Quote Originally Posted by swaledale View Post
"An interesting stat last week contextualises it - that more money is spent on benefits than is collected in income tax in UK. And that isnt because income tax rates are low
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Except it doesn't, as 50% of what are classed as benefits are pensions, which is down to an aging population and that population living longer, thought the living longer seems to be tailing off a wee bit.

Drill down even further and one will find over 65's account for over 40% of the NHS budget and then of course there is the social care budget.

Its also worth adding context, in that the expenditure on benefits (inc pensions) is greater than income tax, there are of course other significant taxes collected by the government.

Of course project fear, did point out that with a faling birth rate and aging population, the number of employed people paying income tax/NI required to pay future pensions would fall and thats exactly whats happening as well.

Meanwhile a large proportion of those very people who are in receipt of both a pension and NHS treatment seem happy to vote for a party whose leader has more than once said he'd look at private provison for both and proposes even more draconian immigration controls, whilst being funded by dodgy billionaires based overseas who pay little or no UK tax. Truly Trkeys vote for Christmas sometimes![/QUOTE]

Mea Culpa. Hadn't appreciated pensions included in the benefits total. But still more money spent on non working people than generated by those in work. Of course there are also VAT, corporation taxes, inheritance taxes SDLT etc but that has to fund (but doesn't) all other government costs.

The fascinating dynamic here is in the supply/demand for labour (and hence income taxes) is very volatile in both supply and demand. Supply - we have a lot of graduate unemployment yet a growing demand for imported labour (legit immigration). At the same time we face massive long term falls in demand for labour due to AI. So personal income tax contributions are inevitably falling whilst redundancy in the workforce rises further.

How to tax AI??

How can an economy in the conventional sense survive the changes driven by essentially technology making people irrelevant. The dystopian future may not be that far away and it.would maybe enforce equitable distribution of wealth created by machines??

God knows, glad it's not my problem to resolve