the more curious why you advocate MMT so strongly. If MMT is such a good idea, why aren't more people behind it? Even MMT advocates admit there is a limit to debt and money creation. What levels of debt and money creation are sustainable? Do you think Japan is a better example of MMT in action than Venezuela and Zimbabawe btw?
 
The problem is actually a lack of houses, full stop. An increasing population, with high levels of divorce, means trying to squeeze an ever-larger number of households into a limited amount of housing, which isn't growing at anything like the same rate. Added to this, the now huge student population has gobbled up whole streets of low-cost housing in many major towns and cities.

Obviously, making it uneconomical to hold a large stock of empty properties would release some property, and the only reason this isn't done is because some very wealthy people who are also donors to political parties deem it 'unacceptable', but that would have only a marginal impact.

The problem is made worse by the UK population's preference for a house with a garden and garage, so that large amounts of land are needed for x number of homes, even if they're cheek-by-jowl and with tiny rooms.
Yes, the physical capacity can't really keep pace with social changes. In the past (I mean up to the '70s) a lot of young working people, single men and women would live in 'rooms' in a boarding house. Now there are many more one-person households. It's a real problem whether in private rental, social rental or houses owned outright. I know a woman who says she could no longer live with her husband, but he bought the house next door and they still pop into one another's houses to eat together a few times a week. They had the money to do that and now take up two large Edwardian terraced houses, even though they essentially could live in the same large house.
 
Thought you might have some background from your posts which makes it all the more curious why you advocate MMT so strongly. If MMT is such a good idea, why aren't more people behind it? Even MMT advocates admit there is a limit to debt and money creation. What levels of debt and money creation are sustainable? Do you think Japan is a better example of MMT in action than Venezuela and Zimbabawe btw?
I think I already said that neither Venezuela nor Zimbabwe are remotely representative of MMT principles. So why do you keep on citing them as 'examples'? They're not. Neither is Japan. MMT authors have merely pointed to Japan to show that their interest-rate setting and debt issuance has never led to the rampant (hyper)inflation predicted by neo-classical economists.

No-one in MMT says there is a 'limit to money creation', but that it is curbed by the amount of resources available which it can purchase. It also (rightly) rejects the concept of debt issuance as a needless anachronism for sovereign currency issuers, so the question of 'is it sustainable' is not a question for MMT to answer. It is a question for those who insist on issuing needless debt and also for them to explain why they think they are doing it.
 
Who are these credentialed economists? Can you outline why they’re right?

Paul Krugman is one. I point you to Google (or your browser of choice) once again for the remaining answers you seek (should you be truly interested).

I see Sharon Graham has decided to focus on workers and detach somewhat from the Labour Party which I applaud and which is in stark contrast to her Ivy restaurant-loving predecessor. I assume social care costs will come into her thinking. Thoughts? Also looking forward to hearing your thoughts on how the left can win the next GE and who will lead it to victory.
 
Paul Krugman blocked me on Twitter because he can't answer basic criticisms. He's another one who has been doing hit-job articles to save face over the fact that he's rested his reputation on things that simply aren't true. Krugman is not like Greg Mankiw, but unfortunately he sits in the same basic paradigm. It's become a sort of joke among economists that if you get the 'nobel prize' for economics (which was created because they were sulking about being ignored) then you're likely spouting nonsense acceptable to the prevailing ideology.
 
Also looking forward to hearing your thoughts on how the left can win the next GE and who will lead it to victory.

That’s the same question asked by your friend Brian, which I gave a lengthy answer to some time ago. The left is dead, it was killed by the Labour Party. There is no one who will lead the left to victory. We now have only right wing politics or very right wing politics to choose from at the next GE.
 
One of the sorry things about this is that there are still people in the Labour Party who would hope to do social good, but who are led astray by long-term economic quackery. They've allowed the terms to be set for them. Starmer is no different than Kinnock or Blair, both of whom chose to give in to a popular lie for the sake of power, rather than press ahead with trying to convince people of unpopular truths. Labour's core election strategy now always consists of trying to demonstrate to a donkey-headed public that they are 'economically responsible'. So we have the ludicrous spectacle of a public moaning its head off about awful public penury, but shouting down any attempt to address it as: 'the money printing press' or 'radical socialism'. Or whatever other rubbish people read in papers like The Sun.
 
One of the sorry things about this is that there are still people in the Labour Party who would hope to do social good, but who are led astray by long-term economic quackery. They've allowed the terms to be set for them. Starmer is no different than Kinnock or Blair, both of whom chose to give in to a popular lie for the sake of power, rather than press ahead with trying to convince people of unpopular truths. Labour's core election strategy now always consists of trying to demonstrate to a donkey-headed public that they are 'economically responsible'. So we have the ludicrous spectacle of a public moaning its head off about awful public penury, but shouting down any attempt to address it as: 'the money printing press' or 'radical socialism'. Or whatever other rubbish people read in papers like The Sun.
….while at the same time being quite relaxed about the £bn’s of taxpayer money being trousered by Tory Donors on the VIP fast track to self advancement.
 
….while at the same time being quite relaxed about the £bn’s of taxpayer money being trousered by Tory Donors on the VIP fast track to self advancement.
Not taxpayer money! :) Misused/misdirected public spending!
 


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