gillbeckvalley.bsky.social
Advocates for nature in the Gill Beck Valley Baildon/Hawksworth, West Yorkshire
105 posts
68 followers
99 following
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The purpose of tax is not to collect money for spending 🤦 the govt has a literally endless supply of money and doesn't need to collect any before it spends it
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🙌
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Policymaker = campaigner + votes
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Also a big step up in the number of wheatears and willow warblers today
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Thank you Paul!!
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I say 'thousands' in the broad sense of 'lots'. Could hear them overhead continuously from 9 til 10 while I was walking. Definitely hundreds of toads... Appeared in the pond en masse tonight. Fantastic chorus of toads and scoter in antiphony
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This is really cool. We get a regular flow of Whoopers in March coming up the Aire Valley like this one. Sometimes they cut across through the Gill Beck valley to Wharfedale
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Loads of physics on the internet 🤷♂️
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A commonsense-shaming, petro-warrior I presume then
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We have a fiat currency. Tax does not fund spending and selling bonds is not borrowing.
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Couldn't agree more. This is govt intervention which could be anti-inflationary. Obviously the govt has just declared war on regulation 😬 and de facto declared it's dedication to the free market
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... political establishment is either unaware or unwilling to risk having the argument that money is just a way of keeping score... To be created or destroyed by government according to what it wants to deliver.
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I think you're right that accepting this particular framing of the matter is the big stumbling block. Starmer's team have completely acceded to the narrative. To be fair almost everyone accedes unquestioningly also. It's so unintuitive for people that money is not a resource that the entire....
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The self-imposed requirement to balance the books is incomprehensible. One can only imagine that Rachel Reeves really does believe in the Maggie Thatcher economy as household analogy. This makes it into a moral issue of profligacy Vs prudence. Tories had no such concerns
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So I'm not saying that wild spending is 'free money' and just blaze away regardless. But it's a lot more subtle than your question implies. You can regulate for some of the outcomes you want. If you want to direct resources to renewable energy then just legislate against the alternatives🤷♂️
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You don't need to 'fund' these things. The govt creates money as it sees fit. It will always have the money available. It does need to resource those policies (with labour, materials etc) and to limit inflationary effects of creating the money and allocating these resources
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www.daera-ni.gov.uk/news/attenti...
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www.buglife.org.uk/campaigns/cy....
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Interest rates are relatively ineffective in controlling inflation in many circs -if inflation is due to war, climate change etc then there's no reason why changing cost of borrowing will help. First part of your question is more complicated
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The govt has no shortage of money. It can pay whatever interest it wants. The govt issues debt (sells bonds) for various reasons but it's always a choice. It's a way of controlling inflation because selling bonds mops up cash which would otherwise be out in the economy for example
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Likewise, always interesting 😊why would it be a drag?
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Yeah everyone I know starts rolling their eyes when conversation gets onto it 😬
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This is a really deep-rooted feeling isn't it. I feel it too. It's natural to feel this way. But creating money isn't debt. Markets start losing confidence when they see that a country no longer has rule of law, a healthy educated workforce, good infrastructure. You can't save your way to success
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And it's almost impossible to grow an economy without creating some money to allow the expansion
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There are constraints on spending, this doesn't mean that government can create money without potential consequences and those consequences have to be taken into account but the link between government money creation and inflation, the price of the pound etc is pretty weak
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This is a really simple statement of fact. But from it very profound things follow. The government cannot run out of money, it cannot go bust, it can always afford to pay, government 'borrowing' is not really borrowing and the national 'debt' is not a debt so long as we don't owe it to someone else
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Pre-1970s pounds were linked to gold. But this creates problems. In a recession the govt needs to create money to keep things working. For this reason many countries moved to fiat currency where money is just a promise to pay.
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Ok so maybe you think that the people who might work for the environment agency would be better working for an airline or for a company making cosmetics. This is the discussion to have. It's always about real resources.
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...or when there's a danger of stoking inflation. But this can be countered by other things like taxation, regulation and spending on things that reduce inflation (public transport, good health care, house insulation, efficient energy generation)
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All of the funds that the govt uses to do things are created from nothing. It's not like a household. It's like the points awarded in the premier league. The premier league does not have a limited supply of points and will not run out of them. It's a bit mind-bending 😁
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www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2023/03...
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Tax does not create funds. All govt spending is created from nothing when the govt instructs the central bank to credit its account. Taxation simply removes money from circulation. The bleating is part of a pantomime in which some participants don't understand and others choose to go with the myth