This is from a headline in the FT this morning:
There are occasions when a two word analysis will do. This is one of them.
Callous bastard.
Not very parliamentary, I know. But totally appropriate.
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If you watched or listened to the full article you will understand more of what he said. You clearly didn’t, because you cant be bothered. Enough said.
I fully understood what he said
Are you defending the indefensible Stacy? Such meanness of spirit has a Dickensian edge to it. Now where are the three ghosts when you need them?
Quite restrained compared with my comment.
He’s most certainly not alone in this government…..and bugger whether the words are parliamentary or not.
If we actually gave people a decent tax free allowance, we wouldn’t have the lowest paid paying tax and then we wouldn’t need to have a ridiculously complex and expensive benefit system to try and give some of that tax money back again.
Benefits should be for the minority not the majority.
🙁
If we had that tax system we’d also have no state education, NHS etc etc etc
That’s the aim of those who promote high personal allowances
The con is working
Absolute nonsense. If the personal allowance was higher, and the higher rate band commensurately lowered, there would be no cost to the Exchequer and you could mostly do away with the ridiculously complex system of tax credits.
Just not true
We pay benefits for a very long way up the income scale
And for very good reason
Get over your demand for simplicity: we live in a complex world
The only alternative is a sound citizen’s income
What an absolutely ridiculous claim to make, followed by more blatant misrepresentation – the aim of a higher tax free allowance is to give more money for he working poor. Top rate tax payers don’t get a tax free allowance anyway.
Any idiot can see that it makes no sense to tax people on low incomes, only to give them money back in benefits because their income is too low.
Not only is the tax (and benefit) system far too complex, it provides a number of perverse disincentives for people not to work and contribute to wider society.
All it does is create an unnecessary bureaucracy that cost billions to administer, taking money out of the real economy.
I wonder why you might be in favour of it….
Fortunately anyone with sense can see the fallacy of what you say….
It’s the LibDems who can’t
Benefits are treated as if they were privileges given from on high! They are not! They are paid for through contributions and taxation.
I notice Cameron wasn’t shy of claiming child benefit even though he was a millionaire…before they means tested it of course!
To an extent, getting rid of tax credits & nobody paying tax below a certain allowance would be admirable.
There is a rather obvious fly in this particular ointment.
Mrs Thatcher encouraged the sale of council houses. This was, probably, the most stupid, ill-thought out & malicious thing ANY Prime Minister has ever done internally. (Obviously, it pales into insignificance compared to Tony Blair killing approx 750k Iraquis, essentially “because he could”)
Even now, the Tories will tell you that was the right thing to do. So, go on then, get rid of tax credits.
How will London work with NO nurses, no teachers, no police, no TFL staff, no ambulances, no firemen.
They can’t afford London prices without Tax Credits, they can barely afford it with them. So, do away with Tax Credits, make me laugh. Can you imagine the boys from CreditSuisse trying to make a fire-engine’s ladder go up & down ? These @@@@@wits can’t even cope with their own ledgers, let alone ladders.
Stevo! you are quite right when you say benefits are not privileges given from on high, but are “paid for through contributions and taxation.”
I’d go further – they are part of an insurance CONTRACT (there was a reason for calling NI’s National INSURANCE) between the Government and the Governed, that says that if you pay IN, when the circumstances are right, you have a right to a pay OUT.
No one carps if you claim back on your House of Car insurance, when you have a valid claim. The same is true of National Insurance – these are NOT allowances, to be bestowed by some Lady Bountiful on a whim, but Benefits, as defined by your contract with the State, on which two points:
1. The State HAD rightly decided that even those who had insufficient contributions IN (the young unemployed or sick and disabled) should still, in a civilised society (not to speak of in the interests of real efficiency, since allowing people to be driven into penury and despair is neither civilizes NOR efficient) have a right to be supported in their need, and be able to call on the collective power of the community as a whole, in the interests of social solidarity and efficiency.
2. Successive Governments – but none more than the present gang of shysters – have persisted in trying unilaterally to re-define this contract between Government and the governed – up till 2010, in favour of the Government’s own economic viability, but since that date in favour of the rich few, sufficient for the electorate to say that the contract is now void for non-performance, and that we need a new contract, which takes real need into consideration.
Further to the last point, the post-2010 contract seems to be motivated by a spirit of class envy OF the poor BY the rich, who wish to see ALL government revenues redirected towards those rich, and away from the poor, as though the rich had sole proprietary right over those revenue streams (as if! it’s what they’re after.)
This is evidently the case in, for example, the comments of “The inconvenient truth”, above, who seriously seems to think that poor people really are responding to “perverse disincentives for people not to work and contribute to wider society” and not to simple shortage of buying power.
He ignores the fact that most of those in poverty are IN work, meaning they are not earning ENOUGH, so that raising the Tax threshold would have minimal effect on their position, unless the threshold were raised to, say £20,000, which would also benefit those on £150,000, of course.
REAL incomes are the need, not mere tinkering with thresholds, and until that happens, the State, as an expression of us all, has a duty to ensure that no one falls by the wayside.
Agreed Andrew
Simply claiming something to be a ‘fallacy’ without providing any evidence to support that claim is a weak argument.
You’ve still to provide any valid argument that explains why taxing people and then giving money back to them (with the associated bureaucracy and wastage) is preferable to not taking them so highly in the first place.
I won’t hold my breath though – when you can’t answer a valid question, you resort to misrepresentation and ad hominem.
🙁
Well let’s remind you if some ideas long held to be true
First that the market distributes income poorly for all sorts of reasons – ignoring externalities for one, ignoring disability for another.
Then let’s note that many think greater equality produces overall greater benefit fir all – not jugs some. Read many works and The Spirit Level
Third, let’s recognise the world us complex and that means complex solutions might be needed
Fourth let’s factor in compassion
Fifth let’s allow for the fact that tax is also charged to reprice goods and services, raise revenue (not always wholly predictably), reorganise the economy and encourage people to engage with democracy and your logic misses most points
And then you realise there is very good reason for charging tax on many people – not leart to counter indirect taxation consequences on the Los paid via credits meaning they should be in the system
Your simple view ignores all that
maybe you should work for the Treasury
Or perhaps you’re an economist
More likely a libertarian
Or all three
That ‘s a recipe for such thinking
I wasn’t expecting much, and I’m not disappointed.
None of the above explains why it is beneficial to take tax from someone simply to give it back to them in benefits (with the associated inefficiencies that this entails).
Inequality, compassion, complexity etc are irrelevant in this context.
OK
Let’s get really basic
We don’t do what you assert
We give the vast majority of people on social security more than they pay in tax
And most tax they pay is indirect
Since we cannot give personal allowances for such taxes we cannot avoid that
Nor can we avoid having them
In which case the premise of all your arguments is false
“Perverse disincentives”:
1. Don’t give any money to the poor (via benefits). It disincentivises them.
2. Give lots of money to the already rich (via subsidised tax cuts). They’ll be incentivised.
The logic of the libertarian.
No wonder they’re not taken seriously.
I’ve had my benefits peremptorily cut off twice in the last few months – this has led me to file two complaints one of which is still ongoing -this must be costing the system something. You can’t cut welfare any more! If this happens it will backfire onto the NHS and Social Services. T take money out of local economies is unbelievable foolish and part of the neo-liberal ideology which defines you as sub-human if you are not ‘financialised’. The de-humanising process is working and there will be large scale support for this backed up by the daily mail/express dumbed down bum-wipe papers.
The British public is bowing down before these oligarchs and we need to be very concerned.
Left without police, NHS, fire or council staff I look forward to the people of the City of London deteriorating into a state of bemused anarchy.
“Oy, Piggy, Give me the Conch”.
“Now I have the Conch, I want to say, let’s impact our positive corporate values in respect of our quality experience customer-wise”
“Shouldn’t we head out & look for food ?”
“I heard that, but I have the conch. Only an aggressive market strategy will prove impactful in these situations, which, i’m sure you’ll agree, are proving uncertain”.
“There is an evil fire-breathing thing in docklands”
“Is it a real risk to our long-term CORPORATE strategy or will it just eat us?”
¨These @@@@@wits can’t even cope with their own ledgers, let alone ladders¨
Which set of ledgers?
The ones they do business by, or the ones they show the revenue?
Is this really the best you can do? – make false claims about things you don’t understand? Hardly the credible argument of an informed observer.
Let me respond one last time.
First this is an ad hominem
Second, I have responded despite your abuse
Third the argument is credible because it is why things happen as they do
Fourth many people – a professional institute, professional journals and others – have publicly acknowledged I seem to know something about tax
And it is you who is making the false claims e.g. compassion does nog matter in tax. That is simply not true
So, because you offer only abuse and no argument please do no comment again. I have begun deleting your comments and will happily do so again
¨I look forward to the people of the City of London deteriorating into a state of bemused anarchy¨
As opposed to the state of bemused illegality that they operate at the moment?
“The only alternative is a sound citizen’s income”
Yup! Either a national dividend paid to everyone regardless of income, either through debt-free money (the best way) or through taxation, particularly of those who earn the most, to redistribute all those tax gains they receive only for them to hoard or invest it!
And the national debt doesn’t really matter! Let’s turn on the spigots and put money where it is actually going to do some good….in the real economy.
The best way to do this would be for the government to create it for themselves….that only seems to be an option to help the rich get richer, though.
In the absence of that, borrow it! It is probably cheaper than any time in history for the government to borrow.
As said before, much of what is said about the national debt is crap anyway!