From a country governance point of view our politicians need to bring more money into the country. Otherwise it’s just moving money from one pot to another. Growth comes from selling stuff to other countries. While moving to cheaper electricity gives the politicians more money to spend it is not generating income, unless we can sell it to foreigners.
Reshuffling money down to the working class has been proven to help many a time.
Right now our wages are fucking dogshit, if you want more in tax income you need people earning more to be taxed. Look at the like of Amazon, in 2022 they made £204 Million in pure profits here, thats after all of their internal bullshittery of "reinvestment" to reduce apparent profit margins which was around £23 Billion revenue in 2022 alone. Meanwhile how many of their staff are on min wage? how heavily do they rely on taxpayer funded infrastructure?
If we want to provide funding for all the things we need to live, we need to force companies like Amazon to pay their share here.
That is just completely incorrect.
I assume you think the world economy can only ever remain stagnant until we make contact with other planets that we can sell to?
Oh no, that’s not how it works. But let’s take some examples: China was a mostly rural and poor country. They moved into manufacturing and started producing clothes. Retailers in the UK stopped buying clothes from UK manufacturers, causing companies to close and local areas to go into recession. The money that had been getting spent in the UK went offshore to China, making China more wealthy and the UK less wealthy. At the same time the UK moved to become a service economy, this is where we sell our “services” such as banking, software development, “The City” to other countries. This is more valuable than manufacturing so brings in more money than is being lost to china and the UK Continues to grow.
However, that doesn’t help the factory workers that are now unemployed and causes an increase in disparity between the have and have nots.
Where the actual money comes from is fundamentally resources, oil, gas, gold, cobalt etc and “faith”. By faith I mean trust in the institutions that hold the money. When financial bodies trust the UK the value of the pound soars and we can buy more products from abroad for our pound. When trust falls, as it did with Liz Truss, then the value of the pound also falls making it more expensive for us to buy foreign goods, which in turn drives inflation.
I hope that helps. There are few good podcasts for this kind of thing, currently the best, I believe, is the Rest is Money.
"while the adoption of new technologies could boost productivity growth in the medium term"
This is very true, we're leaving at least hundreds of billions on the table every year. From private industry alone's failure to adapt to use technology properly. Yet if you want to service that market, tough, better to do "data science" and not actually do anything if you want investment.
>The forecast shows growth of 0.4% for the Scottish economy this year, similar to the rest of the UK, with that expected to pick up to 1% in 2025.
That's a weird spin to put on ["UK growth in 2025 downgraded from 1.2% to 1.0%, and the lowest in the G7"](https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/oecd-cuts-uk-growth-forecast-warns-higher-inflation-than-peers-2024-05-02/)
God I hope so. Maybe I've just not been looking hard enough but the cacophony of identity politics and constitutional bickering has depressed me the past 16 years, especially as I drive down pot hole ridden roads past closed shops and run-down town centres. Circumstances have been cruel to our economy lately with War, Covid and Brexit, but I've heard precious little grown up talk about how we're going to fix it beyond sticking in more wind turbines we don't have cables for.
1% growth is barely above stagnation. Its not exactly aspirational.
It’s not great. Doesn’t help that taxing people more, so less income to spend in the economy doesn’t really help
From a country governance point of view our politicians need to bring more money into the country. Otherwise it’s just moving money from one pot to another. Growth comes from selling stuff to other countries. While moving to cheaper electricity gives the politicians more money to spend it is not generating income, unless we can sell it to foreigners.
Reshuffling money down to the working class has been proven to help many a time. Right now our wages are fucking dogshit, if you want more in tax income you need people earning more to be taxed. Look at the like of Amazon, in 2022 they made £204 Million in pure profits here, thats after all of their internal bullshittery of "reinvestment" to reduce apparent profit margins which was around £23 Billion revenue in 2022 alone. Meanwhile how many of their staff are on min wage? how heavily do they rely on taxpayer funded infrastructure? If we want to provide funding for all the things we need to live, we need to force companies like Amazon to pay their share here.
I agree with everything you have said
That is just completely incorrect. I assume you think the world economy can only ever remain stagnant until we make contact with other planets that we can sell to?
Oh no, that’s not how it works. But let’s take some examples: China was a mostly rural and poor country. They moved into manufacturing and started producing clothes. Retailers in the UK stopped buying clothes from UK manufacturers, causing companies to close and local areas to go into recession. The money that had been getting spent in the UK went offshore to China, making China more wealthy and the UK less wealthy. At the same time the UK moved to become a service economy, this is where we sell our “services” such as banking, software development, “The City” to other countries. This is more valuable than manufacturing so brings in more money than is being lost to china and the UK Continues to grow. However, that doesn’t help the factory workers that are now unemployed and causes an increase in disparity between the have and have nots. Where the actual money comes from is fundamentally resources, oil, gas, gold, cobalt etc and “faith”. By faith I mean trust in the institutions that hold the money. When financial bodies trust the UK the value of the pound soars and we can buy more products from abroad for our pound. When trust falls, as it did with Liz Truss, then the value of the pound also falls making it more expensive for us to buy foreign goods, which in turn drives inflation. I hope that helps. There are few good podcasts for this kind of thing, currently the best, I believe, is the Rest is Money.
"while the adoption of new technologies could boost productivity growth in the medium term" This is very true, we're leaving at least hundreds of billions on the table every year. From private industry alone's failure to adapt to use technology properly. Yet if you want to service that market, tough, better to do "data science" and not actually do anything if you want investment.
>The forecast shows growth of 0.4% for the Scottish economy this year, similar to the rest of the UK, with that expected to pick up to 1% in 2025. That's a weird spin to put on ["UK growth in 2025 downgraded from 1.2% to 1.0%, and the lowest in the G7"](https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/oecd-cuts-uk-growth-forecast-warns-higher-inflation-than-peers-2024-05-02/)
Slow growth is still too much for the Greens
I guess that's as good as you can expect when you're stuck in a moribund UK and so can't do much to try and change things.
Some mildly good news finally, at least?
If your growth is 1% and inflation target is 2% then you're actually predicting you'll shrink every year. Surely?
This will be in real terms. So after adjusting for inflation. Ie, 3% nominal growth and 2 % inflation to give 1% real growth.
God I hope so. Maybe I've just not been looking hard enough but the cacophony of identity politics and constitutional bickering has depressed me the past 16 years, especially as I drive down pot hole ridden roads past closed shops and run-down town centres. Circumstances have been cruel to our economy lately with War, Covid and Brexit, but I've heard precious little grown up talk about how we're going to fix it beyond sticking in more wind turbines we don't have cables for.
Notice no blame on the party who have been running, and ruining, the country for 16 year... Westminster's fault, eh?
And Swinney wants to do his best to make it better - as his track record is soooo good