Last summer I sat with a friend-of-a-friend who had stayed in the UK town where we went to university; she got a job there, worked her way up, and eventually had a kid.

She and the partner were looking at buying a home -- or even just renting a larger one to accommodate the kid. They both worked decent jobs with decent salaries; after taxes, nat-insurance contribution, student loan deductions, union membership, fee-foo-fees, rent and childcare, they managed to save a little bit for a down payment. Got a figure from a bank -- those sorts of maxed-out leverage loan promises -- and started shopping around for the crappy, local, British metropolitan city shoeboxes on offer. Rejected, rejected, rejected; others bidding higher -- much higher. After a few months of searching they had given up, the prices of flats increasing faster than they could save up/amass purchasing power for a home.

Same story with rental apartments. Prices skyhigh, quality complete crap (and/or waaay out of town), sevenhundred people applying for each available unit.

At the same time, she had her maternity payments reduced (both real and nominal) because of some fee-foo-blah-blah bureaucracy thing.

I've never felt so shit for someone else's predicament.

You legit cannot earn your way out of the state's heavy, squeezing boot.

In the last-ever interview (post, even) I published for BM, Knut Svanholm (#1236935) tells me this chilling thing that most of us in Bitcoinland feel:

"If we didn’t have Bitcoin, I’d be much less hopeful for the future."

This friend-of-a-friend of mine has no bitcoin, no optimism for the future, no practical ability to get out of their situation. Pray for a political miracle, revolution style.

F-U-C-K.

Imagine feeling that stuck. No wonder people turn to politics and vote for the guy who says he'll give you free shit (from some fatcat schmuck).

Anyway, here's a story from Claer Barrett about Britain's broken childcare system:

Giving childcare benefits to people earning six-figure salaries sounds mad. But what about actively avoiding promotion, deliberately scuppering a sales deal or pleading with your boss not to give you a bonus? Welcome to the madness of the childcare tax trap that’s ensnaring tens of thousands of higher-earning parents and slowly strangling the younger generation’s economic productivity.

"In England, if one parent’s net adjusted income goes a penny over £100,000, they lose virtually all state help with childcare costs for under 3s."

Nursery places are now so expensive that, without this subsidy, families could be worse off by tens of thousands of pounds. This creates a perverse incentive to cut their hours, forgo a pay rise or stick huge sums into pensions to stay under the cap.

While my friend's household income isn't in the £100,000s of pounds, she's squeezed into the same poverty-trap/crazy-steep welfare threshold. Heavy, complicated, intransparent tax system meets insane patchwork welfare program systems.

Many point out that the median full-time wage in Britain is less than £40,000. Earning £100,000 puts you in the top 5 per cent of earners. Surely these rich whingers should be able to pay their own childcare bills? I don’t disagree. But bizarre kinks in the tax system and the unsustainable way we fund childcare in England make this doubly unaffordable.
On the £100,000-£125,140 band of earnings, a worker with a master’s degree could keep just 23p in the pound after income tax, national insurance and student loan deductions.

"This annihilates their earnings power precisely at the point when they go over the cliff edge and have to pay full whack for their childcare."

Crazy:

Instead of focusing on how they can earn more, higher-earning parents are actively trying to earn less. Sifting through hundreds of responses to a recent FT survey, I found that many readers felt they could not afford to do a great job at work for fear that a pay rise or bonus would take them into the salary “dead zone” where they would lose subsidised childcare but not earn enough to make up for it.

NHS doctors, who have far less pension flexibility, tell us they are dropping to a four- or even three-day week. Some professional women with partners earning more than the cap are quitting work altogether because they can’t afford the childcare on top.

"As an ageing society, we simply cannot afford to stop creating the taxpayers of the future. We urgently need a tax system that incentivises productivity, career progression and procreation."