How to eliminate poverty in this country

Well firstly we have to agree on a definition of poverty. We havent seen abject poverty in this country since the slum clearances. In some countries abject poverty and outrageous wealth live side by side, India, China, Brazil immediately spring to mind. But we don't have abject poverty in this country. Some people are poor no doubt about it, some people need help and there's nothing wrong with helping those who genuinely need it. But also, some people have become reliant on the welfare state. The current DWP budget is £240 billion (of which £118 billion is pensions) that's £20 billion a month. It sounds ridiculous doesn't it, £20 billion a month! But the fact is the DWP budget will go up it's inevitable, and that will be funded by tax. 

We have to get people off the sick, and I don't mean genuinely sick people. We have to get people out of the idea that benefits are a way of life, or a right. Victorian working conditions are long gone, but right now 4.2 million working age people are claiming benefits of some sort and three million working age people are claiming long term sickness payments, this is a case of a welfare state that is out of control. So I would suggest a more fitting thread title might be, how to get the massive welfare budget down.

The bottom line is that we need to cut the size of the state sector relative to GDP. State revenue (taxes etc) is currently about 40% of GDP but state spending (like infrastructure, civil service, benefits etc) is over 45%. When Gordon Brown was booted out of office it was over 50%. When state spending is greater than state revenue we're basically running a deficit and the govt needs to borrow money by issuing gilts.

As a general rule you find that rich countries have small state sectors (e.g. Singapore's is 15% of GDP) and consequently they have very high GDP per capita so the people are rich. The GDP per capita of the UK hasn't grown for years and we consistently run a state of greater than 40% of GDP which is unsustainable.

Labour's answer to this problem is always to increase taxation to increase tax revenue - when what they should be doing is reducing state spending. We should be cutting the civil service to the bone, cutting the benefits bill and cutting public sector pay, but Labour traditionally do the opposite.

Brown actually used expansion of the civil service to "increase" GDP. Crazy stuff, but for some reason I will never understand the cost of the civil service is included in GDP so Brown could maintain the pretence that our GDP was increasing by simply employing more useless civil servants. 

I suspect they have done work for MI6 is assassinating their enemies, so they owe them one.

Ask were we imported BLM from.

Precisely, who knew? The tax payer is currently forking out £5.5 billion a year in hotel bills alone (£billions more in other immigrant related expenses) for hundreds of thousands of penniless illegals who will inevitably be escorted to the front of the housing queue and paid every benefit on offer. It just doesn't make sense.

Far too many vested interests in maintaining a perpetually over-heated housing market.

Including the Government who use the revenue from such to mask systemic weaknesses in the rest of the economy due to to decades of serial mismanagement and under-investment by the old-school-tie network.


All The Best

Indian contractors like Tata, Wipro and Infosys go both ways. They'll offshore the work or import the workers. And they do it in the US where they dominate the H1B visa system and in the UK where they milk the intracompany visa system for all its worth. They've basically killed IT as a career option for non-Indians in both countries.