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About irrationalactor

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  1. I don't think that's true. Even Nigel Farage was saying we could be like Norway, who are in the single market. You can't know how many people voted Leave in the hope of an EEA-style relationship.
  2. The only ways to have kids in London are either to be eligible for social housing or to have rich parents drop six figures on you. Workers with decent jobs but no inheritance all hit their 30s and they either move out to the commuter belt or they give up and leave the country. Sharing like a student starts to wear very thin in your mid-30s. Commuting from somewhere just outside the M25 is the only solution but I wouldn't do it for the world - expensive and hours of your day down the drain. The problem is there always seems to be a new cohort of bright-eyed young interns eager t
  3. Wasn't this thread about a think tank report on BTL tax relief? Diane Abbot didn't write it, right?
  4. It's government by slogan, except the slogans are all lies.
  5. Are campaigning for security of tenure and campaigning against landlords' tax breaks mutually exclusive? Tightening the tax code a little more is IMO much more likely to happen and will end up being more effective, anyway. A lot of pressure groups seem to think in terms of 'rights' - but the people with power seem to think in terms of 'assets'.
  6. Would it raise house prices 10k? Or would it raise them 50-100k? A 25 year old with a decent job and a 10k deposit in the bank goes to get a mortgage. That 10k leverages up to maybe 100k. A 25 year old with a decent job and a 10k deposit and a 10k handout has 20k in the bank. That 20k leverages up to a lot more than 110k. Our whole economy is now a total mess and this 'solution' is a another red herring. The government talks a good game about rewarding hard work but it's now absolutely clear that the game is rigged. Never mind all this free money everyone else will be g
  7. 'Centrist' in the UK is pretty much a codeword for Blairism - far to the right of any post-war government before 1979, either Labour or Tory. I'd rather not have the threat of ID cards, 40 day detention, war, and such back again, thanks. Never mind the tax credits, the gold selloffs, the Buy-To-Let mortgages, the 'relaxed' attitude to oligarchs and non-doms, the light-touch regulation, the Pathfinder program, the missed inflation targets, the bailouts, and the massive boom in house prices. Never again. 'Centrism' is utterly dead. Might as well try a dose of post-war style publ
  8. BTL mortgages should be banned straight up. They're assessed mostly on the rental income, paid by the tenant. Why not just lend the tenant the money to buy the house and cut out the middle man? If you want to be a landlord you should have to pay for the house outright.
  9. My parents are not me - I have no control over their success or lack of it. I myself wasn't able to read in 1980. Sounds like you've done well. But I really do think the windows of opportunity have been closed, now, and the Tories certainly won't be redressing the balance.
  10. This framing in terms of 'aspiration' vs 'envy' only works if everyone has the same life chances and if outcomes are generally fair. Then we could happily say that rich people earned their wealth and that poor people should have tried harder - indeed, that anyone could choose to buckle down and give it another go. I'm afraid the real world doesn't work like that. Wealth locks in privilege, not only for the generation that worked for it, but for successive generations too. No-one has control over who their parents are. Careers are so precarious, and the rat-race so blisteringly fast, t
  11. Blair and Brown are gone. I'd personally like to see Brown apologise for what he did to house prices. But whoever's fault it was, it's clear the Tories aren't interested in fixing it - despite promising to before 2010. They've had eight years and the situation has gone from terrible to catastrophic.
  12. I bought a house a year or so ago and it made me miserable. As soon as I walked in the door with the keys I knew I had made a horrible mistake. I guess I have now technically 'sold to rent'. Just waiting for a bunch more 'first-time-buyer-only' schemes that I have now made myself ineligible for. I am still extremely angry about the housing situation in this country. Buying a house - or buying the wrong house - shouldn't take your entire savings since childhood plus your entire earnings to retirement (or beyond!). Buy a house and you're trapped working to pay the mortgage - who re
  13. Yes, if it's a loan the bank will take it into account when deciding how much you can afford to borrow. Parents shouldn't have to give their kids 90k to buy a house in the first place. How many years does it take a worker without rich parents to save 90k?
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