Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News. Welcome to Merrin Talk's
Speaker 1: Your Money, the personal finance edition of Merin Talk's Money
Speaker 1: and these bonus podcasts we talk about the best strategies
Speaker 1: for making the most of your money. I'm Merin Dumbsup,
Speaker 1: Web editor at Large for Bloomberg UK Wealth Now. This
Speaker 1: week kicked off with some drama in British politics and
Speaker 1: a particular surprise there. Following Andy Burnham's victory in the
Speaker 1: Makefield by election and growing brother from Labor and Peace
Speaker 1: Kiss someone announced his resignation as Labor leader and Prime Minister.
Speaker 1: Burnham quickly confirmed what we already knew, which is that
Speaker 1: he would be seeking the leadership and that is widely
Speaker 1: expected to happen in the next few weeks without much
Speaker 1: of a contest. So we imagine that Andy Burnham will
Speaker 1: be the next Prime Minister. And the question then is
Speaker 1: what will Britain look like under Andy Burnham? And more importantly,
Speaker 1: what will it mean for your money? Spoiler probably nothing good.
Speaker 1: With me to help explore that question, It's Philip Alderic,
Speaker 1: senior reporter covering the UK Cony for Bloomberg News. Phil Welcome,
Speaker 1: thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 2: Good to be here, right.
Speaker 1: The first thing to say, I guess is that assuming
Speaker 1: that Andy Burnham is going to stick to the fiscal rules,
Speaker 1: which he has said he is going to do, that
Speaker 1: leaves him with very little immediate wiggle room. Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, we've got twenty three billion of headroom
Speaker 2: that Rachel Reeves left us with, which itself was a
Speaker 2: relatively small amount of headroom. Unless he gets really lucky
Speaker 2: with growth. Yeah, he's going to He's really got very
Speaker 2: few options at the end of the parliament. Most of
Speaker 2: the hard work is going to be done with these
Speaker 2: frozen tax thresholds, which are going to really irritate most
Speaker 2: of the electorate. So you can't see them the government
Speaker 2: pushing through that, even a Burnham government pushing through with
Speaker 2: something which is going to be some unpopular right before
Speaker 2: a general election.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, I suppose the first thing we should
Speaker 1: actually do is just remind everybody roughly what the fiscal
Speaker 1: rules are, right, which is that you correct me if
Speaker 1: I'm wrong this You're the technical guy here, not me. One.
Speaker 1: That we need to be pushing towards the budget surplus
Speaker 1: by twenty nine thirty, so that spending is in surplus,
Speaker 1: although there's that sort of fluffy bit around what is
Speaker 1: spending and what is investment right, And the second major
Speaker 1: one is that public debt is a percentage of GDP
Speaker 1: needs to be beginning to trend down by twenty nine thirty,
Speaker 1: and looking at where we are now, that seems to
Speaker 1: be verging on impossible. And we had the the May
Speaker 1: borrowing numbers were horrible, weren't they much higher than expected?
Speaker 1: And nearly twelve billion pounds in May spend on interest
Speaker 1: on our debt alone, which is horrible. So you look
Speaker 1: at this stuff and you think, well, even if the
Speaker 1: Parma government had hung on and Reeves had hung on,
Speaker 1: this was still going to fail come twenty nine thirty
Speaker 1: unless there was a massive spending squeeze or some sort
Speaker 1: of bizarre boosting growth, which seems inconceivable. So that was
Speaker 1: already going to fail.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, I think the only thing I caution
Speaker 2: there with is obviously the situation right now in the
Speaker 2: middle of the Irm war, and not all price spike
Speaker 2: et cetera. The inflation's picked up, so a lot of
Speaker 2: that may just be a temporary spike. The underlying state
Speaker 2: of the public finances does remain pretty dire. It was
Speaker 2: going to be very difficult for Starmer to deliver the
Speaker 2: fiscal rules and get growth going and get your investment
Speaker 2: up because there are so many pressures on all sorts
Speaker 2: of public spending at the moment.
Speaker 1: Okay, So let's assume that it is going to be
Speaker 1: Andy Burnham, of course, not absolutely certain yet that there
Speaker 1: could be a contestant. Then we get all kinds of
Speaker 1: spending commitments checked in from everyone trying to win, and
Speaker 1: everything gets what rather worse than we think. But let's
Speaker 1: assume that not going to happen. We have an orderly
Speaker 1: transition the bond market and the equity market. Figure that's
Speaker 1: kind of okay, because fiscal rules something some and so
Speaker 1: that all stairs relatively calm. When we look at what
Speaker 1: Burnamus talked about, He's talked about things like looking again
Speaker 1: at the freezers on income tax allowances. He's talked about
Speaker 1: reconsidering the inheritance tax charges on farmers. He's looked at
Speaker 1: talked about cutting business rates down for pubs and listening
Speaker 1: lifting threshold for small businesses. He's talked about reversing the
Speaker 1: rise in employers national insurance. But all these things would
Speaker 1: be marvelous because all of them have been fairly nasty
Speaker 1: drags on growth and on sentiment in the UK. But
Speaker 1: going back to this idea that there's very little room
Speaker 1: to do anything, it seems inconceivable that he could possibly
Speaker 1: do those things without also introducing new taxes, perhaps on wealth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it's implausible to think that he can.
Speaker 2: He can make all these all these tax cuts for
Speaker 2: particicular sections of society and to help ease some of
Speaker 2: the pressures that on business without you know, without recovering
Speaker 2: the money from elsewhere. And we've and we've seen that
Speaker 2: no spending cuts seems to be it seemed to be
Speaker 2: pretty undeliverable in under this government with and you know,
Speaker 2: the makeup of the labor governments or the Labor Party,
Speaker 2: with the backbench rebellions still sort of brewing. Whenever there
Speaker 2: is talk of a spending cut, it's going to be
Speaker 2: the same problem that burn And faces in regard to that. So, yes,
Speaker 2: if there's going to be a tax cut, there's going
Speaker 2: to be a tax rise to pay for that tax cut.
Speaker 2: That that's the way if he's if he is honestly
Speaker 2: going to stick to the fiscal rules that Rachel Reeves
Speaker 2: is introduced, then, yeah, somebody is going to bear some
Speaker 2: pain to ease the pain on someone else.
Speaker 1: Looking at whether there's risers might come, and one of
Speaker 1: the things that he has previously suggested is reintroducing the
Speaker 1: fifty p rate of tax on higher earners.
Speaker 2: Doesn't make any money. I mean it doesn't. It never
Speaker 2: makes doesn't touch the size, does it, really.
Speaker 1: It doesn't touch the size. There was a wonderful article
Speaker 1: on the one of the papers at the weekend. I
Speaker 1: don't know if you saw it, and about gosh, I
Speaker 1: don't know, seven or eight years ago, ten years ago,
Speaker 1: whenever it was Scottish referendum, I write an article saying
Speaker 1: that taxes were going to go up in Scotland and
Speaker 1: that one should rush out and buy houses in Northumberland,
Speaker 1: just on the border, because that's where everybody would go.
Speaker 1: You know, the top rate of tax in Scotland is
Speaker 1: now forty eight percent and here's the headline, Scottish tax
Speaker 1: exiles flood into Northumberland. Families fleeing the SMP's higher rates
Speaker 1: are driving up president in Northumberland. So you know, fifty pm,
Speaker 1: we'd all be going the other way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, yes, gif for Scotland it would be a
Speaker 2: symbolic gesture rather than an attempt to reduce the constraints
Speaker 2: that he has, his fiscal constraints that he has. I
Speaker 2: think he's also talked about sort of doing the council
Speaker 2: tax revaluation. That again would be a shift in the
Speaker 2: balance of taxes because people in the borer regions would
Speaker 2: pay less than people in London, and the wealthier regions
Speaker 2: would end up paying more because their houses were valid
Speaker 2: more then, so that would be a redistributive operation. But
Speaker 2: he could you can also attach to that some some
Speaker 2: form of net tax increase as well, so I could
Speaker 2: you know, I could imagine him him doing something like that.
Speaker 2: And he's also talked about I mean, in the past
Speaker 2: he talked about ten percent inheritance tax on I think
Speaker 2: on all inheritance. So we've obviously got them, you know,
Speaker 2: up to a million pound before you you end up
Speaker 2: getting HD being incurred with inheritance tax. So and that
Speaker 2: he talked about that was in relation to social care
Speaker 2: in the past. So again that's a that could raise
Speaker 2: you know, substantial sums of money and as you said,
Speaker 2: is effectively a tax on inherited wealth.
Speaker 1: And that would be interesting because one of the things
Speaker 1: that people worry about all the time, absolutely NonStop is
Speaker 1: inheritance tax, even people whose estates will never fall into
Speaker 1: the inheritance tax, whereas you worry about it all the time,
Speaker 1: and suddenly he'd give them good reason to worry about it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and the last time they worried about it was
Speaker 2: with Terre's and May's dementia taxes, as Labor branded it
Speaker 2: back then, and it cost her majority, didn't it. So
Speaker 2: it's obviously, as we all know, it's the least one
Speaker 2: of the least popular time. This is the thing. There
Speaker 2: is economic restraint and then there's political constraint, and the
Speaker 2: two are sort of operating hand in hand. The physical
Speaker 2: situation rather than the fiscal rules in the UK is
Speaker 2: itself a massive constraint, and then the efforts to actually
Speaker 2: try and fix that have proved to be a huge
Speaker 2: political constraint. So you end up just in complete stalemate.
Speaker 2: And that's the big challenge for Burnham is how he
Speaker 2: breaks that stalemate where Starmer was unable to well.
Speaker 1: I suppose Ah could be super strong and just get
Speaker 1: on with it, But the obvious route then is to
Speaker 1: try and go down as we were just saying with
Speaker 1: the inheritance tax to try and go further down the
Speaker 1: wealth tax route, and he has talked about, for example,
Speaker 1: equalizing the rates on income tax and capital gains tax,
Speaker 1: which sounds very attractive to lots of people, but of
Speaker 1: course is fairly outrageous because that's an absolutely massive wealth tax.
Speaker 1: So when the rates of capital gains tax were were
Speaker 1: cut previously under Gordon Brown to what today's relatively low
Speaker 1: sounding levels, one of the things had happened at the
Speaker 1: same time was the removal of the indexing to inflation.
Speaker 1: And because the rates were lower, that was sort of
Speaker 1: vaguely acceptable because you're no longer you're paying a lower rate,
Speaker 1: but you're paying tax on your inflationary gains as opposed
Speaker 1: to your real gain. It was kind of a reasonable compromise.
Speaker 1: But if you were to put capital gains tax rates
Speaker 1: up to income tax rates without taking into account inflation,
Speaker 1: you have introduced, I mean, it's a wealth tax at
Speaker 1: the moment, but you would have introduced a massive wealth tax.
Speaker 1: And that we have few enough of our rich happily
Speaker 1: staying in the UK at the moment, this would be
Speaker 1: something I suspect that would really drive up departures.
Speaker 2: I mean a lot of small business owners. They make
Speaker 2: their money through taking capital gains on the businesses that
Speaker 2: the profits that they've made and the gains that they've made.
Speaker 2: I think people in general would see it as unfair
Speaker 2: if you had a capital gains tax which was unadjusted
Speaker 2: for inflation. Obviously, the people who are defending the idea
Speaker 2: will point back to Nigel Lawson in the nineteen eighties,
Speaker 2: and that was when capital gains tax was last The
Speaker 2: rates were drawn to be equivalent to the income tax rates,
Speaker 2: and so you know, there is a sort of you know,
Speaker 2: the labor can say, oh, well, the Tories did it,
Speaker 2: but of course back then there was the inflation adjustment.
Speaker 2: And the Liberal Democrats say in the election manifesto, in
Speaker 2: their election manifesto in twenty twenty four, they had something
Speaker 2: similar where they wanted to they wanted to harmonize the
Speaker 2: rates but with the income tax rates, but they would
Speaker 2: introduce in inflation adjustments. So for your thinking about doing this,
Speaker 2: you either do it the way he wants to do
Speaker 2: it and just irritate so many people that it will
Speaker 2: backfire inevitably, or you do it in a way The
Speaker 2: Liberal Democrats were suggesting which ends up raising you know,
Speaker 2: after behavioral adjustments or whatever. It only ends up raising
Speaker 2: it three or four billion, which is nice to have,
Speaker 2: but it doesn't solve everything. So it's not a big
Speaker 2: you know, it's not a big bazooka.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm One of the things that you will hear
Speaker 1: from wealth managers at the moment is that people refuse
Speaker 1: to take capital gains because they don't want to pay
Speaker 1: capital gains tax. So we have much lower turnover and
Speaker 1: possibly in the UK equity markets and other parts of
Speaker 1: the market than we would otherwise because people are very
Speaker 1: key not to take their capital gains tax. Of course,
Speaker 1: because because you pay both capital gains tax and inheritance tax,
Speaker 1: people are loath to pay capital gains tax when they
Speaker 1: know they're then going to have to pay inheritance tax.
Speaker 1: But of course capital gains are wiped out on death,
Speaker 1: so you only pay inheritance tax, so people will only
Speaker 1: want to pay one of those, not two of those.
Speaker 1: So if you put the rate of capital gains tax up,
Speaker 1: then that becomes even more of a problem. The behavior
Speaker 1: of stuff that it drives is really out of proportion
Speaker 1: to the to the tax.
Speaker 2: Well and actually on the behavioral stuff. It is a
Speaker 2: reminder that the hmrc's own estimates of harmonizing the CGT
Speaker 2: with the income tax rates are for there to be
Speaker 2: and you end up losing tax revenue because of this
Speaker 2: exact thing, because everybody just assumes we're gonna we're going
Speaker 2: to wait it out, We're not going to cash in anything,
Speaker 2: so there's no tax to be paid. And then you know,
Speaker 2: they hope for a Tory or reform government next time
Speaker 2: around who will just completely reverse the policy, which you
Speaker 2: know they will inevitably run on. And I mean they're
Speaker 2: also you know, they're saying now that they wouldn't wouldn't
Speaker 2: enforce such a right. So yeah, I mean, it doesn't,
Speaker 2: it doesn't work. And we saw some behavioral action by
Speaker 2: business owners and others a couple of years ago after
Speaker 2: it was anticipated that the capital gains tax would rise
Speaker 2: to everybody basically cashed in before the budget. So we've
Speaker 2: seen a massive spike in actual capital gains tax revenues
Speaker 2: and it's all been driven by behavioral stuff. So again,
Speaker 2: wealth tax is such a difficult one to actually guarantee
Speaker 2: you're going to get any income off because it is
Speaker 2: subject to so much behavioral change more constraints there.
Speaker 1: What is interesting here is the limited period. I mean,
Speaker 1: I know there's talk about how there's a possibility that
Speaker 1: Andy Burnham might call an election and we might have
Speaker 1: another general election. I'm not convinced on that one. I
Speaker 1: don't know how you feel about it. But barring that,
Speaker 1: we're only talking about a couple of years left in
Speaker 1: this term. And so the other conversation that is happening
Speaker 1: around Andy Burnham, and the thing that he's mentioned several
Speaker 1: times is the idea of introducing some kind of of
Speaker 1: land value tax. But of course this is an incredibly
Speaker 1: complicated thing to do, where you have to come up
Speaker 1: with a value for every single bit of land, because
Speaker 1: this is not a property tax. It's not about the
Speaker 1: value of houses. It's about the value of the land itself.
Speaker 1: And the idea of a land value tax is to
Speaker 1: is to charge you very much higher amounts for land
Speaker 1: in areas surrounded by state provided amenities, etc. To force
Speaker 1: you to make that land productive, so to prevent people
Speaker 1: from simply sitting or bits of land and not using
Speaker 1: them properly. But to introduce a tax like that, I
Speaker 1: mean that takes years. So I'm hearing lots of people
Speaker 1: worrying about a land value tax of what is going
Speaker 1: to be awful and how all this work and blah
Speaker 1: blah blah. But I suppose the answer in the end
Speaker 1: is that we've got a very short time period here
Speaker 1: and it probably wouldn't work. Don't need to worry about
Speaker 1: that kind of thing.
Speaker 2: Well, as you say, the complications involved, you just thought
Speaker 2: it would be an obstacle in themselves to this. If
Speaker 2: he needs to win the next election, he needs to
Speaker 2: have done something by then.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: One of the other things people talking about is, you know,
Speaker 2: revaluing the council tax ban, so revaluing the entire housing
Speaker 2: stock in the UK so that the nineteen ninety three
Speaker 2: valuation estimates are updated for today. But that itself takes
Speaker 2: a long time, which probably which doesn't sound anything like
Speaker 2: as complicated as doing this kind of what is the
Speaker 2: amenity value of the local services that are provided by
Speaker 2: the state for the land, and then we'll tax a
Speaker 2: little bit of that. But if the council tax revaluation
Speaker 2: is going to know, would take a few years to
Speaker 2: do that. I mean that seems implausible that he'll be
Speaker 2: able to put in a land value tax and actually
Speaker 2: get anything out of it in time for an election.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So what do you think he does have scope
Speaker 1: to do if we're looking at you know, not as
Speaker 1: longer than two years here, and he needs to win
Speaker 1: the next election, and you know, let's say, let's say
Speaker 1: I'm putting this out here, that he actually manages to
Speaker 1: hang on for the full full period and we don't
Speaker 1: have another prime minister in six months or nine months
Speaker 1: or a year. So let's say it gets the whole lot.
Speaker 1: What could he conceivably do within the constraints of the
Speaker 1: fiscal rules that would actually be a effective and be
Speaker 1: reasonably popular. Yeah, I mean I'm coming up with nothing.
Speaker 2: By the way, I'm not sure what would necessarily be popular.
Speaker 2: They're going to have to touch spending in some way
Speaker 2: because you know, we have the tax burdeners is already
Speaker 2: going to be hitting you know, the highest since in
Speaker 2: the post war period. Debt is edging higher. It's getting
Speaker 2: up to very close one hundred percent of GDP. It's
Speaker 2: the deficit has been running at you know, five percent,
Speaker 2: between four and five percent for the last four or
Speaker 2: five years. I mean, it's completely and utterly unsustainable too.
Speaker 2: Then the idea that you can find a tax that
Speaker 2: is going to be an acceptable tax. I mean, I
Speaker 2: can imagine him increasing inheritance tax, for example, because unpopular
Speaker 2: as it is, it doesn't touch you immediately. It is
Speaker 2: something for the future. But the spending stuff, there's talk
Speaker 2: about the triple lock to try and restrain pension of
Speaker 2: spending again would be hugely unpopular because we saw that
Speaker 2: with the winter fuel a lance. Then you've obviously got
Speaker 2: the health benefits which have reached in reaching about one
Speaker 2: hundred sixty billion a year at the moment, going up
Speaker 2: to one hundred and ninety by the end of the parliament.
Speaker 2: I mean Jim O'Neil who's one of the advisors to
Speaker 2: Burnham at the moment, he was even saying, you know,
Speaker 2: you've got to touch these shibbles. You've got to say,
Speaker 2: you know, NHS spending. There has to be some constraint
Speaker 2: on NHS spending. And Burnham is the former Health Secretary
Speaker 2: who has said he you know, he dinede a ditch
Speaker 2: just to prevent prescription charges, et cetera. But there's people
Speaker 2: within the NHS talk about rationing some services because it's unaffordable.
Speaker 2: We've got this bow mool cost disease, which is developments
Speaker 2: in technology end up not leading to productivity gains but
Speaker 2: end up just being new technological costs to the service.
Speaker 2: So it's just, you know, you have this mushrooming NHS state.
Speaker 2: The one thing that I was thinking that he can
Speaker 2: do is just to race tax. If he's going to
Speaker 2: race tax, he's just got a race tax on everyone.
Speaker 2: And then that would require him to say special measures everybody,
Speaker 2: everyone who is paying tax is going to have to
Speaker 2: pay an extra two percent on the on the basic rate,
Speaker 2: and make it, you know, a national project where you know,
Speaker 2: you're not going to be singling out sections of society
Speaker 2: and saying, you know, we're picking on you because we
Speaker 2: need to fix the you know, fix this country. We're
Speaker 2: going to pick on everyone because this is a national
Speaker 2: this is a national requirement.
Speaker 1: And at some point that has to stop, as you said,
Speaker 1: at some point it has to come back to spending.
Speaker 1: Spending has to be reduced. At some point someone has
Speaker 1: to tackle well for spending. Someone has to tackle the NHL.
Speaker 1: Someone has to look at this properly. You can't just
Speaker 1: keep saying taxes up, taxes up, taxes up. And if
Speaker 1: he puts up taxes across the board, and there is
Speaker 1: this brilly interesting conversation going on in the UK about
Speaker 1: who is over taxed and who is under taxed, and
Speaker 1: it you know, we don't have a very good system
Speaker 1: of taxing everybody. The burden is very very very heavy
Speaker 1: on the well off and not particularly heavy by international
Speaker 1: standards on everybody else. But then you come back to
Speaker 1: the fact that an awful lot of the things that
Speaker 1: people are expected to pay for themselves in the UK
Speaker 1: and finance out of general taxation in other countries, and
Speaker 1: in particular ort to enrollment, there's you know, paying paying
Speaker 1: into your pension in the way that we do in
Speaker 1: the UK. That's not necessarily the case in Europe. And
Speaker 1: the same with university education, which we pay for here
Speaker 1: at our own pockets, and people don't necessarily not enough,
Speaker 1: by the way, but we pay for our own pockets,
Speaker 1: which people in Europe do not. And then this dentistry
Speaker 1: and you know, various other things that come out of
Speaker 1: general taxation out elsewhere but not in the UK. So
Speaker 1: if you look at it in the round, very hard
Speaker 1: to say that any part of the UK population is undertaxed,
Speaker 1: maybe over benefited, but not necessarily undertaxed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. They're almost hidden taxes, aren't they. And then
Speaker 2: of course you've got these levees on the for businesses,
Speaker 2: on energy levees, climate change levees and stuff, and even
Speaker 2: on the house even on household bills. You've got them
Speaker 2: so that some of them anyway are addition are effectively
Speaker 2: additional hidden taxes.
Speaker 1: So I mean, I think one of the things that
Speaker 1: you could say, Andy of you on this is you
Speaker 1: you could could have a go at net zero and
Speaker 1: you know, the interesting thing is that if Millivan becomes Chancellor,
Speaker 1: then we double down on net zero in a well,
Speaker 1: we probably do, and that is one of the things
Speaker 1: that's adding or our rush to net zero is adding
Speaker 1: hugely to our energy built because the infrastructure required and
Speaker 1: the various levees et cetera. Calming down on that slightly
Speaker 1: might be one thing that could bring down built across
Speaker 1: the board.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is that's an easy, easy one. What the
Speaker 2: tour is just one in Aberdeen? Didn't they the South
Speaker 2: because on this campaign to get drilling in the North
Speaker 2: Sea again? And I mean, yeah, I mean this one,
Speaker 2: I just don't understand it because obviously you can you
Speaker 2: can raise a bit of tax revenue. And also instead
Speaker 2: of having to you know, pump little ship you container
Speaker 2: loads of oil to the UK or whatever you you'll
Speaker 2: you'll be going to get more domestically. So I don't
Speaker 2: don't I don't see. I don't see why bring it
Speaker 2: in by ship is any better than just getting it
Speaker 2: out of our own reserves. So and you get more
Speaker 2: tax revenue for it. So that one, that's that seems
Speaker 2: to me like an obvious easy one. Again, you're not
Speaker 2: gonna it's not going to be game changing, but it'll
Speaker 2: be helpful.
Speaker 1: Okay, Well, I'm not sure that we've really made our
Speaker 1: listeners feel particularly optersted today.
Speaker 2: There's another a lot of optimsm going around. I know
Speaker 2: I've had one thought I've had maybe, which is is
Speaker 2: could Burnham just be a lucky general? We know Starmo
Speaker 2: is so dismally unlucky with the with the international backdrop,
Speaker 2: as well as making such a terrible series of errors
Speaker 2: that Burnham has got a template for what not to do,
Speaker 2: as in the policy options that Starma shows have just
Speaker 2: beware of, like walking into land mines. And then also
Speaker 2: if you know the Iran Iran waris is going to
Speaker 2: be resolved, and if Ukraine Russia just sort of sort
Speaker 2: of fades fades back again, and you know, Trump's unable
Speaker 2: to do more kind of crazy stuff because of the midterms.
Speaker 2: And we've seen the data stand a.
Speaker 1: Little bit better.
Speaker 2: We've got inflation is a bit lower than was expected,
Speaker 2: there's signs of signs of life in the jobs market.
Speaker 2: You know, you could actually just see a situation where
Speaker 2: Burnham gets lucky and you get you just get that
Speaker 2: little spurred of growth which probably delivers as much tax
Speaker 2: revenue as all of these little things that we've talked
Speaker 2: about put together. So that's my optimistic hopeful hat.
Speaker 1: Okay, Well, I think will end there, and I appreciate
Speaker 1: the optimism there, but I don't think I'm particularly happy
Speaker 1: when the best we can hopeful from our new prime
Speaker 1: minister is he gets a little bit of geopolitical luck.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I wishful. Thank you is exactly Yeah. It's not
Speaker 2: a strategy.
Speaker 1: It's not a strategy, but maybe it would be something. Well,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks listening
Speaker 1: to this week's Maren Talk to Your Money. If you
Speaker 1: like us, your rate review and subscribe whereever you listen
Speaker 1: to the podcasts. Also be sure to follow me and
Speaker 1: John on X or Twitter. Marens w and John Underscore,
Speaker 1: Stepic and Phil, I know you are on Twitter. What
Speaker 1: is it?
Speaker 2: Pat?
Speaker 1: Phil Aldrick?
Speaker 2: Simple?
Speaker 1: Excellent, Thank you. This episode was produced by Samasadi and
Speaker 1: Moses and I'm sound designed by Aaron Kasper. Questions and
Speaker 1: comments in the show and all our shows are always welcome,
Speaker 1: and of course we would love to hear any of
Speaker 1: your ideas that Andy Burnham might actually be able to
Speaker 1: make things better our show email is Merror Money at
Speaker 1: bloom Berg dot netm