Low economic growth is a slow-burning crisis for Britain
I live in the UK and I had a chat with my partner about an hour ago about quitting our jobs and going on benefits. I was 60% joking, but I&#x27;m absolutely fed up with this country.<p>Things are extremely difficult here if you&#x27;re working for a living and are not ultra wealthy. Just last year I brought a house which put in me hundreds of thousands of pounds of debt because of how ridiculous house prices are. I&#x27;ve worked and saved my whole life since I was a teenager (32 now), yet there are 20 year olds on benefits in my family who live in houses that are worth more than mine and have never worked. I&#x27;m so stressed out right now because interest rates are obviously rocketing up so I&#x27;ll be paying a much higher rate when I go to remortgage next year and at the same time house prices could potentially crash. The reality is if I lose my job over the next few years I&#x27;m probably going to be screwed and the last 15 years of work was probably all for nothing. Fun.<p>At the same time significantly more than half my income goes on taxes when you consider taxes like VAT, council tax, TV license, car tax, fuel taxes, stamp duty tax, and all the others I&#x27;m forgetting on top of the income and NI tax that comes out of our wages. For the hundreds of thousands of pounds of tax I&#x27;ve paid over my career I have the benefit of getting literally no help whenever I need it because I work and I also get to enjoy our barely functional public services.<p>I&#x27;m not complaining about my situation, but it does upset me when I&#x27;ve struggled my whole live to get where I am, yet single mums in their 20s in my family still get to live in nicer houses than me, get free cars from the government while not having to work a day in their lives. I&#x27;m driving a Fiat Punto with 90,000 miles on the clock while several people in my family on benefits have gotten new BMWs because of government schemes.<p>The low growth we have in this country doesn&#x27;t surprise me at all. Last week I was looking for a weekend job to help with the bills, but given my tax rate it&#x27;s basically pointless looking for extra work. People in my family on benefits are also routinely advised not to work by the job centre because it would leave them financially worse off. But we&#x27;re not just disincentivised people from working, we&#x27;re also massively over regulated. It never ceases to amaze me just how difficult it is to do anything here. For example, my girlfriend likes making bath bombs she wanted to sell some so I looked into helping her set up an online store, but I found out you have to pay hundreds of pounds to have every product you want to sell reviewed and approved first making the whole thing pointless at the scale she would be operating at. Another example is something I&#x27;d love to do which is sell cakes, pastries and pizzas as a delivery service from my home kitchen because I love cooking and always have too much food. But I can&#x27;t sell food because to do that I need to have health and safety inspections, and again at the scale I&#x27;d be operating at it makes no sense. And it&#x27;s like this with everything here. Unless you&#x27;re super rich or know someone in the industry who can get you through all the regulatory hope I don&#x27;t really understand how anyone starts any business without being terrified that they&#x27;re operating in violation of some regulation. Apparently I can&#x27;t even cut the tree down in my own garden without telling the local council because it&#x27;s over a certain width. It&#x27;s a beyond a joke.<p>I very much agree that Britain is heading for a crisis if we&#x27;re not already in one. The core problem we have is that people here truly believe the government can fix everything by spending more money and increasing taxes, and until that attitude changes nothing will get better. So instead of cutting taxes and incentivising people to work, I can almost guarantee the public will demand the government fixes this problem by increasing taxes on people who earn more than them while spending ever more money on various inefficient wellfare schemes. And if you want an example of this then just look at what&#x27;s happening right now with the energy bill crisis... No one is asking for tax cuts to help people with affordability, they&#x27;re asking for handouts to pay for their bills while increasing taxes on the energy companies.