How bad will the Budget be?

How long before you start addressing the current reality.

It depends on who you are and what your situation is. If you need to travel a lot as part of your business operation or need to commute by car to and from work, the fact that the expected hefty fuel duty increase did not happen is a major plus.

If you are on low pay, especially if you are under 21, the big rises in minimum wages looks pretty hopeful to you as it does to me.

Continuing to freeze thresholds though for another four years and claiming this as a virtue because they are not doing it for even longer, hits us all rather hard.

There is hope that the extra money for infrastructure investment and for the NHS might start helping in due course, and that the planned overhaul of planning laws will kick start more housebuilding.

And big reductions in the discount for right to buy are a positive because they were forcing social landlords to sell at a massive loss which made new social housing construction economically unfeasible. This had to change and offers hope to all those languishing on housing waiting lists.

If you work in the public sector as some of my friends do, there is hope that your pay will not continue to be cut in real terms year on year and that the recruitment and retention crisis will begin to ease.

So there is genuine hope for some, though probably not so much for you. As a minimum wage employer, the big minimum wage increase is going to be a concern for you especially when added to the large increases in employers' NI contributions. I have qualms about the wisdom of the latter for sure. Many employers will simply pass these costs on to their employees as lower pay rises or to their customers as higher prices. But minimum wage employers do not have lower pay rises as an option and risk losing too many customers if they raise prices.

It would have been difficult to raise so much money in other ways, but at least some of it could have been raised by modest extra taxes on wealth, particularly immoveable assets like land or property. After all, whilst the average billionaire could easily move himself and his money out of the country, he would struggle to get his London penthouse or country mansion on a ship or a plane to transport elsewhere.

Labour is indeed fortunate in who their opponents are. Because only the appalling Tories can make Labour look like an improvement - at least to those of us having to earn a living as opposed to those whingeing from the comfort of their armchairs all day.

Also - if the super rich start selling their land banks, isn't this likely to reduce the price of one significant cost factors in housing etc (land)?..and isn't the price of real estate one of the significant cost factors in the entire economy?

The trouble is, this simple insight into how the economy really works is just a starting point and you can still reach the wrong conclusions from here.

I don't think any sensible people are.

The increasingly widespread problem we have with many right wingers - here as everywhere else - is they want us to debate some fake reality or conspiracy theory they choose to believe in but which in fact is obvious nonsense to most intelligent people.

Best ignored. I do a lot of ignoring on this forum, lol

You can see this is not the underlying (foundational) reality by looking at Pac's graph - the public and private sector are both paying less because the economy overall is less productive. There is no real choice or surprise here - people have to get less if there is less produced. What is interesting is that persistent gap between public and private