As the Guardian notes this afternoon:
Jeremy Hunt says tax credit cuts will help to teach British to work as hard as the Chinese
The argument is, of course an old one. J K Galbraith once noted, ironically, that tax cuts were supposed to motivate the rich and tax increases were meant to motivate the poor. As he asked, appropriately, given how absurd he thought the argument to be, where was the point of inflexion? At what level of income did the equation flip?
The truth of course is that rich are no different from the rest of us. There is no inflexion point. The whole argument is wrong. It's just convenient for the rich to think otherwise.
It is regrettable that Jeremy Hunt clearly subscribes to the penal view of punishing the poor to make them work.
The workhouse is just a step away.
a lady i know well is a teaching assistant and, through no fault of herself, a single mother and draws tax credits. She does do above and beyond at her school but there is no money to pay her more. How is reducing her income supposed to work?
It is straight from Britain Unchained, published 2012 by a group of young tory zealots few of whom have ever done a hand’s turn
http://thosebigwords.forumcommunity.net/?t=52092046
Oh come on, Richard. Jeremy has worked really hard to amass his £4.5m (in 2010) fortune and that includes making substantial gains from “errors” in claiming his parliamentary expenses and £100,000 by arranging his tax affairs. It just shows what a boy born on the wrong side of the tracks – son of an Admiral, educated at Charterhouse and Magdalene College Oxford – can achieve.
I’ve got to say it.
This Tory Government is one of the worst things to have happened to this country in a long time. Even the dolts who voted them in don’t deserve this.
How the crash of 2008 has been used to attack those with little or moderate means instead of taking the opportunity of reforming both finance and politics is just incredible.
The only surprise is that he can say it with impunity.
Sign of the times in the medja I’m afraid.
The workhouse is…
…A humane and improving advance in the relief of the poor, replacing the ‘Outdoor Relief’ schemes administered by the parishes under the former Poor Laws.
I regard Workfare as being closer to profit-driven outdoor relief schemes than to the Victorian workhouse.
Labour camps: well, that’s another idea entirely. Let’s just say I’m glad I’m over 25.
……Meanwhile, over at the BBC taxpayers alliance shrills (along with former defence secretary Liam Fox) at a Tory Conference fringe meeting are reported as calling on the Government to cut pensioner benefits such as winter fuel allowance, bus passes, Christmas bonuses etc.
Moreover, they are seriously arguing that it should be done ASAP on the grounds that those affected will likely not be around to vote in 2020 (probably because they will have died of cold) and people will have forgotten which party was responsible by the time of the next election.
Fox is also arguing on the need to press the ‘moral’ case for permanent public spending cuts/no turning back on the grounds that we are running a ponzi scheme borrowing from future generations to pay current benefits and that older people will support cuts to their benefits if they are sold on the basis of helping future generations.
I suspect that the people we are identifying here would consider the workhouse somewhat too soft on the grounds that we really do need to be implementing feudalism without the noblese oblige.
I have a slight advantage over ‘unt – having worked with and supervised “British workers” (and others outside the UK). People are people – pay them a fair wage, given them some respect (and earn their respect – usually by setting an expample – old fashioned I know – worked for me) & you will get a fair days work from them. Cut wages to the bone – “you pretend to pay us – we pretend to work”. ‘unt missed his metier – a village somewhere is missing an idiot.
Paying fairly (and even well) and treating people with respect has always worked for me
I, for one, would wholly encourage, Jeremy to make these and all the other, stupid ignorant, hypocritical and potentially damaging statements that he can think of. It looks like Jeremy could become a real political asset – for the Labour party, in the same way that the likes of Palin and Trump have been assets for the US Democrats.
By the way Richard, a very supportive article re PQE in the Guardian today. The comments section is largely supportive as well with the vast majority in favour.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/04/printing-money-jeremy-corbyn-quantitative-easing-peoples-qe#comment-60827957
Thanks
I was in meetings with economists almost all day
Good for Zoe, I say
As a general rule, I wouldn’t see the comments section of the Graun as indicative of anything at all – whether supportive or unsupportive of an issue.
It’s regularly plagued with Tory trolls as a matter of course, and these are very likely to be posting under multiple identities using astroturfing software.
I haven’t read this particular article or the comments yet, but I suspect that, if the majority are supportive of PQE, it’s because the trolls are, for the time being, otherwise engaged at the Tory Conference!
I admit I never read Guardian comments
There are many better ways to get depressed
Had I never read Guardian comments, I would very likely not have come across Neil Wilson, nor his tireless posts explaining and advocating MMT.
I’m very grateful to him and CiF for that.
I helped a friend of a friend of someone in the ahem grey economy with a benefits calculation recently. She’s been offered the chance to go from working a 16 hour week to a 31 hour week, the pay is £8 an hour and she wanted to know by how much of the extra £120 she’d be better off.
After allowing for 20% PAYE, 12% NI ( employees ), the 41% tax credit taper, and then the 65% reduction on net income remaining to her Housing Benefit, and the 20% reduction on net income to her Council Tax Reduction it turned out she’d be just £24 a week better off. She turned it down and we shared a vape to commiserate.
The problem is not that we are insufficiently like the Chinese, it is that the system discourages hard workers. If the cost of stuff for poor people was lower ( e.g child care, electricity and in particular housing ), you could design a system which trapped fewer in dependency and fairly rewarded the good workers who want to get on.
Howard Reed and I designed a system to ivercome this
It is in The Joy of Tax
“The system discourages hardworkers”
Dog whistle much.
Baxter basics -have you ever really enquired about why this is so without resorting to the absurd one-dimensional simplisctic ghastly trash that Hunt spouts?
We’ve had 40 years now of financialisation which has created an asset bubbling rip-off rentier class (to which Hunt belongs) which is all about making money WITHOUT real social value.
It is this that has trapped people not the benefits system. When housing is unaffordable (bank created bubble not simple supply and demand). You end up with housing benefit having to compensate for this.
Remember:
40 years of stagnating wages
Housing Bubbles created by financialisation
years of inappropriate bank credit that makes money for a minority
Banks effectively ‘renting’ out the currency to ‘allow’ people to keep up with the housing bubble THEY created
If you want to get baxter basics start joining up the dots yourself
Well, you’ll be pleased to know that under Universal Benefit, she will no longer have the option of turning down those extra 15 hours – but will be forced to take them on, or face sanctions.
And once she’s working those 31 hours a week, the JobCentre will then require her to look for a job working 40 hours per week, or face sanctions… and so on.
But that’s not all!
Now according to Jeremy Hunt, only when the working week is extended to a Chinese-style 80 hours per week, with 4 days annual leave, will she be finally be considered to be a proper Hard Working Person!!!
No need to migrate to China you luck workers, the Conservatives are bring Foxconn work practices to merry old England.
What a load of rubbish Mr Baxter. If work paid, there would be no choice to make. The whole system is not working, the neo-liberals have created a monster in the world economies we need what the likes of Richard Murphy advocate being put in to practice as soon as possible. Jeremy Hunt is a nasty piece of work.
It depends on how you read Baxter’s comment really – he’s right that the system discourages some increases in hours, but the real fault is in the taper system – in the case he describes, no one can fault his friend for deciding not to take the extra hours, since she loses far more than she gains (not just in financial measures either!). If instead, the amount of support increased slightly to cover additional costs such as childcare and transport, there would be less to criticise about the system. Not knowing Baxter personally, I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt that this is what he meant… feel free to correct me if I’m wrong!
His other comment I also agree with based on this assumption, if housing, energy and childcare were not so expensive, more people could be helped out of the poverty trap.
Sadly, instead of a compassionate and understanding government that aims to do the best for all, we have examples like the odious Hunt, who think that sweatshop practices and limited labour safeguards are the best for this country, since they would be best for the holders of capital that he represents.
Hunt’s suggestion is logical given the ideological stance of his party. It sits quite cohesively with the reduction in the access to judicial remedy and the planned reductions of freedom of speech and political protest. His thought dovetails nicely with the recent statement that commercial benefit trumps human rights. With a mantra like that this government is capable of anything.
Indeed-I always suspected that Hunt was one of the most ‘fascistic’ of the Tories-there was always a mad glint in his eye when he talked about ‘those that don’t get up in the morning.’ His vision is of the 19th Century that Marx wrote about and that forced seamstresses in London to become prostitutes by night.
The great irony is that Hunt and his ilk haver never worked in a productive way for their rentier money and you can bet your bottom dollar he has claimed for every packet of dry roasted peanuts at the house of commons bar.
Every so often the mask slips and shows the real man. But we should know where we stand with Hunt given his expressed views in the past on privatising the NHS or his revealed cosy relationship with Murdoch. Or his use of public funds to pay for his Mandarin lessons.
Sadly he is my MP, with a substantial majority.
“Jeremy Hunt is a nasty piece of work”
One among many….
“a village somewhere is missing an idiot”
Nope; the Westminster “village” has so many idiots that one [more] goes unnoticed.
(has Dame Shirley paid-off the gerrymandering fine yet?
40 million wasn’t it?) That was Westminster as well…..village-idiot heaven.
Rhyming slang? 🙂 Think about it. 🙂
This is the same crap that insists benefit sanctions to those claiming JSA will somehow motivate them to get jobs.
No it doesn’t! Being without any income for a minimum of 4 weeks, quite apart from being inhuman and immoral and questionable under international law, such techniques sap a persons’s confidence and make them even less ready for the workplace than before.
Instead of paid work experience and training, which would probably be a big help to jobseekers, they are instead offered persecution and penury, which saps any motivation.
Isn’t it time we grew up and stopped buying into the “deserving poor” myth?
For those who have not read it, there is a wonderful piece by someone who worked for Jeremy Hunt in his ‘business’. Tells you a lot about the kind of person he is. And makes his Chinese comments even less of a surprise
http://thequietus.com/articles/08944-jeremy-hunt-levenson-enquiry-hotcourses
Recommended
The culturally vapid and astonishingly vacuous character that is Hunt is clearly delineated in the article. The description of working for him as:
“a vampiric, morale and confidence-sapping operation. ” Precisely describes what the Tory Party exemplifies.