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The Politics Thread 2020


G STAR RAM

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12 minutes ago, DarkFruitsRam7 said:

Does electing Bernie Sanders mean the US would suddenly become a socialist state?

I feel like that country could benefit from a 'dash' of socialism, just as we benefited in 1948. Bernie Sanders could perhaps do that, without ever being able to turn it into the next Venezuela.

64% of Americans believe that the super-rich should pay a wealth tax to help support better public services.  

There are a lot of budding inadvertent socialists in that country....provided that such policies are not actually referred to as left-wing or socialist that is.

It won't happen with Bernie now though,  it's Trump v Biden. 

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1 minute ago, Highgate said:

64% of Americans believe that the super-rich should pay a wealth tax to help support better public services.  

There are a lot of budding inadvertent socialists in that country....provided that such policies are not actually referred to as left-wing or socialist that is.

It won't happen with Bernie now though,  it's Trump v Biden. 

I think the bolded bit is absolutely bang on.

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By chance I got speaking to a US guy in a bar a couple of months ago when I was working in mainland Europe. He seemed a fairly regular bloke until the conversation turned to politics (the US Democratic canditate selection stuff came up on the TV that was playing).

When I asked him what he thought about "Obamacare", he went on a rant and accused Barack Obama of being a Communist.

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On 18/03/2020 at 11:36, EtoileSportiveDeDerby said:

Do you remember the bank for bad loans for Northern Rock etc...? Whatever happened to this ? May be we need another one of these. 

PS: I am not one of these, household finance is enough trouble as it is but then again that is my money whereas those professors got ideas about other people's money.

Northern Rock was a bank in it's own right ,like a lot of building societies it converted to a bank to allow it to borrow money on the open market .Building societies can only lend a proportion of what they take in savings, they are mutual's.

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32 minutes ago, alexxxxx said:

Economy and pound is in real trouble

Most countries are doing the same because, well, what else can they do?. Printing money isn't good but neither is giving out loans that will have to be re-paid with interest, assuming companies are able to come out the other side still viable.

Because of that, the Pound will be no worse off than any other country. As for the wider economy - depends how long this goes on & how much worse it gets.

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Just think about this little fact:

Anyone with a student loan (which was sold-off to a private company), is now paying 5,300% more interest than the Bank of England base rate. (5,300% NOT a typo)!

A typical £50,000 student loan would cost approximately £2,700 in interest for the first year (@ 5.4%)

A £50,000 loan at the BoE base rate would cost £50 in interest in the first year (@ 0.1%). I wonder who is trousering the £2,650 difference?

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36 minutes ago, Van Wolfie said:

Most countries are doing the same because, well, what else can they do?. Printing money isn't good but neither is giving out loans that will have to be re-paid with interest, assuming companies are able to come out the other side still viable.

Because of that, the Pound will be no worse off than any other country. As for the wider economy - depends how long this goes on & how much worse it gets.

But Britain is in the process of cutting itself off from its main European export markets, which is not a good idea if you are trying to convince the  markets that they really ought to invest their money there. And Britain's chronic budget deficit and balance of payment deficit aren't good for its creditworthiness at a time like this.

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54 minutes ago, Grumpy Git said:

Just think about this little fact:

Anyone with a student loan (which was sold-off to a private company), is now paying 5,300% more interest than the Bank of England base rate. (5,300% NOT a typo)!

A typical £50,000 student loan would cost approximately £2,700 in interest for the first year (@ 5.4%)

A £50,000 loan at the BoE base rate would cost £50 in interest in the first year (@ 0.1%). I wonder who is trousering the £2,650 difference?

In a lot of cases nobody is as a large number of student loans are written before being repaid.

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12 minutes ago, Tamworthram said:

In a lot of cases nobody is as a large number of student loans are written before being repaid.

So we as a country are telling young people don’t  worry about your student loan it will just get written off if not repaid god help us.

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6 minutes ago, cstand said:

So we as a country are telling young people don’t  worry about your student loan it will just get written off if not repaid god help us.

Kicking it down the road to future generations via the national debt......I don't think that is actually the marketing pitch to young people, but the expansion in further education meant that the assumption that all of the increased number of graduates were going to fuel a large, highly skilled (and highly paid) "knowledge based" workforce turned out to be flawed.

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