And another thing…

Tom with respect this has always been the case. But that is not how Labour used to see it. Just why cannot labour hold its hands up and admit to failures instead of dreaming up more and more excuses as in this case. It does your cause no good to keep expecting everyone to believe that every failure is someone elses fault.

Yes and No.

If you won the lottery – it wouldn’t make any material or perceptible difference to relative poverty. The measure isn’t that sensitive to movements in one persons wealth.

However, you are correct that as a group of people become much richer then the relative wealth at the bottom-end must become poorer.

Theresa May is correct – more must be done to counter the causes of poverty rather than relying on tax credits to flip a couple more families the right-side of the imaginary poverty line created by one Gordon Brown.

IDS has done much work on this area to analyse the causes and make recommendations and it really is appalling that after 13 years of power Labour has not materially changed the regions of abject poverty and idleness usually located in their own electoral strongholds.

You are correct that a supertax is not the right option and would make us all relatively pooer.

Ye gods

A post I can agree with.

“work hard, get lucky and you’ll own a Learjet”

“work hard and you’ll own a BMW”

“Sit on the couch all day belching Stella and you’ll still get a car (an old banger mind), a washing machine, some beer vouchers, a fridge, a cooker, a TV, somewhere to live, free school meals and free health and education. All translated into Urdu if you need it. Just vote Labour”

I’ve spotted a problem. Can you see it?

The State is rewarding people for sitting on the couch all day. Hence the queues at Sangatte. Who can blame them? Not me.

Tom, have you come across a book called the Spirit Level? It has quite a lot of evidence to show that, irrespective of ideology, more unequal countries perform worse on a whole raft of measures health and social well-being. (review link below)

In other words, you can think of increased equality simply as a tool to achieve better outcomes on a range of problems (obesity levels, life expectancy, teenage pregnancy, crime, etc etc). And that’s based on evidence, not ideology.

That’s why you need to somehow reign in the pay of those at the top, not just concentrate on those at the bottom. How you do that is up for debate though, I think. Perhaps you can convince people to accept smaller salaries, but I suspect government is going to have a role to play somewhere…

Spirit Level review
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article5859108.ece

Wouldn’t an MP be roundly criticised if he or she accepted a large win on the National Lottery?
If you win, Tom, will you give the money back for good causes?

Will, make sure you take some money off Blair and Mandelson before you ask me for any eh?

Yes, I heard the blessed Mother Theresa of Maidenhead on the radio pontificating re this issue. She made it sound like the Labour government (‘with good intentions’ she conceded) had created massive, grinding Victorian-type poverty at one end of the society.

It really is a travesty. Her party was the one that created the joblessness in the 80s onwards that caused the poverty that has taken years to try and put right.

Old Holborn – the market doesn’t reward hard work. It rewards skills and output the market requires. If it rewarded hard work, a cleaner working three jobs would be paid more than a mid-level executive who does his time 9-5, and much more than a pop star who sings a song well once.

As for the wider issue, it’s clear that you cannot be very wealthy without being rewarded for more than you produce – and as that extra has got to come from somewhere, you’re (directly or indirectly) ‘taking’ it from somebody less wealthy.

The 20% who have 80% of the wealth of this country don’t produce 80% of the productive output, do they?

If you go by the overly simplistic logic that poor people vote Labour and richer people vote Conservative (I know it is not that simple but just assume it for the purposes of this argument) then it is in the interests of the Conservative party to have a greater number of rich people whereas it is in Labour’s interest to maintain levels of great poverty.

So vote Labour to remain poor. After all, they need your votes!

I agree that relative poverty is not a goal to worry about, compared to absolute poverty.

To get into a heated debate about whether a person can afford this years most fashionable sports shoes and if the unfortunately fashion deprived should be helped just seems bizarre.

However, we mustn’t allow income inequality to get too extreme, as that leads to revolution as the mass overthrow the rich, only to restart the cycle once again.

It is very important to ensure that quality of opportunity exists, even if not necessarily equality of outcome.

In that regard, sadly, the secondary schools are seriously failing our society, and expecting universities to pick up the pieces just makes the difference between the two groups of society even worse.

To retain a sensible approach to income inequality, we need to strongly improve education for everyone – which means, at the secondary level.

Otherwise you’ll have a revolution on your hands.

Stop talking sense.

Regarding this report, John Rentoul has commented on the blatant ‘anti-Labour propaganda’ on the BBC’s website.

Lead headline on BBC News website this morning: “Rich-poor divide ‘wider than 1970s’.”

Which is a bit different. GCSE history multiple choice question: Which party was in power between “the late 1970s and early 1990s”?

http://johnrentoul.independentminds.livejournal.com/262878.html

You are of course correct that it’s all relative and, in comparison with the poor of 100 years ago, the UK’s poor now are relatively well off.

But there is another relevant piece of relativity. Britain is a more unequal society than many comparable countries. Are you, a Labour MP, quite content that we’re closer to the US in this respect than we are to most of our European partners? I know I’m not…

Alarmingly, possiblyy for both of us, I agree almost entirely. I do wonder, though, why someone who takes this view belongs to a party which puts such emphasis on equality of outcome that it sets up quangos to try to enforce it, and harps on interminably about the gap between the rich and the “poor” as if it was the gap, and not real poverty (where it exists), that mattered.

Tom, I’m disappointed that you appear unaware of how poverty levels are calculated. Yes, they are relative measures but relative to the national MEDIAN not the MEAN. Therefore, the incomes of the tiny percentage of super rich have no impact. Only if the entire top 50% of the income spectrum were earning disproporionate sums would inequality caused by the rich impact on the poverty line.

In other words, relative poverty measures how many people are living a substantial distance below an average person. It’s a tragedy and a disgrace that a Labour MP whose party is committed to abolishing child poverty doesn’t know that.

Tom – you’re talking the talk, but not walking the walk* again. Time to move parties?

*I hate this saying btw.

@alisdair

“The 20% who have 80% of the wealth of this country don’t produce 80% of the productive output, do they?”

20% of my clients produce 80% of my income though.

I never understood why we had relative poverty rather than calculating the cost of living in this country and related that to income…

Any chance of those numbers????

This debate has been going on all of my life. I can recall studying Townsend’s massive book on Poverty in the 1970’s. Attempts since are not really much different (Social Exclusion terminology) and I have great difficulty as you say in assessing poverty in terms of a percentage (50% or 60% of median income). I reject much comment on the subject. For example Oxfam once came out with 13m in poverty in the UK with a figure of 70% of Bangladeshi children defined as living in poverty. Unicef compares different countries and again it looks like we are not doing well.

If I compare the UK with other countries in the UNICEF study I cannot reconcile the economy of the countries who have lesser poverty levels. For example, we have the City of London whose remuneration only compares with New York. Paris, Berlin etc do not pay those in their financial sector anything like the income of those in London. As you say, our celebrities including Premier League footballers earn far greater sums than in any other country in Europe. We do live in a free market economy and we cannot legislate for what shareholders believe their CEOs or Bank Managers are worth.

I have also read research which indicates that young people consider their families are in poverty if they cannot afford to purchase children a mobile telephone.

I agree with the comment above regarding education. It certainly helped me.

I do think there is one area of social policy that does keep us from improving in terms of upping the income of those at the bottom. I do not mean employment which is a given but the fact that we have more children living with lone parents – single parents. The government is trying to rectify this by ensuring single parents retrain and obtain employment when their children reach a certain age. This will take years to filter through. Added to this measure, tax credits and improved child benefit and welfare payments have assisted tremendously. Indeed, many argue that benefits are too high as it is increasing the welfare dependency culture. Indeed, a documentary on television recently indicated that a mother with four children could not meet the income she received from the State if she was employed. We have to get the balance right as well as change the culture that it is morally right to live on state benefits if one is fit for work.

I agree with other taxes too. If I sell my home in another European country then I pay a tax on the profits from when the home was purchased. This tax could also be levied on any property that has been inherited. We could use this money to provide intensive employment training etc.

I am mature and have lived through great poverty in the UK. I have witnessed much improvement over the years and particularly since the late 1990s and it is down to this government. Of course we will always have people who have less than others. However, if we provide the opportunities for others to achieve their potential as well as assisting those who cannot assist themselves, we discharge our duties as a society.

@John Holmes

Good pickup on the Median vs. Mean thing, I spotted it but didn’t want to disagree with Tom when the central message is entirely correct.

By virtue of the median wage defining poverty it is possible, and maybe even likely, that a recession decreases the number of people in poverty. And a booming economy plunges many more people into poverty – sometimes even people who didn’t realise they were poor.

The main thing is: who says inequality is a bad thing?

As long as the poor are less poor then it doesn’t matter how rich others get.

It doesn’t comfort someone who can’t afford heating in winter that bankers have had to sell their Ferraris. And it doesn’t pain someone who can suddenly afford heating AND food that bankers can afford a Lear jet.

There was a Rowntree Foundation report about 3 – 4 years ago that showed the gap betwen rich and poor widening.

But the detail explained that the top 1% (basically Roman Abramovitch and his players) had streaked ahead.

Almost everyone else was better off by a smaller or larger amount, and the poorest were better of by most, but the 1% spike made the gap “wider”.

The group that had got actually poorer was those just below the top 1%, i.e. very rich people in the earnings percentile 95-99 had got asmidgeon poorer, but I oubt if they would even notice.

I suspect this is still the case.

Still more ludicrous was the BBC’s suggestion that the difference between the rich and poor is in the face of Sure Start, launched in 1998.

As this was originally introduced to help support families with children up to 4, and later up to 14, 16 with disabilities, such an accusation is ludicrous Tory BBC propaganda in my view. How quickly are the children of the poor supposed to grow up?

Theresa May in the same news item had her pop at Tax Credits, of course. People had better get used to the strong likelihood that these would be abolished a year or so after Osborne took the Treasury.

We should pray for Great Britain, and work for a fourth Labour term. I fear crime and disorders of various kinds await any sort of Cameron government.

Keir Hardie

Speech to the House of Commons 1901

I submit that the true test of progress is not the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few, but the elevation of the people as a whole.

Still he was a ’socialist ‘ spits on floor!

Sorry Tom. I have had a word of revelation from the Lord, and he tells me that on this occasion, your lottery ticket will be a FAIL. He tells me that you still have to learn to be humble, and that 6 million quid would make you a pain in the arse. If it is any consolation, he told me this for my info, too.

As the Lord said on a previous occasion, the poor will always be with us. What we can do, and I mean we, is to create a society that whilst not rewarding poverty, mitigates it with base levels of public service that everyone can agree with.

Other people will do better. They will be able to live and learn longer because there will be better things that can be bought, such as a good education.

But opportunities should be provided for all. Equality is about raising the bar, not lowering it.

The UK has one of the biggest gaps between rich and poor of any developed country. To argue as you appear to be doing that this is because of a small number of extremely rich people skewing the figures is quite simply preposterous.

Thankfully I don’t think many people in Scotlamd will agree with you. We can look northwards to our Scandinavian neighbours to see how things can be done better.

There are many different measures of poverty and, perforce, riches:

‘Relative poverty, in contrast, views poverty as socially defined and dependent on social context. One relative measurement would be to compare the total wealth of the poorest one-third of the population with the total wealth of richest 1% of the population. In this case, the number of people counted as poor could increase while their income rise. There are several different income inequality metrics, one example is the Gini coefficient.

‘The main poverty line used in the OECD and the European Union is a relative poverty measure based on “economic distance”, a level of income set at 50% of the median household income. ‘ Wiki

I’ve not read these latest figures or studied wether they are about income or wealth or both. Certainly the BBC has got its presentation so biased some sort of apology is inevitable. It is not supposed to be a party in the election campaign, but to report it and offer some opportunities (not 24/7) for combatants to have their say.

It is particularly notable though that studies have found that vast wealth still resides with those who are most direct inheritors of the norman invaders. It is quite true that they don’t all go to Eton . . .

And whatever measure Polly Toynbee publicises will be whichever she judges puts HMG in the worst light so as to put yet more pointless pressure on a Government which introduced Tax Credits and several measures to assist women, who are poorer than men on the whole.

Spoken like a true socialist, Tom. Well, isn’t that what Scottish Labour candidates pretend to be when in Scotland?
Time to cross the floor Tom. Or just stay on the same side as events will catch up with you in a few months time anyway.
I’m sure your largely Tory readership (red and blue types) will approve.

Poverty is not just about money it is about choice. Poor people don’t have as many.

The question is whether their lack of opportunity comes as a result of other people’s advantage.

I think it does.

I think most people in Scotland agree, and there is a will to change that.

England I can’t comment on, so won’t.

Right, right, the old “England’s a foreign country” argument. It’s true – some Scots have different attitudes and values to some English people. Just as some Scots have different attitudes and values to other Scots. How weird, though, to base a political “philosophy” (and by “philosophy, I mean, of course “emotion”) on that concept. Glasgow is a very similar city to Leeds or Manchester or Liverpool or Belfast. In fact, Glaswegians probably have more in common culturally and politically with the likes of Manchester than with their fellow Scots at the other end of the M8. Yes, they all have different accents but that’s hardly a reason to support independence.

Tom you seem to be assigning characteristics to me that I do not possess. Are you a psychic in your spare time? It is precisely because I don’t want to assign characteristics to the ”English”, not a homogenous group, that I am not commenting on why I think there is a clear disparity between the majority political view in England and the majority political view in Scotland. Because I’m really not sure that I know.

But if you think that there isn’t a political difference then I have to point you towards the Tory party.

I think when we are discussing issues of people’s attitudes towards inequality (and I note you didn’t address the substantive point of the comment I made) differing views towards the social acceptability of being a Tory are relevant.

Harman is all trumpet and no sword. Why not double the minimum wage?

The right just love to carp about the ‘work-shy,’ but I think what their quarry is really shy of is low pay and bad conditions. Harman’s Labour does not even outlaw zero hours contracts – for shame.

The same right-wing social commentators frequently put the ‘work ethic’ up on a pedestal by itself as if it were some self-justifying principle. I think that is a Victorian, lop-sided, naive and over simplistic approach with a motivation of expediency rather than righteousness.

I will happily concede that there is a responsibility to work hard. However, that responsibility is only one side of an employment contract or bargain in which two sides, not one, have a responsibility. The employee has a responsibility to work hard, yes, but in exchange for that the employer has a responsibility to pay their employee a decent living wage.

It is not that people are ‘workshy’ as the right-wing defamers love to trumpet in their hateful way – it is that the employers are the ones who are shy about paying their staff properly.

Do politicians ever sit down and give careful thought to how much they would be on if the hours they worked were paid at the minimum wage? Not much of an incentive? Then you’ll forgive others for thinking the same.

There will always be some people who are richer than others. This issue is not about stopping the rich getting richer, the issue is how to elevate the poorer people in our society.

But while it is right to help people, it is also right that people should help themselves.

There is a clear correlation between wealth, income & standards of living with levels of eduction.

However intelligence levels also come into it. In the main, smarter, more intelligent people get on and do better than those who are not so quick of mind – and there is no way around that – as “non-PC” as it is.

But be sure not to confuse intelligence with education because they are not the same. There are plenty of examples of highly intellegent but relatively uneducated people who have done brilliantly. Equally some people who have had the best educations possible have not done so well.

But leaving aside intelligence levels, our education system is clearly failing many people – but is it really? For it is somewhat beyond believe that it is so poor as to turn out the volume of semi-literate and innumerate people that it does – a national disgrace even given the money that has been poured into it.

But our education system and the people that work inside it are just not that bad. So if ever there was an example that Labour’s answer of just opening the cheque book really doesn’t solve much (if anything), it’s education.

For it is not only the system’s fault, or indeed solely the government’s fault that people do not learn basic skills at school. It is at least as much the fault of the pupils themselves and their parents.

The fact that people are so quick and happy to absolve themselves of their own responsibilies for their own actions and failures is in turn symptomatic of a massive failure of social policy and, sadly, now so typically British is it not?

Much is wrong with our education system and the way it is micro-managed by Ed Balls & co, but equally much (if not more) is wrong with the attitude and approach of far too many of the people who use it. All the facilities are there such that there is no reason that all but a tiny minority should be literate and numerate when they leave school. But you can lead a horse to water……….

So we have two choices – we either accept that we have a “lost generation” of school leavers or we do something about it and it needs to be really quite draconian unless our society is happy to carry a huge number of passengers for years to come.

If nothing else, the one thing we have clearly established over the last 13 years is that we do have a substantial segment of our society who are quite prepared and happy to be passengers and that is wrong.

So my vote goes to compulsory adult education (if you can’t pass a basic literacy/numeracy test) and community work/service in exchange for benefits.

If people can’t be bothered to try & better themselves and at least do something simple like pick up a little litter or help their community in some way, I’m struggling to see a reason to pay for them to sit at home & live off the hard work of others.

A fair society is one in which everyone contributes at least something. Opportunities for all, but no free rides.

Tim Said :”I will happily concede that there is a responsibility to work hard. However, that responsibility is only one side of an employment contract or bargain in which two sides, not one, have a responsibility. The employee has a responsibility to work hard, yes, but in exchange for that the employer has a responsibility to pay their employee a decent living wage.

It is not that people are ‘workshy’ as the right-wing defamers love to trumpet in their hateful way – it is that the employers are the ones who are shy about paying their staff properly.”

You paint a very black & white picture – that all employees are angels & work hard & all bosses & businesses are evil and just out to exploit the common man.

That is far too simplistic and plainly wrong. However, “profit” is not a dirty word and the profits of business belong to the owners of those businesses. It is their reward for the risks they take in owning a business and employing people.

As in all things though there is a balance and of course not all businesses find it – but then nether do all the employees either.

I recall research from some years ago which showed that the health (and other indicators) of black people in South Africa (during Apartheid) was worse than that of comparable people in neighbouring states. This was despite the fact that the absolute levels of wealth of the black people in South Africa was better than the people in the other countries. The research concluded that relative poverty was the determining factor not absolute poverty.

I have thought about this for a long time. The only way to create a society that has both equality of outcome as well as equality of opportunity is in a communist state – but this has been shown to be more theoretical than real, it seems. Indeed with the fall of communist control in Russia, it did not take long for some people to make very large sums of money – through both legal and nefarious means.

One of the problems is that we confuse poverty & wealth with actual cash. Of course annual wage and overall value of capital owned is an easy proxy to measure so hence the economists and sociologists do it this way. However, I think poverty & wealth is much more to with a sense of well being, personal worth and confidence. Of course £££ is closely linked but they are not the same.

In a very unequal society the huge disparities in these feelings are, I believe, at the root of the problems that we ~all~ suffer – crime, lack of school attainment, poor health, frail old age and so forth. Society as a whole ends up paying for its own inequalities through taxes.

It seems to me – and the evidence is there to support the theory (as cited by others above) that the more unequal a society is – the less healthy & more crime ridden it is. Indeed, I would contend that unequal societies are bad economically as well.

It would seem that using the tax system in some Robin Hoodesque way is not the solution. So the question remains what is to be done? I would offer these suggestions:

1) Sure start must carry on – all the evidence points towards the value of these early interventions

2) Introduce progressive VAT – the more people want to spend on their cars and hifi systems – the more VAT should be charged (B&O amplifiers & Porsches will go up in price significantly)

3) Ensure that ‘class’ is treated in the way as race, gender, disability, sexual orientation etc when it comes to job applications etc.

4) Remove spurious and infair tax breaks for the well off (eg remove the charitable status from all private schools)

5) Raise the tax threshold to £10,000 pa but then increase the % base rate to match the losses

6) Ditch tax credits – but instead introduce a system whereby those on benefits are not immediately penalised if they get some work. Such a system cannot be hard to work out.

7) Introduce a national maximum wage – above which tax rates will rise exponentially. If people want to leave the country as a consequence – I will be on the quay waving them off. I don’t happen to think that the skills and intelligence of these high earners is that rare – others will fill their shoes. (What is rare – is their confidence – but this can be replaced by other people)
Simplify the tax system – as it seems only the rich find ways to avoid (sorry “optimise” their tax)

Sorry to be pedantic Tom, I think you should be clearer that you mean Premiership football when talking about super rich footballers. Outside the Premier league clubs and players are not super rich, far from it in most cases.

Aside from that, good points that I agree with.

[...] Harris writes about today’s reports that the inequality gap in the UK is at its highest in several de…, focussing on the top end of the income bracket, rather than the [...]

There’s a lot to be said for not taxing people out of spite; I wish the rest of the Labour Party would accept that.

Jack said:

“1) Sure start must carry on – all the evidence points towards the value of these early interventions”

Sure start is good in principle but badly executed it needs a shake up. It costs too much in its current form.

Jack said:

“2) Introduce progressive VAT – the more people want to spend on their cars and hifi systems – the more VAT should be charged (B&O amplifiers & Porsches will go up in price significantly)”

Excellent idea- NOT! All this would do is to price quality products off the market, kill inovation & reduce everything to cheap low cost tat because if you do what you are suggesting it will not be worth spending the money on R&D to develop higher margin quality products (who’s technology always filters down to the rest of the market over time).

Jack said:

“3) Ensure that ‘class’ is treated in the way as race, gender, disability, sexual orientation etc when it comes to job applications etc.”

Excellent idea as long as employers are also allowed to discriminate on grounds of ability, competence and work ethic. Note the Bristol employer who was told this week she could not include the words “must be hard working” in a job advert because it descriminated against non hard working people!!

Jack said:

“4) Remove spurious and infair tax breaks for the well off (eg remove the charitable status from all private schools)”

Amongst other things, private schools are necessary to demonstrate how good schools can be and how much the STate system needs to catch up. Aside from not having to charge VAT , they get no other help. About 7-8% of children are in private schools. If you put the fees up overnight some parents will not be able to afford them. If that happens some schools will start to close (loss of critical mass) & if that happens there will be an influx of people looking for places in the state system. Result: chaos and mediocrity. It is not for the likes of Eton to slow down or dumb down what they offer. It is for the State system to learn from what they do because they are really quite good at it.

Jack said:

“5) Raise the tax threshold to £10,000 pa but then increase the % base rate to match the losses”

Rob Peter, pay Paul. Over 50% of income tax is paid by the top 10% of earners now. You/we/the Government are not “entited” to take any more of their money & they are already shouldering a significant part of the load – much more than their fair share.

“6) Ditch tax credits – but instead introduce a system whereby those on benefits are not immediately penalised if they get some work. Such a system cannot be hard to work out.”

Indeed,tax credits, like most of the tax system introduced under the Pedant who is now PM, are a disaster – if for no other reason than nobody understands them. In 1997 there was one tax “book”, now there are three “volumes” printed on fine paper written in small typeface. The cost of administering the tax system is now quite staggering and largely so because it is so complex.

TCs also work in a very binary fashion over tax year periods – i.e. they take no account of the fact that circumstances may change from one end of the tax year to the next. If you need TC’s at the beginning of the year but arn;t entitled to them at the end you may also have to pay back what you had at the start of the year.

Jack said:

“7) Introduce a national maximum wage – above which tax rates will rise exponentially. If people want to leave the country as a consequence – I will be on the quay waving them off.”

And who will go? the brightest and the best is who. A very simplistic and silly idea which has been tried before with disastrous consequences. Go and look up “Laffer curve” on Wikipaedia

Jack said:

“I don’t happen to think that the skills and intelligence of these high earners is that rare – others will fill their shoes. (What is rare – is their confidence – but this can be replaced by other people).”

…and UK PLC will get eaten alive in world markets. People don’t succeed here because they are “too nice”??? Is that what you are suggesting?

Jack said:

“Simplify the tax system – as it seems only the rich find ways to avoid (sorry “optimise” their tax)”

Tax avoidance is every man’s right & duty. Tax evasion is illegal & should be nailed. Do not confuse the two.

Also see my earlier comment re opportunity for all but free rides for none.

In short, as has been demonstrated time & time again, Communism doesn’t work.

There isn’t a single communist state that is prosperous, innovative, healthy, efficient and above all FAIR. You think life is unfair here? Try taking a close look at China.

….and the reason? The human being is genetically and inherently a competitive animal and that competition is what drives and seeds excellence. It also means there is a very substantial portion of society who do not want to live in your monochrome world (thankfully!)and are prepared to do what they can to achieve “more”.

There is a lot of ignorant nonsense here about it being in Labour’s interest to keep people poor.

This is not represented by basic facts that show that Labour’s strongest support is amongst skilled and semi-skilled workers and their families.

Aside from moral considerations it is clearly in Labour’s electoral interest to get people into work.

On the wider point I think Relative and Absolute Poverty are both important. But the difference is always obscured by screaming headlines.

Absolute poverty goes without saying (except for some of your more wild-eyed commentators) is a moral challenge.

Relative poverty is important because it excludes people from the power to influence their own lives. Using taxation is an obvious way of keeping it in check – indeed the whole basis of the welfare state. Something I assume Tom believes in.

But taxing the rich just in order to make them poorer is silly, which is a bit of a straw man on Tom’s part; taxing better off people (not even the ‘rich’) to moderate the extremes of poverty and exclusion is important – look at the success of Tax Credits in getting people back into work.

Better off people are paying for the tax credits and it is making the whole country better off as more families have a working parent, so they have enough resources to contribute economically and live decent lives with less dependence on the state.

There are also some Tories who want to make those at the bottom end of society suffer more as well – also also out of spite.

Let us not have spiteful politics! I agree.

Fair taxation should be just that. Fair.

Jack
“6) Ditch tax credits – but instead introduce a system whereby those on benefits are not immediately penalised if they get some work. Such a system cannot be hard to work out.”

Well it was hard to work out, but it became known as Tax Credits. And as you know it is very difficult in practice to get right. People still face marginal taxation/benefit rates of 80% – better than the previous 130%.

There may not be a single communist state that is prosperous, innovative, healthy, efficient and above all FAIR.

However the idea that “competition” (another word for inequality) is the only driver of excellence and economic competitiveness is demonstrably false.

If that was the case then countries like Sweden, Denmark and Finland would not be ranked higher than the UK in global competitiveness rankings.

Jack said:

“There are also some Tories who want to make those at the bottom end of society suffer more as well – also also out of spite.”

An excellent point which was exemplified perfectly at the Tory conference when they announced that they are going to retest Incapacity Benefit claimants.

Making disabled people’s lives even more difficult than they already are is about as spiteful as it gets.

“There are also some Tories who want to make those at the bottom end of society suffer more as well – also also out of spite.”

This is frankly just nonsense. Even if such people do exist they are in a tiny, tiny minority with less than 1/10th of the credibility in the real world as Nick Griffin of the BNP! I have NEVER heard anyone express this kind of view either in person or even seen it expressed on the web either.

Conclusion: You made that up! Bad!

Having said that if what you really meant to say is that there are also some Tories who want to stop subsidising freeloaders & con artists who claim they can’t work when blatantly they could do something useful…..well then you would probably be right.

Tax credits are indeed way to complex. Hardly anyone understands how they are calculated & it seems many people have been incorrectly assessed & paid.

Stories of them being taken away from obviously deserving people thanks to changes in personal circumstances or relationships are legion & so are stories of people abusing the system…..and they cost a fortune to administer.

So maybe a good intention but really badly thought through & executed. A G Brown special really – costs a fortune and nowhere near as effective as they should be!

Tom: Any credibility in the rumour of an early election on the back of the 0.1% growth number on the back of the facts that it was only achieved by:

a) Xmas spending
b) A shed-load of QE cash going into the system
c) Car scrappage
d) Spending being brought forward before VAT went back up.

Given all that what’s the likelihood of neg GDP in April? High I would have thought. Maybe not ideal to have those numbers come out mid election campaign – no?

As many people have commented sitting at home on the sofa drinking Diamond White Cider is an option for some and you cannot blame the people who want to earn shedloads for a 60 hour week.

The other side of the coin I have noted inverted snobbery like the Monty Python sketch where someone is so poor they end up living in a shoebox in the middle of the road. The conversation is based around ‘ow ‘umble their parents or grand parents were before making it.

There is always hope.

Tax land not work.

This stops the propertied classes from leeching off the poor (which has caused 99% of our economic problems)

Talking about more equal than others, quite some time ago I commented on your blog about the hypocrisy of MPs being allowed to smoke in certain parts of Westminster while pubs were going to the wall through no smoking laws. You told me smoking was not allowed anywhere in Parliament. What about this:
“Also, the Members’ Smoking Room is provided for the exclusive use of Members of Parliament…”
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2010-01-26a.311890.h&s=smoking#g311890.r0
So, is it a Members’ non smoking Smoking Room or what?
Thank you for your time.

@Dave Atherton

That Python sketch pillories the competitive nature of Yorkshire (didn’t hear any other accents, which were not exactly convincing) arguments about whose upbringing was the most deprived.

The chat about GDp tends that way. While in truth 2009 Q3’s figure was corrected to – 0.2% after the preliminary figure of – 0.4% the former figure is still used in the Guardian I have seen.

It will be surprising if the Q4 figure of + 0.1% is not adjusted.

I don’t see any attempt to hold an election by 22 April to avoid the 2010 Q1 figure being taken seriously unless there is a clear expectation of a substantial improvement in the April release of the preliminary Q1 figure.

“The Bank forecast growth rates of 2.1 per cent for 2010 and 4 per cent for 2011 in its quarterly inflation report, much higher than the outlook of private sector economists and the Treasury’s predictions.”

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/db5c0082-ceb4-11de-8812-00144feabdc0,s01=1.html

You’re so off-topic, Henry, that I would ordinarily have deleted your comment as irrelevant. However, I will instead use this opportunity to confirm that The Smoking Room has been a no-smoking zone since the nationwide ban was introduced. They’ve kept the name, of course, on the basis, I assume, that “The Room” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

Quietzapple, that’s very, very funny. That article you quote was published over 2 months ago on 11th November

Try something a little more recent and somewhat more realistic & damning

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSWNA274320100128

GDP growth in Q4 over Q3 was only 0.1% even after the help it got from Xmas sales, scrappage scheme, spending pulled forward to avoid the VAT hike & QE etc etc.

Reports everywhere that retail sales are weak in January & on monday Darling says “more bumps in the road”. Everyone I talk to says business is quiet. GDP growth is going to go negative again in Q1 as sure as eggs is eggs & the figures for that will come out in mid April.

If that happens & Brown goes for May 6th that’ll be right in the middle of the campaign & he’ll get crucified. The only business that is booming at the moment will be the Nokia replacement/repair shop round the corner from Downing street

Hard to treat anyone who treats a preliminary figure as set in stone, in the face of my post pointing out the folly and dishonesty of just that but~:

“With fears over debt, regulation and property having eased, the focus is on trading,” said Lena Thakkar, an analyst. “A recovery could come faster than anticipated, with an economic upturn and a boost from the World Cup.”

“Merrill’s team argued that, with pub stocks having pared gains in the last four months of 2009, the sector is back where it was a year ago. Yet consumer sentiment is improving, property prices have steadied and economic growth is forecast to rally by 4.2 per cent this year, it said.”

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/311c46a0-0c75-11df-a941-00144feabdc0.html

Jan 28th FT. I’d look again at the probity of the Reuters quote, your shower have been predicting failures in HMG sales of debt for quite some time. All part of your scares and despondency policy.

But it is possible that, despite the most recent Ipsos/Mori poll which showed the tory lead down to 4%, the market is anticipating Osborne in No 11, in which case it is a miracle that we are not in Omega on the UK’s credit rating.

Theresa May is an idiot. Dave shouldn’t let her out without a chaperone.

It’s common when dealing with data sets statistically to discard the outlying data points before starting analysis because they _do_ skew the figures.

More importantly, what the **** is relative poverty all about? Is it of any relevence to anything? If I earn X amount, it doesn’t make ONE iota of difference to me if David Beckham earns £4.50 an hour or £45,000 per hour.

So relative poverty is a scam, it’s meaningless. So why is it your governments preferred measure of poverty? Perhaps because _real_ poverty is pretty much non-existant in this country.

Furthermore, if you attempt to decrease relative poverty in the only way possible, punitive taxation on those at the upper end of the scale, then as has been pointed out countless times, they will all be off to New York, Dubai or Beijing. This would hit the tax revenue pot and so that would actually lead to less relative poverty but more absolute poverty.

That’s why your government is wrong and should be voted out and never be voted back in again. You are on the wrong side Tom.

4.2 % ???? If only – that figure has nothing but comedy value.:)

Forecasts for UK GDP growth in 2010 as at 31/12/09

European Commission +0.9%
International Monetary Fund +0.9%
David Kern, British Chambers of Commerce +1.1%
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) +1.2%
Alistair Darling, Treasury +1% to +1.5%
Bank of England +2.1%

Economic boost from the world cup?? Is that what’s going to underpin our economy? Is that the best we have?

We shall see what we get by the year end – but it sure as hell won;t be 4.2%

Taxed to Death: “I have NEVER heard anyone express this kind of view either in person or even seen it expressed on the web either.”

Hmmm – can I come and live in your world!

While I am always pleased to hear Queitzapple’s optimistic economic input I feel he is missing a key point here.

While we are in the deepest recession (last quarter notwithstanding) for a heck of a long time, unemployment has fallen less that it did in the 1980 or 1990 recession. Why is this? The public sector is employing more people and so stopping unemployment reaching EU or US levels. This is a good thing on the one hand but means that there is a massive drag on growth should the situation become more benevolent towards economic growth.

that should read: unemployment rate has risen less

Or: employment rate has fallen less

I would just like to reply to something that ‘Taxed to death (and then poked again to make sure there is none left)’ said, if I may. I still think this is relevant. S/he said:

“Having said that if what you really meant to say is that there are also some Tories who want to stop subsidising freeloaders & con artists who claim they can’t work when blatantly they could do something useful…..well then you would probably be right.”

The latest DWP figures on fraud and error in the benefits system were released in November of last year and they showed that Incapacity Benefit fraud was running at 1% – hardly a huge brigade of “con-artists” like the right wing press and the Tories would like to make out.

It should also be pointed out that the test which people passed to get IB was considered by some charities to be one of the toughest gateways to disability benefit in Western Europe. There is no question that the vast majority of these people are disabled.

It appears that David Freud – and you – has made an intellectual sleight of hand by expressing a mere opinion that a lot of these people are capable of some work and that therefore many of them are “illegitimate” claimants. Your argument assumes a number of things:

- That the tests and procedures which decide that people are capable of some work are fair.

- That people who can do some limited work will have no problem finding specific jobs of a narrow focus in their own locality; and most importantly of all,

- That employers are only too willing to take on disabled people.

In fact, now is a good time to bash employers again. They do NOT want to take on disabled people. For example, The RNID did a survey which found that employers are more likely to employ somebody with a criminal record than somebody who is deaf.

Your post vindicates Jack’s point about the Tories being plain spiteful to the poorest and most vulnerable in society.

Tim said: “Your post vindicates Jack’s point about the Tories being plain spiteful to the poorest and most vulnerable in society.”

I would not deny any genuinly disabled or incapable person the benefits and help that they need.

However, we now have over 2.5m people on incapacity benefits and I am afraid I simply refuse to believe that approaching 10% of the population of people of working age is so disbled as to be incapable of doing any form of useful work.

So talking of “sleight of hand” I have no doubt whatsoever that many people on the IB register should more properly be registered as unemployed – but that wouldn’t make the unemployment figures look too good now would it?

If you add the two together we have over 5M people who are economically inactive in this country – after 13 years of a socialist government its a pretty damning indictment of the failure of successive governments.

Dear Tom,

The first point you make is that your winning the lottery push other people into poverty. Using the definition of poverty employed by the government, Unicef, the EU, and the report cited, this is false. UK poverty levels are calculated primarily using the median level of income in the country. If you’re not familiar with statistics, think of it like this: line everyone in the country up in order of the wage they earn. Take the person in the middle of the line. Work out what 60% of his or her income. Anyone who earns less than that is in poverty. The median income in the UK is about £23,000 per year, so because you already earn more than that (putting you in the top 50% of earners) increasing your income by £6,000,000 will not push a single extra person into poverty.

The second point you make is that the only way to reduce poverty (using your definition of poverty, which presumably is based on mean incomes) is to increase taxes on the richest in order to fund transfers to the poorest.

The third point you make is normative: that such transfers aimed at reducing poverty (based on your definition) would be “really punitive” and “plain wrong”, “tax for its own sake”.

My question for you is, if you use the definition of poverty from the report based on median incomes, whereby to be in poverty you’d have to be earning less than about £14,000 per year, do you still think that transfers targeted at the richest are a bad idea?

Regards,
Robbie

Taxed to death – thanks for the reply. I’m afraid I’ve heard that old chestnut about proposals not affecting ‘genuinely disabled’ people many times and it just reminds me of the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy. People who make this claim seem to think that ‘disabled’ means either dead or paralysed from the eyebrows down. Such strict black and white criteria do not correspond with reality. A deaf person, a blind person, a person in a wheelchair and a person with CP are all disabled but are still often capable of doing some work. The main reasons why they do not work are given in my earlier reply, the main one being that employers do not want to take them on. What is fair about dumping these people on JSA and leaving them to languish there forever? You can be incapacitated by prejudice and social barriers, not just the immediate illness or disability.

The Tories want the best of all worlds. They want to dump disabled people onto JSA. They want to not employ disabled people (probably dismissing it as ‘social engineering’ or ‘political correctness gone mad.’) And last, they want to wash their hands of the stigma of being labelled bullies of disabled people – which is exactly what they are.

if Tom wins an even number of £millions his wealth will increase so that he joins the top 1% of the population so far as that is concerned.

The person who was just clinging in there with, perhaps £1.99m piled up will fall into the second percentile so far as wealth is concerned.

The average riches of that top 1% will rise a little, and the differential will increase.

I hope that makes the unlikely situation clearer, but I suppose there is little reason for optimism, apart from the improving Labour position in the polls.

The rest of us just keep taking our £1 out of the post office each week, reducing our wealth by “investing” it in DrWhoMP’s national lottery win, hoping for a slice of charitable largesse for our pet causes, such as Quietzapple’s Berry & Port social club, Epping.

Tim Said “Some sensible-ish stuff” apart from:

“You can be incapacitated by prejudice and social barriers, not just the immediate illness or disability.”

Totally seperate issue and there should be no room in our society for prejudice. The fact is that its there & ever more legislation isn’t going to fix the problem. Some education might though.

“The Tories want the best of all worlds. They want to dump disabled people onto JSA. They want to not employ disabled people (probably dismissing it as ‘social engineering’ or ‘political correctness gone mad.’) And last, they want to wash their hands of the stigma of being labelled bullies of disabled people – which is exactly what they are.”

I’m sorry, that is an horrific generalisation which just destroys any sense of a credible argument you might have had.

All tories are bullies?
All tories are racists?
All tories want to take the poor out and stone them on a Sunday morning for entertainment??

Is that what you REALLY think?

Sounds like something out of Alistair Campbell’s great book of “spin” & and has all the credibility of same.

Want to talk about bullying low-lifes? Lets talk about Bad Al Cambell, or Draper & McBride…….Brown & Balls arn’t too far behind them either come to think of it.

The next government is not likely to be popular because it is going to have to do some very tough stuff. Just like Thatcher’s lot did in 79.

They didn’t get it all right and the next lot won’t either, but when you are in as much financial trouble as we are there isn’t a choice unless you want to carry on borrowing untill the lenders all close their doors on you – at which point you are into financial oblivion faster than you can think “uh-oh……”
…and there’s no way out of that one.

You don’t think we are in that much danger? Well, I and a lot of other people would disagree and don’t wish to put the idea that we can just “carry on” to the test anyway. We are in deep, deep trouble.

We spend more on benefits than we collect in income tax, our NHS is the world’s third largest employer, we need an extra £175Bn just to stand still at the moment. How much extra economic activity will it take to produce that? Answer : an amount way beyond the capacity of this country.

We have champagne tastes in public services with Tesco lager income to pay for them, so something is going to have to give.

Fortunately its not all bad because there is huge, huge waste – and THAT is what we need to get rid of. The money that the government wastes and has wasted is criminal, and demonstrates massive incompetence and negligence.

Any private sector business that wasted money in the same way would have been blown into the weeds of bankruptcy years ago (and its Directors would quite possibly be in jail).

Diversity co-ordinatiors on £75K a year? No thanks. British Potato council? No thanks. ID cards? No thanks etc etc etc……

And maybe it was tough under Thatcher – for some. Others made the most of the opportunity – & that doesn’t make them bad people by the way.

Every labour politician is still harping on about how unfair it all was under Thatcher. That in itself is pathetic because before you condemn what the conservatives did in the 80’s lets not forget what they started with – Winter of discontent, a “Brain drain”, 98% top rate of tax, Unions killing competitiveness, national bankruptcy and a visit to the IMF less than 18 months earlier. It was a huge mess and as Thatcher said, and as has been proven once again now, “sooner or later all Labour governements run out of other people’s money”.

Look at the state of the Economy in 1979 vs 1997, and then look at it in 1997 and look at it now (and then consider there has been a 10 year boom in between).

I’m sorry, but I am furious about the state of our country & its finances & the lies, spin, endless taxation, loss of freedom and endless nanny state perpetrated by the Labour government. It will take quite some fixing, it will hurt and there may be casualties along the way – but that is the price we all now have to pay.

Burying our heads in the sand is just not an option any more and (assuming they can get past the electoral rigging that has quietly taken place via the boundary changes effected by the Labour party – just how conniving and dishonest is that?) then it will fall to the Tories to fix the mess – again.

We can only hope that the electorate has learned its lesson this time around.

We have been the subject of a massive and hugely costly experiment(not just financially) in social engineering and while, on the surface, some aspects of it may have produced short term success, but ultimately, as a whole, it has failed massively because it is not sustainable – we can’t afford it.

“I have abolished Boom & Bust” – if it wasn’t such a serious demonstration of utter incompetence, it might actually be funny.

…and as an after-thought. The labour Party can’t even run its own finances – what on earth makes anybody think they are competent to run the country???

Maybe I did make a generalisation, sorry, but that was because of the TV coverage of the Tory conference in which Cameron declared that he was going to retest IB claimants and the reaction was described as being ‘music to their ears.’

A whole hall of people sounding as if they love the thought of disabled people being humiliated with further tests in order to qualify for £84 a week sounds very much like bullying to me. Retesting all means that genuinely disabled people will get the stress and worry of wondering whether they will end up with anything to live on. Don’t you think they have enough hardship to deal with?

I agree that Labour are just as appalling, but beware of tu quoque arguments.

If you’re not prepared to help disabled people into work, then you have to pay them benefit, they can’t live on thin air.

Time tories realised that Labour is gaining in the polls, and there will be 4 more years, at least, of sane redistribution of wealth, some of it to the disabled, and continuing record growth of GDP/head to fund it.

Some of us recall rather higher income tax rates than now prevail.

The standard rate recently fell to its lowest in my lifetime.

Greedy is Geo Osborne saying how “interesting” flat rate tax is.

Quietzapple has a convenient memory……

“Some of us recall rather higher income tax rates than now prevail”

Indeed so…..83% + a 15% surcharge on un
earned income = 98% c. D Healy

“sane redistribution of wealth” ???

Don’t make me laugh.

“The standard rate recently fell to its lowest in my lifetime.”

Indeed, but it has been more than offset by the increases in duties and purchase taxes, the removal of the 10p rate, the fiscal drag created by the erosion of tax free allowances; and not to mention the increases in National Insurance.

Try again, you’ll need to do much better than that Typical labour spin – you assume the rest of us are too stupid to notice. Some of us saw Gordon Brown for what he was 13 year ago thanks very much. The end game of where we are now was as obvious as Concorde coming in to land. “I’ve abolished boom & bust” who’s he think he is – King Canute??!??!?

Meanwhile, my income has been massacred, things I buy have massive duties on them, my pension funds have been murdered – and you wonder why people who work hard for a living have had enough? I take no pleasure in “I told you so” but I only hope people who voted this government in not once but three times are beginning to realise what they have to answer for.

and as for

“Time tories realised that Labour is gaining in the polls, and there will be 4 more years,”

Only in your imaginary world …… whoopdi do – you found one poll. The only one that matters is at the ballot box and it can’t come soon enough.

And if , by some extraordinary act of stupidty we do get another 4/5 years of G Brown, well, I am one of the fortunate who can afford to leave – and I might well do so.

Meanwhile it is now proven beyond all doubt that your beloved government and labour/socialist “progressive” ideolagy has failed. It is an economic train wreck, it doesn’t work, the entire foundation of your beliefs doesn’t function.

And you know why? Because human beings are inherently greedy and competitive and there is nothing you can do to legislate that away. Think that’s not true? Then you have your head in the sand – and I give you Jacqui Smith, Tony McNulty, David Chaytor, and the entire city of London!!

Just how many current and former Labour front benchers have become multi millionaires in the last 10 years anyway? You think Mr & Mrs Ed Balls are worth half a million a year betwen them in the private sector? Get real, they’d get eaten alive before breakfast!

Socialism is the complete antithesis of the human phsyche and that’s why it never works. And its not just the bankers that are greedy, its at all levels of society – right down to the workshy benefit scroungers who would sell their own mothers rather than do an honest day’s work.

And yes, somewhere in the middle there are disadvantaged and disabled and even hard working honest people – and with the latter its about time we looked after them and stopped raping them financially at every possible opportunity. Maybe then they might generate the money we need to pay down “Gordon’s folly”.

Socialism only ever works in Theory – and as someone once said, “I want to move to that town called Theory – everything there seems to work!” When you find out where it is, do let us know; because back in the real world Socialism as much use as a chocolate teapot.

Meanwhile…..

Tim said “If you’re not prepared to help disabled people into work, then you have to pay them benefit, they can’t live on thin air.”

Agreed 110%

But what needs looking at is how come 10% of the working population are now classed as disabled?? A significant number clearly should not be and what we have to do is to sort out which are deserving and genuine and which are cheating low life thieving scumbags – because for sure they are in there somewhere. And when we find them then I want my money back from them. 5 years community service whilst living in a communal workhouse in order to pay back what was stolen ? Fine by me.

Also lets be clear, we all want the genuinely disabled (and pensioners) to be looked after. Any government that won’t cater for the weakest in our society is no civilised government.

But I do not for a minute believe that the Tories are going to seek to “go after” the genuinely diabled, or the pensioners for that matter to find the money we all need to sort this mess out. Even if they were stupid enough to do so it would only raise a fraction of what we need.

Its going to have to come from the people that work via tax, from massively downsizing the public sector and from catching the cheats. If we actively engage in the last two then the first one will happen and people will be happy to pay because they can see that their money is no longer being incinerated as it is now.

Personally I hope they start with the last lot first and start making some serious examples of people. Lets lock a few benefit cheats away & throw the keys away& then see how many others stop claiming.

Too harsh? People who steal from the rest of us will get no sympathy from me. .

They’ll be first up against the wall when I’m El Presidenté

Only someone who uses a name whinging about what are in fact low taxes in the UK could complain about 25p in the £ income tax, a year of VAT at 15% (to which the Tories objected at beginning and end) and prattle about Denis Healey’s term as Chancellor (after Barber’s inflation and the OPEC oil price hike)

I wonder if he (she?) favours “Flat rate Tax” as per Osborne, before they started changing WIKI entries for what seem to be presentational reasons?

I am always interested to read wether folk live in the Uk, or are posting from abroad.

Quietzapple – usual bland spinning “nothing” reponse caused by a lack of a serious answer to some serious questions & charges. Sorry mate but you’re going to have to get up a bit earlier if you want to debate this stuff effectively with me.

Low taxes?

25p in the pound? What country are you paying tax in??? Because when all’s said & done much more than 1/4 of my income goes into the coffers of the UK treasury.

Actually I don’t mind the tax as much as I object like hell to the waste.

However, in answer to your “charge” it was you that said “Some of us recall rather higher income tax rates than now prevail”

To whit it was clearly necessary to remind you of what high taxes really are (were)! here in the UK (and indeed how recent they were). Sorry if that’s an inconvenient truth. A bit like Healy’s trip to the IMF and the current PSBR I suppose.

VAT at 15% was a joke too. Indeed its a good one to look at and a fine example of Labour’s idiocy and endless lies & spin.

Brown/Darling said the average consumer would be £250 better off because of the VAT cut.

VAT cut was 2.5%. £250 is 2.5% of £10,000 which is what you would have to spend to yield your £250 – except that it would still be subject to VAT at 15% so you would actually spend £11,500 instead of £11,750 to save your £250 – with me so far? Pretty simple maths this…

To spend £11,750 you would need to earn over £16K pre tax – which sounds feasible until you consider that there is zero VAT on:

Mortgages or Rent
Council tax
Food
Kids Clothes
Books & newspapers

and then seperate rates of VAT on Insurance & Gas & ELectricity (i.e. these were outside the VAT cut)

…and all those things get paid out of taxed income first.

So according to the “Great Leader” the AVERAGE houshold in this country has (and spends) just about £1000 per month free & clear in post tax disposable income after paying for all the necessities of life.

Oh Really? What planet is that on then?

So the VAT cut & its value was yet another outrageous lie. But it did indeed cost c. £12Bn to the treasury (i.e. the taxpayer)- so where did it go?

Simple – straight into the pockets of retailers. In effect the idiot government gave the retail industry the best part of £12Bn to prop up their balance sheets. It was just so obvious what was going to happen – but too obvious for GB/AD to see though apparently! Idiots or just incompetent?

Stupid, ill thought out & by & large a total waste of money. Sounds familiar really doesn’t it?

And FYI I is a “he”, I reside in the UK, I am a self employed business owner and I filed my tax return & paid my tax on Friday as usual.

…and no I don’t particularly favour flat rate taxes but I do favour a tax system which is simple and fair. One where tax payers don’t feel like they’ve been raped and then beyond that have to watch a government incinerating our money on endless worthless & ill thought out tripe.

Simple really. Roll on May 7th.

If a fourth Labour victory will still your beating keyboard amen to “roll on May 7th” indeed! (not that I know the date of the election, other than to say it will be a thursday)

As I would not enjoy reading and would not wish to totally ignore your voluminous outpourings I shall address you via this reference only:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP

The following european countries spend more of their GDP on tax than Britain: Austria, Belgium, Bosnia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden, Ukraine.

I wonder when tories will begin to “get it”? Britain is a civilised country, we don’t think that a return to victorian values is progress.

About 18 months ago I took the opportunity to move to Australia for a number of reasons, but career and money certainly weren’t among them. I left a (comparatively) well paid job in the Square Mile and moved to Brisbane, which is by comparison a very sleepy little city indeed.

I wasn’t overly excited about the job prospects over here but managed to land myself a role fairly quickly, albeit a more junior role than I previously filled, with correspondingly lower levels of responsibility (and stress).

The new job was only paying a little under 75% of what I was earning in the UK by the exchange rate at the time, so imagine my surprise when my first pay packet came in and I was paid more in the hand than the after tax income from my English job.

In addition, my commuting cost was reduced by 85%, my rent went down by 30%, I pay no council tax and my water bill for last year was less than 20 pounds. I get subsidised child care and almost exactly double the child benefit I received in the UK. (These are all comparisons based on mid-2008 exchange rates; the pound has lost about 15% since then, which makes it an even better deal for me.)

The most astonishing realisation for me was that I was losing so much money from my UK income that I can take a more junior role earning less and have a higher disposable income as a result. The amount of money taken from an individual in the UK in NI, tax, council tax, VAT, levies, duties and various other surcharges is truly astonishing when you think about it, and the only possible solution is to drastically reduce the government’s expenditure.

The pips are already squeaking!

Quietzapple: “Greedy is Geo Osborne saying how “interesting” flat rate tax is.”

So how do you decide which goods and services should be subsidised by the better off and which shouldn’t?

Is it fair to make the rich pay for the healthcare of the poor but not their haircuts? What about their shoes or their roads? How about their milk but not their cola? Their coats but not their heating?

Once you start letting the government provide more and more they will keep doing it. The business of government is government. Make no mistake, Labour would love to move more goods and services into the public sphere, allowing them to allocate things as they see fit, giving them ever more control over the minutiae of our lives.

So never mind a flat rate tax, how about a flat fee, the same way we pay for everything else?

How about an a la carte menu of public services that we can decide which ones we want… Or a voting system that allows us to elect people willing to change what the government provides and what we can do ourselves?

So while Geo Osborne may well be greedy, this particular policy is far from greedy, it is wealth creating and freedom loving in a country devoid of both.

My old friend Quitzapple says “La, la, la, la, la, la, I don’t think I’ll like the truth of what you’ve written so I just won’t read it.”

You should try some truth on for size. It’ll hurt at first but you’ll get used to it

“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP

The following european countries spend more of their GDP on tax than Britain: Austria, Belgium, Bosnia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden, Ukraine.”

And in English? Oh you mean they collect more in tax as a percentage of their GDP. Which figures mean precisely nothing unless you also then compare their standards of living and their public services – some of which will be better and some worse than ours. But as usual these comparisons are fatuous and relatively meaningless.

What matters is whether the UK is the best shape the UK could be in and the answer to that is categorically no, not in a million years, we are miles behind where we should be considering the capabilities and facilities we have.

QuietZapple then pontificated thusly:

“I wonder when tories will begin to “get it”? Britain is a civilised country, we don’t think that a return to victorian values is progress. ”

Do we need to be declared bankrupt before you will “get it”, or will another visit from the IMF suffice?

We (or rather the government) are throwing our money and our future up the wall. As the debt builds so does the interest – we are no spending ridiculous amounts on debt interest and it has to be dealt with.

So who are the right people to deal with the problem – King Canute & Captain Darling & his paperclips? I don’t think so.

You can whinge all you like about living in a civilised society, but if you max out your credit cards & don’t pay the bill you too will be living under the railway arches. Rest assured, if that’s where the UK ends up, I’ll be long gone….but I will send you a postcard with “I TOLD YOU SO ” written all over it.

And just to underscore the scale of the issue: An analysis of the UK’s position with respect to indebtedness (from no less than R Peston of the BBC – now he wouldn’t be biased, would he? )

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2010/02/tories_withdraw_support_from_t_1.html

Most people are generally pretty happy about the current level of tax versus private spending, which is why Chameleon, in his traditional tax cutting spiel, pretends he would only be making cuts (where?) in areas like tattoo removal.

39% of GDP is a reasonable level of tax. The USA has less, and many there would like to see that rise if they get good health care for it.

I was mildly surprised that Quite So Many European countries pay a higher proportion of their incomes as tax. Almost all in fact.

Notable of course that we have the fourth strongest military forces in the world, largely based on hi-tech rather than on numbers of foot soldiers.

If Osborne won’t cut those, or education, and plans an increase in the NHS, and says everyone favours Tax Credits I suppose they’ll be telling us of vast tattoo removal empires to be removed?

Quietzapple is confused:

“Most people are generally pretty happy about the current level of tax versus private spending, which is why Chameleon, in his traditional tax cutting spiel, pretends he would only be making cuts (where?) in areas like tattoo removal.”

Tax vs PRIVATE spending? Tax vs private spending isn’t the issue – its tax vs PUBLIC spending. I believe the figure for this year is that we will spend £178,000,000,000 more than tax receipts will be. Sound familiar? Same again next year and probably the year after.

You are actually content with that? If so & you can’t see where that is taking us then you live in la-la land I’m afraid.

Besides, ratios such as you quote become irrelevant when the lenders all say “UH UH”, no more unless you want to pay some ridiculous rate of interest. All they care about is the risk and the risk associated with lending money to the UK is increasing to unacceptable levels.

Our problem is about waste – Diversity co-ordinators on £75K a year and the British potato council, and ID cards and, and, and…. the list of things this government has thrown money away on is endless and eye-watering in both the quantity and the variety of endless cock-ups. I would be surprised if it is ever surpassed.

We can not afford to live the way we do and spend as we do. Why is that so complicated to understand? If a private citizen or a business ran their finances as this Government has run our country’s finances they would have been declared bankrupt years ago.

Clearly Governments have more lattitude in such things – but it isn’t infinite.

@Quietzapple: “39% of GDP is a reasonable level of tax. The USA has less, and many there would like to see that rise if they get good health care for it.”

Do you know anything about the US?

They spend more per citizen on healthcare than any other nation and yet have 45m Americans not covered.

If they adopted a more European system they could actually CUT healthcare spending and have the vast majority of Americans receive BETTER healthcare.

The UK could easily cut healthcare spending, they could open up many parts of it to competition forcing cost savings from that (with REAL penalties for firms that fail to deliver on promises) we could reduce the number of things we treat people for. We could make hospital places where only actually sick people go for emergency treatment or serious operations.

Does the UK need the world’s 4th strongest military? If any of the top 3 took a dislike to us we’d be toast (figuratively and literally) so who are we protecting ourselves against? Not that I am remotely a fan of a pan-EU force, but as a NATO-esque defence pact we’d need only a small force per country.

Big government means no competition which means no innovation. (Crude generality, but a fair enough comment for most industries.)

Being poor isn’t, in itself, a condition which should elicit sympathy. And being wealthy isn’t necessarily a condition deserving scorn.

Bill Gates is one of the greatest philanthropists on the planet, as well being almost its richest man.

There are families who spurn the free education offered universally to their children, while dishonestly drawing benefits made up from the taxes paid by those often as poor as they.

Which is why equality remains such a meaningless concept and fairness such a relevant one in the search for a better society.

Paul, if the USA brought in a more nearly tax funded healthcare system and raised taxes to pay for it the percentage of their GDP which went to tax would increase.

That would lead to an improvement in their healthcare.

From what I’ve see the poor in Cuba, where 50% of GDP is tax, have better healthcare than the poorer americans. Their infant mortality ws better when I last looked too.

The sheer ignorance of those who campaign for lower taxes and advocate unregulated markets in the face of the recent recession beggars belief.

Many of them wanted a depression, commented with that in mind, to put the lower orders in their place.

No wonder whatsoever that Labour is climbing as the tory duplicities become more apparent.

@Quietzapple, The US GOVERNMENT spends more on healthcare, per person, than the UK. We all actually benefit a by this as much of that spending is on research but often not on life saving medecine (think obesity, impotence and diabetes). However the the US has such a strong lobby system that politicians are in deep with the medical industry, big pharma, law firms and insurance firms so there is no political will to change the current system in spite of the popular will, and even that is under threat from adverts, politicians lying and media skewed statistics.

Low taxes are good.

Unregulated markets are bad. (Who’s campaigning for them?)

Is that hard to understand?

E D U C A T I O N !
Do people know what that means?
Sitting in a classroom?
Partly.The rest comes from mum & dad,
aunts & uncles.
Educate them to respect their street,
their neighbourhood.Educate them that broken bus shelters/grafitti/litter drag down the ‘outsider’s’oppinion of them.
Educate them that if a girl says no she is a very nice girl & if a boy likes you he WILL wait.
Educate them properly, so they have the best chance.They are not thick and I am a strong believer that they can NEVER know what they have NEVER been taught.
It is up to us adults to teach them ALL of life’s lessons,ALL of them.
Always give them an alternative choice,
when you see them going to make the wrong one.
I know poverty,but I don’t know why adults stopped ‘nagging’ their children to make the right choices,do as they
are told, don’t cheek your elders,pick up their litter if they dropped it,be in
by a certain time,and gave them a good rollocking and bed when they didn’t.
We are betraying our children,our heritage and our family names,by not educating them properly.
It is us, NOT the state who give our children courage,pride,strength,a sense of community and manners to make it.