Fertility has fallen to just 1.39 children per woman, while more than 4 in 10 births in England and Wales now involve at least one parent born outside the UK.
It would be interesting to know how many of the mothers are in receipt of benefits before the birth wouldn't it? I suspect quite a few of the 4 in 10 births are to women already on benefits. If that's the case then they aren't exactly going to be paying future taxes! So the native Briton who works and pays taxes, doesn't get state benefits and can't afford to have children would be hit even more by having to support women with babies who live off the state. Didn't they used to say that only the very rich and the very poor had numerous children? One class was wealthy enough and the other, these days, gets the benefits
It’s a classic economic puzzle, isn't it? The data on benefits pre-birth gets a bit muddy, but the financial squeeze on middle-income working families is very real. It definitely feels like the "squeezed middle" are the ones left holding the calculator while trying to figure out if they can afford a nursery place!
Lots of worthy research but "Fewer workers means more pressure on the tax base, pensions, the NHS, social care and the working-age population expected to fund it all." is clearly not true when the central banks themselves are making it plainer than ever that national currencies originate from them. Witness this recent statement from the ECB; "Fiat money is declared legal tender and issued by a central bank. It can’t be directly converted into, for example, gold... Our euro can take the form of banknotes and coins, but it can also exist in a bank account as a computer entry or be stored in a savings account." (https://www.ecb.europa.eu/ecb-and-you/explainers/tell-me-more/html/what_is_money.en.html) Nothing there about needing to get it from taxpayers first and why oh why would anyone think there ought to be? It's blindingly obvious money doesn't originate with taxpayers begging the question so few are asking; where does money actually come from then for taxpayers to be able to get hold of it at all? The ECB have helpfully laid out a broad overview but the Bank of England had already gone into specifics about this in their March 2014 Quarterly Bulletin where their video explains banks create new money when they loan it and their PDF explains that what we use for money is Govt. IOUs (https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy)
In closing, I'd like to say IMO those who clandestinely rule over us don't care what colour we are; Their sole interest is that there are warm bodies available to be sent down their mines and up their chimneys.
Thanks for the deep dive into monetary theory, Bill. While central banks can certainly type numbers into a spreadsheet to create fiat currency, the real-world goods, services, and NHS beds still require actual hands to build and run them. Printing the cash is the easy bit—it's finding the future doctors and bricklayers that’s the real head-scratcher
None of what I wrote originates with MMT (I'm not MMT myself, it's as yet too broad and undefined a church for me), rather it's about how banking works, pure & simple, as I try to make plain by quoting banks themselves directly & referencing my sources. The needed hands you refer to can be & should be being trained as money can be created for that purpose. The fact it isn't and we've got the likes of Streeting complaining that there isn't any money to do it, this in an environment where money can be & routinely is created by Treasury/BoE civil servants ex nihilo, this while dole queues lengthen, suggests the issue is entirely political, as there are no practical barriers to the operation.
The commercial banks are licensed to create money (ie Govt IOUs) by the BoE so in some senses they're acting as Govt agents when they create new money by lending.
Thanks Bill, I'm very hazy on how all this works. I get the idea that Commercial Banks create money by lending but obviously they can't just lend and lend and lend ( at least I don't think they can) so there must be some brake on it somewhere. I assume this has something to do with the way Commercial Banks hold reserves with the BOE. I don't understand how the Bank of England controls the money supply through commercial banks.
How does this fit in with the fact that UK population has been rising fairly rapidly since 1980 and has accelerated since 2020? This must be due to immigration I should think. So what do we know about the age distribution of the immigrants?
Spot on, Steve. The headline population growth is indeed being driven by net migration. Regarding the age profile, immigrants are overwhelmingly concentrated in younger, working-age brackets when they arrive. The big question for the long-term charts is whether they eventually settle down, stay put, and what their own fertility patterns look like a decade from now.
I was thinking that bringing in a lot of young people over a short period of time is a bit like stepping on the accelerator as far as population growth is concerned except that it'll happen a bit further down the line.
It would be interesting to know how many of the mothers are in receipt of benefits before the birth wouldn't it? I suspect quite a few of the 4 in 10 births are to women already on benefits. If that's the case then they aren't exactly going to be paying future taxes! So the native Briton who works and pays taxes, doesn't get state benefits and can't afford to have children would be hit even more by having to support women with babies who live off the state. Didn't they used to say that only the very rich and the very poor had numerous children? One class was wealthy enough and the other, these days, gets the benefits
It’s a classic economic puzzle, isn't it? The data on benefits pre-birth gets a bit muddy, but the financial squeeze on middle-income working families is very real. It definitely feels like the "squeezed middle" are the ones left holding the calculator while trying to figure out if they can afford a nursery place!
Lots of worthy research but "Fewer workers means more pressure on the tax base, pensions, the NHS, social care and the working-age population expected to fund it all." is clearly not true when the central banks themselves are making it plainer than ever that national currencies originate from them. Witness this recent statement from the ECB; "Fiat money is declared legal tender and issued by a central bank. It can’t be directly converted into, for example, gold... Our euro can take the form of banknotes and coins, but it can also exist in a bank account as a computer entry or be stored in a savings account." (https://www.ecb.europa.eu/ecb-and-you/explainers/tell-me-more/html/what_is_money.en.html) Nothing there about needing to get it from taxpayers first and why oh why would anyone think there ought to be? It's blindingly obvious money doesn't originate with taxpayers begging the question so few are asking; where does money actually come from then for taxpayers to be able to get hold of it at all? The ECB have helpfully laid out a broad overview but the Bank of England had already gone into specifics about this in their March 2014 Quarterly Bulletin where their video explains banks create new money when they loan it and their PDF explains that what we use for money is Govt. IOUs (https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/quarterly-bulletin/2014/q1/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy)
It's obvious from that alone that Govt's self-funding. If anyone wants to know the more intricate details (gets wonkish!) they can start here https://www.economania.co.uk/various-authors/where-money-comes-from.htm
In closing, I'd like to say IMO those who clandestinely rule over us don't care what colour we are; Their sole interest is that there are warm bodies available to be sent down their mines and up their chimneys.
Thanks for the deep dive into monetary theory, Bill. While central banks can certainly type numbers into a spreadsheet to create fiat currency, the real-world goods, services, and NHS beds still require actual hands to build and run them. Printing the cash is the easy bit—it's finding the future doctors and bricklayers that’s the real head-scratcher
None of what I wrote originates with MMT (I'm not MMT myself, it's as yet too broad and undefined a church for me), rather it's about how banking works, pure & simple, as I try to make plain by quoting banks themselves directly & referencing my sources. The needed hands you refer to can be & should be being trained as money can be created for that purpose. The fact it isn't and we've got the likes of Streeting complaining that there isn't any money to do it, this in an environment where money can be & routinely is created by Treasury/BoE civil servants ex nihilo, this while dole queues lengthen, suggests the issue is entirely political, as there are no practical barriers to the operation.
I'm not an economist but the bank of England says that the vast majority of money is created by commercial banks when they lend.
https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy
I'm don't know how QE fits into this.
The commercial banks are licensed to create money (ie Govt IOUs) by the BoE so in some senses they're acting as Govt agents when they create new money by lending.
Thanks Bill, I'm very hazy on how all this works. I get the idea that Commercial Banks create money by lending but obviously they can't just lend and lend and lend ( at least I don't think they can) so there must be some brake on it somewhere. I assume this has something to do with the way Commercial Banks hold reserves with the BOE. I don't understand how the Bank of England controls the money supply through commercial banks.
I link to a lot of money creation info at https://www.economania.co.uk/various-authors/where-money-comes-from.htm
HTH!
How does this fit in with the fact that UK population has been rising fairly rapidly since 1980 and has accelerated since 2020? This must be due to immigration I should think. So what do we know about the age distribution of the immigrants?
Spot on, Steve. The headline population growth is indeed being driven by net migration. Regarding the age profile, immigrants are overwhelmingly concentrated in younger, working-age brackets when they arrive. The big question for the long-term charts is whether they eventually settle down, stay put, and what their own fertility patterns look like a decade from now.
I was thinking that bringing in a lot of young people over a short period of time is a bit like stepping on the accelerator as far as population growth is concerned except that it'll happen a bit further down the line.