I've been playing with ideas for renaming aspects of tax and the related economic issues where the popular language used is obviously deeply value laden and against the national interest. These are some ideas:
Any others?
I'll update with good ones in a day or two.
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buys = bus
On a similar note… When the Government talks about wanting to achieve a surplus, they are actually saying that they want to take more out of the economy than they are putting back in.
Popular: Low tax economy
Alternative: Fair tax economy
Quantitative easing = printing money ?
I think printing money is not really useful either
But I’ll think on it
National debt = National credit [ we talk about credit for banks]
Deficit = new credit
Taxpayer’s money = government money
Tax burden = money stabiliser
Tax competition = freeloading
My money = government money.
All noted
Thanks for spiking my contribution to his My Money definition without dint of
contra argument; eminently democratic.
Democracy embraces editorial freedom
I exercise it
That’s my right
You can set up a party that says it will tax once
And that will not have an NHS or state education
See how you get on
But you are right on one way: the money is yours to use after you have paid all tax on it
But not until then
Yes of course the term ‘tax’ has just been deliberately corrupted, an example I abhor is Council tax, when this is a community charge for services. My local council can’t tax me.
The term tax, like many words in language takes on several meanings, its the context and corruption of those meanings we are discussing. As you say we need to change the language.
I can’t see we can reign in that tax = “a compulsory contribution to government revenue”. This is deep buried in the lexicon i.e. ‘tax and spend’ = ‘income and expenditure’. And the devolved Govt’s of the regions can’t wait to have the authority to ‘tax’ sorry charge. A beautiful political trap, devolved Govt’s are not sovereign.
One suggestion; Govt debt is also an asset, use ‘debtasset’ or ‘debtwealth’.
Noted!
Deficit = new money rather than new credit?
To the public, taking credit means they are in debt, so bad!
Using the terms debit and credit is generally a bit of a minefield, as in – whose account are you crediting?
Viz:
“A debit is an accounting entry that either increases an asset or expense account, or decreases a liability or equity account. A credit is an accounting entry that either increases a liability or equity account, or decreases an asset or expense account.”
Credits are income
They are pretty good news
the older, more historical terms were less emotive and reactionary,
tax payers money was referred to as ‘the public purse’
could my money be my ‘personal purse’?
and the tax burden was expressed as ‘paying your dues’
could the deficit be considered a ‘forward investment’
is the national debt actually ‘the sterling money supply’?
Get the retaliation in first, as rugger chaps used to say.
My (sorry, the Government’s!) tuppence worth:
National Debt: National Sterling Savings Account
Deficit: Annual UK Savings Allowance
Taxpayers’ Money : N/A
Tax Burden: Anti-inflation & Social Justice Premium
Your last two are good as described.
Thanks
If national debt is private sector net savings then surely the public sector deficit is just private savings made per year?
In there
I have no idea how to accomplish this but the ideal solution would be to rename everything so our monetary system make intuitive sense to the public.
Government spending:
This implies the government spends like a household or business since that is the only concept of “spending” the public are familiar with.
Money creation sounds like printing money so isn’t a good replacement.
Government spending = public investment?
Tax = inflation control?
Tax = economic stabilizer?
I think a good initial step would be to list common economic terms and defining them accurately in terms of the reality of how our modern system actually works. Then you can go from the realistic definitions to new words.
Government spending = adding interest free money to the economy.
Tax = removing money from the economy to control inflation and/or to create real resource space and/or redistribute purchasing power.
I like those – but thin k they may well be to hard to explain
You are absolutely correct!
The primary reason neoliberal propaganda is so effective seems to me to be the combination of simplicity and familiarity.
Combating it is tremendously difficult. Descend to their level of simplicity and you lack the explanatory power to convince plus your statements fly in the face of intuition and familiarity.
Explain properly and you’re too slow, “boring” and you run into the fact most people aren’t receptive to being told everything they think they know on a major topic is completely opposite to reality. Cognitive dissonance requires that they reject what you’re telling them.
Still, got to persevere.
I will
I am boring in that way
I think some avoidance of obvious retorts and invocations of newspeak is needed. To equate debt with wealth, national debt say, with the wealth of a sovereign wealth fund like Norway’s is self-evidently absurd. National debt incurred by spending on infrastructure and education must, somehow, be different from non-productive expenditure however important and desirable it may be.
Recently I responded to a survey of ProPublica’s in the US on near death in childbirth and I commented in it on the BIRTHRIGHT of every citizen (and even resident) in the UK to NHS care and contrasted it to the prevailing situation in the US. I said the knowledge that the nation, effectively, stood behind every new mother giving birth was an extraordinary thing (perhaps in truth the lack of social solidarity in America is more remarkable).
Birthright capital: something you have a share of as a citizen. I think it’s more evocative at a personal level than “national”.
Deficit: one needs to distinguish between QE and repayble borrowed money.
Suggesting that taxpayer’s money is the government’s will not go down well. Besides the semantics the elephant in the room is trust. Notoriously, Grover Norquist wants to shrink the US federal government until it is small enough to be dragged to and drowned in a bathtub (and George Osborne is his disciple in the UK). Why? Because govt is considered profligate, wasteful, incompetent and untrustworthy.
Govts which accommodate industrial scale selective payment of tax start with perceptions of unfairness which semantic change cannot address. The appropriate term for money in the bank accounts of the British Virgin Islands that should have been paid as tax is YOUR MONEY. Governments that permit looting from their societies and the export of capital to jurisdictions like this are simply dishonest and would look even more so with euphemisms that ignore this injustice.
The word tax makes no distinction between what’s discretionary and what’s not. All citizens should get an annual report showing where the money went and their contribution and what their stake in the balance sheet looks like. Most are massively misinformed about the relative costs of many many things (foreign aid, EU membership, old age pensions, child benefit etc.).
Imagine statement showing, say
What you paid in tax this year: £X
Average amount the NHS will spend on you if you get sick:
In your area: £x
People of your age: £y
and so on. It wouldn’t have to be a printed statement but something that people could explore online so that they could see what was spent on schools, hospitals, roads, unemployment benefit etc. in their area and nationally. The term social dividend may be justified.
Calling tax competition tax war is not helpful. War is violent and may be unjust and tax competition may not be unless it is demonstrably unfair. It can be legitimate or illegitimate. Nobody in the US talks seriously about tax war in respect of different sales taxes between states. It’s accepted that they have different business models (and Kansas has usefully demonstrated the stupidity of trying to eliminate taxes). Just use cheating, gamesmanship, parasitism as appropriate. Surely predatory (utterly dishonest, artificial) transfer pricing designed to game taxes is bigger issue than just differences in tax rates? All we need is rules to keep things within bounds… things like country by country reporting!
Thanks
The other approach is to start with the high level view of our current problems and work down from there to your new names:
1) Reality is that a heterogeneous group of rich people has used their wealth to capture the state and use its powers to distort the economy so that it enriches and empowers them further.
This is problematic because it stops the state and market system from working correctly together in harmony. That causes us to be much less productive than we’d otherwise be. Consequently all but the very richest live harder and less enjoyable lives than is really necessary. Even worse we’re currently unable to deal with climate change or environmental destruction amd we’re at unnecessary risk of a war because of this distortion to the state and the market.
2) The way the rich use their wealth to capture the state is through propaganda. It comes in many forms: newspapers, TV news, TV shows, social media, think-tanks, education especially in the economics profession etc… Here’s what the propaganda says about the economy…
… And this is why these lies are so effective… …use of metaphors… appeals to what people are familiar with etc…
3) Here’s how it actually works…
4) Here are a load of actual events that prove the rich are wrong and we are right about the economy…
5) This is how the economy could work so much better in the future if a well informed public took back real democratic control of our own country…
6) To that end we suggest new terminology to avoid future confusion over the reality of the economy and to guard against future propaganda attacks…
You should include ones for ‘austerity’ and ‘subsidy’
Will look at that
How about: ‘Austerity’ = ‘Richsplaining’, i.e. the 1% telling the 99% that we have to pay the price for their mismanagement of the economy.
You have the right answer with ‘National debt’ = ‘National savings’. We already call part of it ‘National Savings’; and it’s easy to point out that gilts, a lot of which are owned by pensions, are another form of savings.
Relatedly, ‘Deficit’ = ‘Annual national savings increase’.
To defend this substitution of ‘savings’ for ‘debt’, we need to be ready with these points:
1) savings and debt are always 2 sides of the same coin.
2) but the national ‘debt’ of a country which also issues the currency has none of the negative features of real debts (viz. interest which has a real cost, or which can only be paid by cutting other expenditure, and doubts over ability to pay, and adverse consequences in distress debt situations).
3) and the national savings are an especially useful form of savings, being completely secure.
I think ‘Taxpayer’s money’ = ‘Public money’ (not ‘Government money’), because we should all have a say about how it is used.
And perhaps we should say that there is also ‘Private money’, but that both public money and private money are ‘National money’, in the sense that they are created via a publicly owned institution, the Bank of England (and its Magic Money Tree). This aims to recognize the reasonable aim of most people to have some savings, while attacking the cruder ‘My money’ idea (an aside: Stewart Lee’s satire of the latter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyGND49CBYk ).
Self employed = forced by Silicon Valley and its satraps into a job with no security, no rights and no minimum wage just so they don’t have to pay employer’s NI contributions.
Political economics = don’t have to know anything about actual economics
Thank God!
(Note that in that comment there is an assumption that many think unrealistic and because I am a political economist I can spot it.
That’s the difference between me and an economist.)
Great idea!
Are you also going to include and critique GDP, growth and productivity?
Incidentally, how do productivity calculations and trend analysis take into consideration the changing nature of work over time, increasing pay inequality between junior staff and CEOs, the fact that the finance sector is a drain on the economy ( as per Werner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EC0G7pY4wRE) increased privatisation/ contracting out of public sector work which allows profits to be extracted during the course of ‘production’?
On the subject of public service outsourcing, ‘academisation’ etc in recent years, surely any debate re government expenditure needs to include more on this? Analysis of relative changes in government borrowing and spend in any sector needs to place much more emphasis on how that money is spent, where it goes and how changes in this are likely to influence the quality of outcomes. Without this many of the comparisons of spend (inputs) by different governments are misleading.
Especially important now is to draw attention to how the sell off of public assets, e.g. as per Naylor report recommendations, influences ‘public balance sheets and P&L accounts.’
I must do a blog on Baumol’s disease
Worth looking it up if these issues interest you
Please do. I hadn’t heard of it before. Sounds like there might be a link to David Graeber’s stuff on bullshit jobs that think has great relevance to neolib managerialism and the auditing industry involved in the procurement, monitoring and evaluation of govt contracts that often count and measure the wrong thing etc etc.
Mike Power’s book “the audit society: rituals of verification comes to mind https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-audit-society-9780198296034?cc=gb&lang=en&
Alternatives?
Deficit = growth fund, investment fund
I guess you may have already seen Bill Mitchell’s attempts at tackling this subject. I think he hired a sociologist to help him understand why neoliberal arguments, though factually inaccurate, gain so much traction with the public…
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=25961
Sorry, yet another long and slightly confused thought from me!
What seems obvious is that for words and the ideas they represent to gain traction with the public they have to be integral parts of a well understood narrative. Some factors are more important in a narrative becoming well understoid and accepted than others.
Things you think would be important but aren’t:
1) consistency with reality
2) internal consistency
3) being strongly predictive
4) having broad and deep explanatory power
Factors that are actually important:
5) idea is familiar to people due to similarity to their everyday lives
6) simplicity and brevity
7) appeals to fear of financial and social status loss
8) appeals to natural justice
9) appeals to common sense
10) appeals to in-group loyalty (patriotism and the like)
11) reinforces existing social hierarchy
There is also a defacto advantage for the established narrative. Being already embedded in the public psyche is akin to the neoliberal narrative being ensconced in a mighty and well provisioned fortress atop a steep hill. We face almost impossible odds.
However, the fortress analogy should give us a clue as to how best to proceed. You can’t attack a fortress head on with a small army and you can’t starve it onto submission if the occupants can keep their supply lines open.
No, what you do is survey the fortress for weaknesses and plan a sneak attack or a series of actions that progressively weaken its defences without exposing your own side to heavy losses. Maybe you even spot a way to lure your enemy into the field for a final battle on ground of your choosing?
Basically we have to think more Trojan Horses than Charge of the Light Brigade.
Know your enemy:
Where is the neoliberal propaganda model fundamentally weak or currently losing ground due to events? Where does it clash with common sense? Where can it’s supposed strengths be used against it? Where is it demonstrably and easily shown to be inconsistent? Where does it suffer from longwindedness and waffle?
Know thyself:
Where do we have simpler explanations than the neoliberals? Where do our ideas most chime with common sense? Where are our ideas most familiar to the general public? Which of our ideas are unavoidably tough to explain and which are easy and quick to explain?
Perhaps if a comprehensive map of both our and the neoliberal rhetorical positions were made we could more easily plan an effective assault on their propaganda fortress?
Interesting idea
I like your thinking
Interesting Ideas Adam
I am writing a piece for Progressive Pulse and will add some of these ideas with full attribution is that is OK with you
National debt = money raised or printed by the Government for national investment/investment in the country that creates jobs and wealth for everyone.
Deficit = Government investment (money) in the country that has been spent (after it has been created)
Taxpayers money = the pound in their pocket that is printed/provided by the Government in order obtain good and services
Tax burden = a way of sharing the nation’s wealth to make life fairer for all
OR
‘an efficient way of helping capitalism to benefit as many people as possible’
We could also call it ‘wealth sharing’?
Tax competition = a negative practice that encourages us to share less of our wealth with each other making life less fair for the nation
My money = the money that you earned through work or receive from the Government because you qualify in some way. It is given to you in pounds that are printed by the Government.
Can I just say that way I have written my contributions is how I would explain these concepts to colleagues at work.
Also – ‘the deficit’ is simply a record of the money that the Government has created and spent (invested) in the country.
Thanks
Sorry for delay – have been trying to log these
Bless you Richard – you are a real gent – no problem – as you say you have a life too and why not?
Quantitative easing = public investment and/or corporate rescue
Thanks Adam Sawyer for the BM link – which I’d not seen before. Having ploughed through (most of) it, and read the many comments from both professional and laypeople – and, ofc, having read RM’s above valuable contribution to the debate, along with everyone else’s ideas + suggestions, I’ve reached a personal conclusion.
Having spent most of my working life in consumer marketing, persuading people they need stuff they don’t really need, when it comes to explaining modern monetary principles to the general public, my advice is: don’t bother! It’ll drive you nuts and possibly angry too. The parable of casting pearls before swine comes to mind. The meaning of this is not the popular one. It is not disparaging to swine but to the person who is trying to feed them pearls. To do so is ignorant and a complete waste of time. Pearls may be valued by humans but pigs sensibly don’t eat them. OK, most analogies are imperfect. What I mean is that the shift in consciousness required for an ‘ordinary’ person to UNLEARN their innate understanding of money, budgets, etc is simply too great a challenge for any quick fix, unless they have a Pauline conversion – which, admittedly, is how many of us eventually get to grips with counter-intuitive facts.
I’m not suggesting the dialogue should cease. But I am suggesting that, however well crafted, it’s not going to achieve its objectives any time soon. And there are two other major inhibiting factors. The first is the powerful opposition to prevent any popular understanding. The second is finance. A significant multi-million pound budget would speed up the process. Good marketing works but it’s expensive at this level. Think how much it cost (and how long it took) to combat the cigarette lobby. A more recent example is decades of low-fat food marketing, which we now know to be nutritionally wrong yet still persists in the public’s mindset and hence on the supermarket shelves; high-fat seems counter-intuitive until you know the facts.
Enough waffling. My recommendation is to keep chipping away at all levels – especially educational and in social media – with as simple a ‘narrative’ as possible. As this blog indicates, good ideas are not in short supply. Constant dripping (no ‘fat’ pun intended) will eventually wear away the stone as younger people especially will symbiotically connect the intellectual explanation to their experience of external events, creating a ‘light-bulb’ moment. If I had to give a time-scale for the creation of a permanent critical-mass, I’d say 20-25 years. But what do I know?
I reckon with luck I have 25 years left….
I hope you do 😉 Unfortunately I don’t 🙁
John D:
I think that 25 years is probably a good estimate given that it took neoliberals a similar length of time to get their idealogical position accepted broadly enough to get Thatcher and Reagan into power.
They of course had more money and power behind them but the rise of the internet gives us an advantage the neoliberals didn’t enjoy in the ’50s and ’60s. Indeed, this blog is a very good example of the advantages we have due to new technology.
Also, and I realise Malcolm Gladwell is a journalist and not an academic, has everyone read The Tipping Point?
It’s got some interesting ideas about the how ideas spread and what it takes for them to “tip” in a big way. I can’t remember the details so maybe I’ll re-read it…
One thing I do remember was something about 3 types of people with extreme personality traits that led to them being, respectively; super connected, super aware of the market and super persuasive.
I wonder if there are not some key individuals within the elite who could help these ideas “tip” if only we knew who to approach?
Maybe something else to map out is groups within the elite who are potentially not happy with the status quo and could be persuaded that an alternative approach may be more beneficial to themselves as well as everyone else.
First time commentator here.
Please keep on keeping on Richard, even when the going seems hard, and even if it takes 25 years or more. Noam Chomsky is still going around giving speeches and talks – he’s 89 this year.
That said, I think due to social media, your ideas are actually spreading faster and further than you imagine. I am writing from Singapore and have been sharing your blog with my friends in Singapore.
I stumbled on your blog because one of your posts – the one on who has a better track record of managing the national debt (Labour vs. Conservatives) – was shared several times on the “comments section” of various news articles posted on Facebook. People have woken up to the idea that the neoliberalism agenda that was sold as economic orthodoxy and “fact” is actually just self-serving libertarian bullshit, and that the “no magic money tree” argument is just Tory selfishness disguised as “fiscal necessity” (especially when GBP 1 billion was so quickly found for the Tory-DUP alliance).
And while we know words do matter, images are perhaps even better at 1)distilling and communicating complex concepts and 2) going viral. In this day and age of the “viral” video/caption/picture, ideas can and do travel far faster than before. See this comic as an example (which my friends posted on their Facebook walls):
http://www.upworthy.com/a-short-comic-gives-the-simplest-most-perfect-explanation-of-privilege-ive-ever-seen
Hopefully one day a graphic artist will help you put your ideas into images as well. Something like this:
http://economixcomix.com/home/tpp/
Best wishes!
I would be open to it
As to cartoonists