Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

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UK is extremely risk-averse. In the case of road safety, it shows: a lot of time and cash goes into minimising deaths.

This is not only road users: roadworks have restrictive speed limits, which are not taken down when there is no workforce out, to minimise risk to workers setting and unsetting limits, traffic cones etc. Things that in other countries would close a lane often close the whole road, again because of risks to road users and maintenance people.

This is of course great, but also very expensive - and I cannot shake the feeling that the UK loses so much money on this risk aversion that is actually causes more hazard due to underinvestment elsewhere. NHS is crumbling, the very safe roads take forever to navigate, introducing inefficiencies and starving the central budget of cash. GDP per capita has barely grown since 2008. Even a small annual boost would unlock a lot of cash for investment, in particular into NHS and saving lives.

It's like putting all your pension investments into bonds, because they are safer. But you swap market risk for the risk of not having enough cash when you retire.

But maybe it's easy to have this perspective because I have a desk job and commute by public transport.

Seems a rather tenuous link to the state of the NHS. The UK has a lower tax regime than most equivalent nations. If we wanted a better NHS we could just collect similar tax rates to that of Germany or other western nations.

One of the issues is we’re trapped with a media ecosystem that won’t even allow progressive parties to say “we’ll take a bit more in tax and in return you’ll get a functioning health service”, instead they feel they have to promise to run the economy like the Tories (which is mind numbing).

It’s not just the recent Labour election I’m referring to. The first time Blair got in it was the same.

We get the services we deserve.

It's not just the roads, it's everything. Most pension money is invested in UK bonds. UK treasury department focuses on a set of very narrow spending criteria, so much so that it's hard for governments to spend money on investments.

And then it's not just the NHS. My point is, rather, that extreme risk aversion in the short term can actually increase the medium-term risk. If the UK could generate a few extra 0.1% of GDP growth per year in exchange for some risk, that would seem an overall better world to be in.

That's pretty much been Lib Dem policy since 1992, but they finally gave up on it in 2023: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66910334

Two paragraphs and a couple of sentences ...

Imagine how much further forward we could have been if we started at this simple point of truth.

> The UK has a lower tax regime than most equivalent nations. If we wanted a better NHS we could just collect similar tax rates to that of Germany or other western nations.

This is largely untrue today since the Conservatives have significantly increased taxes over the last decade. As it stands I think Germany only taxes around 1-2% more of GDP than us.

The primary difference between Germany and the UK in terms of public service funding is that the UK funds most of it's healthcare via taxation where as Germany operates a duel model which means healthcare isn't funded so much from taxation, meaning they have more money for other things.

Additionally, Germany has a much higher per-capita GDP which means they can afford significantly better public services even if they tax an equivalent share of GDP.

Finally what Germany funds with additional taxation the UK more than makes up for by running much larger deficits. The issue isn't that the UK government isn't spending enough as a share of GDP.

From the IFS [1]:

"UK tax revenue was 33.5% of gross domestic product (GDP ) in 2021 – the most recent year for which there are internationally comparable data. This is slightly below the average for both the G7 (36.3%) and the OECD (34.1%). While UK taxes are higher than in most other English-speaking developed economies (such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Ireland and the United States), they are considerably lower than in most other western European countries (average tax revenue amongst the EU14 was 39.9% of GDP ).

Under current government plans, UK tax revenue is forecast to increase to 37.7% of GDP by 2027–28. This would take the UK above both the current OECD and G7 averages. It should be noted, however, that other governments may also increase their levels of taxation by then."

If it's just Germany we're comparing to, then there are still multiple percentage differences. Germany is close to the average of 39.5% of GDP and the UK is 33.5% raising to 37.7%. Nearly 2% difference, which is a lot. It doesn't matter how the tax is raised, it's the total investment that matters. We have been a low tax economy for a long time (compared to similar European nations), that was my entire point: if we want better services then we are unlikely to get them in a low tax economy. Recent changes to the tax levels doesn't change how we got to this position in the first place.

[1] https://ifs.org.uk/taxlab/taxlab-key-questions/how-do-uk-tax...

I'll guess you've probably not done a huge amount of project management for infrastructure projects then. I can wager most road projects wouldn't be completed quicker if safety barriers had to be removed/reconstructed on a daily basis.

Equally, nobody in the construction trade gets into it to get killed in an accident, especially ones avoided by just having traffic move at slightly lower speeds.

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