This video is fantastic.
And in political and economic terms both deeply worrying, and a portent of things to come.
Rishi Sunak got some things right with his various support schemes earlier this year.
As they now, supposedly, come to an end he is seemingly getting almost everything wrong and is determined to make an already bad situation very much worse.
But some were never helped in the first place, and are getting angry now, and rightly so. That pent up anger is apparent in this video and the government needs to take note: people are not going to take the devastation it is choosing to deliver lying down. Cummings may believe in destruction. The vast majority do not.
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Richard I very much admire you but where were you when the chancellor were calling the biggest group of the excluded “tax dodgers”? Where were you (and any accountants) when the government were saying that Ltd company directors dividends were “from investment”? No one stood up and said, “wait a minute the reason the tax system is like this is because it means those starting Ltd companies pay the same overall tax as those running unincorporated businesses? Those dividends are in fact “benefits from employment related securities”, and were defined as an employment reward back when ITEPA was written. No – none of the so called “experts” said anything.
I spent years calling for reform in this issue
https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2007/08/09/arctic-systems-moving-small-business-taxation-on-in-the-uk/
I recognised the issue
Maybe alone, I wrote a proposal to address it which The Treasury noted – I met them
Please don’t include me with the rest
But I also recognised the real risks of self employment
Thanks Richard, but directing me to something you wrote in 2007 sort of proves my point.
A
Well it really is rich, or rather just so ‘Rishi’ to claim he is putting aside “ideology and dogma” when his whole professional life and political career has been built of nothing but neoliberal ideological dogma in wholly, unwholesome and unvarnished from. He represents the 1%, who are touched by none of this carnage; and only the 1%. He simply wouldn’t be there if he didn’t follow the dogma. The cloying rhetoric of this Government, the weasel words are the mere refuge of the trickster.
N.B. I would like to see a video of all the same people in this video, asked to put up their hands – hown many of them actually voted for this government? They weren’t elected to wreak this havoc miraculously, just by the 1%.
Hidden unemployment everywhere. The data is so unreliable. Noticed with cynicism that HMG has now taken to using the median to measure Covid test return speed in a sample that has an enormously elongated tail. We have nowhere to stand in this morass of falsehoods.
It’s all about democracy really, so I highly recommend listening to this interview with the US investment guru Paul McCulley (ex-Pimco) –
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-09-03/paul-mcculley-on-the-profound-change-coming-to-the-economy
Paraphrasing, but only slightly, he says Democracy IS socialism and this is good!!
He is basically saying that, currently, capitalism is monetarism or vice versa and “we are “unambiguously” on the verge of a profound change to a more democratically managed economy (one more driven by fiscal policy), a change that will have significant changes for the real economy as well as markets and portfolio management.”
The interview has many quotable sections, especially about monetary vs fiscal policy, central bank independence, and the inflation mystery (nobody knows how to model it, and the zero-lower-bound means the central bank has lost the only tool in its toolbox).
Quoting one of the interviewers – “He argues that the dominance of capital over labor for the past 40 years means that inequality has been at the root of disinflation rather than merely grown up alongside it.”
In essence, I think he’s saying that we need a very different blend of democracy and capitalism.
Hard to judge what’s going on. Long term there will be a revulsion against the rich trying to leach large incomes out of others or at their expense. This history of the founding of the Bank of England shows the games they’ll play. That’s nearly 300 years British voters have put up with their cons. Now the country has the most corrupt and incompetent government since Lord North (also Tory) triggered the American Revolution with his stupidity!
https://www.british-history.ac.uk/old-new-london/vol1/pp453-473
My view is the British still have a Primitive Democracy because few voters understand how a floating fiat currency monetary system actually works. Indeed many are oblivious to how the economy’s being currently rescued by government creation of money because of the coronavirus pandemic. All you can do is keep plugging away in the hope the pennies will drop one day!
Thank you George.
Forgive my scepticism (maybe still just dealing with David Graeber’s sad demise) but I’m not sure about this. Its the more quiet majorities you have to watch out for – those online who will fall prey to whatever lies are being peddled there and whom may yet determine our fate.
Let’s not win before we have even fought eh?
Aye PSR, I take your point. Scepticism is natural after hearing about the great man’s sad demise.
I do think it was a remarkable interview to hear in the US media.
The McCully interview is quite extraordinary. Here we have a retired arch capitalist at the heart of global capitalism talking like Richard , Bill Michell , Stephanie Kelton, Wolfgang Streek and Tony Benn all rolled into one. He is smart enough to realise that it is social democracy that always saves capitalism from itself. This guy should be the leader of the Labour Party.
Heh… this is what happens when you abandon creatives 🙂 They *will* come for you in ways you cannot imagine 🙂 This is a govt utterly out of its depth.