United Kingdom
General community for news/discussion in the UK.
Less serious posts should go in !casualuk@feddit.uk or !andfinally@feddit.uk
More serious politics should go in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.
Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
view the rest of the comments
This is what happens when you have a country trying to become more American over time. We want European public services with American tax rates. What we've ended up with is American public services, and American tax rates, but with none of the political or economic power of America. The economy is hampered by the privatisation of necessities.
However, I also think comparing with America is disingenuous. I'd much rather live in a country where my government is semi-competent, versus one where it is totally incompetent. You couldn't pay me to live in America.
The way I see it, living here in the US, is that since the 1970s corporate America has been in the business of extracting wealth from the great middle class that came out of WW2 spending, and US hegemony over the world:
Cutting taxes for corporations and the wealthy, cutting social spending in order to commercialize and tax social infrastructure that used to be free such as childcare, healthcare, elderly care, education and so forth. De-industrializing sending blue collar jobs overseas so that corps can extract even more wealth faster.
In many poorer areas, this vein of wealth has been tapped out and local communities are desolate, misery-drug addicted holes.
Britain did not have that same post-war middle class boom to the same degree, and taking on the same wealth extractive policies will result in little to no gain, IMO because there's little wealth to extract.
The above is purely my own uneducated uninformed drivel.
This is exactly it. The American economy is riding on a semi-permanent high of being the dominant economic power of the entire world, especially since the USSR fell. They maintain this with a combination of military power and economic power, projected globally.
Copying that simply will never garner the same results
I think one can further break down "economic power" between industrial strength, control of the largest financial (stock, bond, futures) markets, and control over the de facto global currency.