What is everyone's thoughts on reform not taxing overtime to get the economy moving ? Personally as someone that does overtime I am in favour but what are the downsides to this. Will people on low hour contracts just stay on them and work overtime to pay less tax or would it be capped at minimum of 40 hours a week ?

After World War Two America's president Harry Truman left the Whitehouse with nothing but his Great War army pension. Harry was offered many fancy sinacures by big congolmerates. He turned them down because "You don't want me. You want the office of the president, and that doesn't belong to me. It belongs to the American people and it's not for sale." Harry was the son of a donkey breeder, he was too poor to go to uiniversity and his father lost the family house at one point. And Mrs Truman lived in the same town as him and her father killed himself when she was just 18. He was never rich and didn't marry into money.

In spite of this Harry valued his integrity more than buying a bigger house and or car. He wasn't tempted by it, like so many other ex politicians who were 50 times richer.

Today it seems to be the excat opposite. What happned? Now it seems every ex PM and ex minster is being paid to stand there and look pretty at some comglomerate. Gorbachev appearing in a Pizza Hut advert is my favourite example of this.

I genuinely think the government needs to start having a serious conversation about overhauling the welfare system, Universal Credit, housing benefit etc, before we get hit with a wave of unemployment that the current system just isn't designed to handle.

The way I see it, the current system is largely built around the idea that if someone loses their job, they get some financial support to keep them going until they find another one. But what happens when there isn't another job to go to?

With the pace AI is developing and companies already looking at reducing their workforce, I worry we could end up overwhelming the welfare system before the government even has time to react.

And where would the money come from? Surely at some point we need to start talking about taxing the companies that will be making enormous profits from replacing human labour with AI. If businesses can operate with a fraction of their current workforce, those profits have to go somewhere, and the people who lose their jobs will still need to survive.

I also don't really buy the argument that AI will create more jobs than it destroys. I know that's what happened with previous technological revolutions, but this feels fundamentally different. We're literally building machines designed to replicate human intelligence, and eventually physical labour through robotics too. AI has already surpassed a large proportion of the population in certain knowledge-based tasks, and it's only getting better.

And before anyone says AI isn't good enough yet, we've been having that same conversation for the last few years. People were laughing at the idea that AI could replace certain jobs not that long ago, and now companies are actively working out how many employees they actually need.

I'm not saying mass unemployment is guaranteed, but surely we should be planning for the possibility rather than assuming everything will work itself out?

Some companies are already moving beyond just experimenting with AI and are starting to see it as a genuine way to reduce labour costs. And once the financial benefits become obvious, what exactly is going to stop everyone else from following?

What concerns me most is the lack of any serious public discussion about what happens if this goes badly. We could be facing a situation where millions of people are capable of working and want to work, but there simply isn't enough work left for them.

I don't have the answers, but I do think these conversations need to happen now, not when unemployment starts spiralling and the welfare system is already under enormous pressure.

Maybe I'm being overly pessimistic, but I feel like we're sleepwalking into something that could fundamentally change how our economy works, and nobody in government seems to be taking the worst-case scenario seriously.

Interested to hear what others think, especially anyone working in industries where AI is already replacing jobs or management who are currently testing these Ai's to see if they can reduce headcount.