Off Topic Political Debate

Not sure I have the info to answer this.......

E.g Did the last labour govt create hundreds of thousands of jobs in their heartlands?

But....


We need a welfare state
It is more needed in poorer areas where typically/obviously people are more likely to vote labour
Taxation should be proportionate
Society as a whole needs to benefit

I wholeheartedly believe
Healthcare should be free and available to every UK citizen
Education should be free
Social welfare should be available to those in need.

And
I don't mind paying more in my taxes for this.

I would rather pay it in tax than be ripped off.... for example....by my dentist who tells me I need private treatment for this and that... and then he pockets the money on top of his NHS contract.


There are bound to be tensions... eg. South East is more wealthy therefore people in the NE need more support therefore there is a geographical perception issue etc etc

I do not agree with the ideological excesses of previous labour govts as well as the privations of the latest Tory ones.

and.... who are worse
unemployed 'scroungers' ? Or Wealthy tax avoiders??? or BOTH?

 

Faith, prayer, alms, fasting and pilgrimage are the fundamentals of Islam to the majority, not a small minority, of moslems. I cannot for the life of me see how these are "fundamentally evil".

 

I guess we know which the government think worse... can't remember the full staffing figures, but HMRC employ less staff to investigate tax fraud which costs the country an estimated £120 billion annually (depending upon which source you believe) than DWP employ to investigate benefit fraud which costs the country £1.1 billion annually. That £1.1 billion is £0.5 billion less than the estimated amount of benefits underpaid thanks to staff errors....

So apparently 1.1 is greater than 120 - I somehow think even the P5 kids in my class would dispute that.

 

Maybe I should have used the word 'connection' rather than link, but towards the bottom of the article there is a link to comments made by readers. Click on it and see who has commented...

 

Most of us would agree with this - I do not see why it matters what they would vote - it is self evident that poorer people need more welfare help. Few people argue against some form of "progressive" tax bandings - it is when tax is used as a punishment for success and hard work that we start to balk - I do not want topay tax for other people's discretionary spend.

Anyone disagree. Seems Apple Pie to me. Does not mean that you will ever stop rich people paying more on top if they perceive a benefit - try to stop them here and they will get it abroad. Trick is to provide an excellent basic service for all and stop people wanting or needing to go private on top - but where they do it actually HELPS the publicly funded services they then pay for but do not use.

Dentistry is a SHAME on the NHS - totally disgusting.

Agree - but let's not pretend a Mansion Tax is that - it is a tax on the South East and London. A mansion in the North or Scotland is likely to be worth less that a decent flat in London.

Don't all parties have ideological excesses?

A thief is a thief however rich he is. Why distinguish? Have you never been offered a cheaper job "for cash" - do you imagine that is not a non rich person employing tax avoidance? It is no preserve of the rich.

 

Bit simplistic though isn't it. Perhaps the £120 billion ( a nice made up figure) is 10 bankers and aristocrats being naughty -so needs few people to investigate and the £1.1 billion (wonder who calculates that too) is 10 million people failing to declare £100 each - might need a few more people to look at. As always these figures are just plucked from the air and used to make a political point. All governments try to prevent cheating on tax and benefits but are woeful in doing it as they use public functionaries.

 

Not really simplistic and not plucked from the air, but researched. Tax Research UK & HMRC figures relating to Tax debt, Tax avoidance and Tax evasion. The Tax debt figure apparently makes up half of the total, and is the figure written off as irrecoverable or discharged each year. So the few people employed to investigate can hardly be said to be doing a proper job, yet the government don't appear to care about that. On the other hand, they certainly like to spend time, money and effort on castigating the easier targets for a far smaller return - when it's quite clear that, from DWP's own figures, they would be better served by simply training their staff to do a better job, instead of imposing sanction targets on them under threat of disciplinary action.

 

Tax debt can be from a multitude of sources - where is the suggestion it is the rich and not the "too poor to pay" whose debt is written off - still doubt the figures. I think the political parties - of all persuasions DO care though - especially the Tories as they are always the ones who suffer the criticism even though the figures remain much the same under all governments.
Perhaps it is again the public sector employees who fail in their duties to collect. They should privatise tax collection - you would see a difference then - if people were actually motivated to do a job. Abolish the public sector

 

Er - HMRC have already done that. And the figure still rises....

 

Just shows - we are all dooooomed

 

I just fail to see how privatisation is the answer ?

I think people use this as some ideology.....

I may also be naïve ... but too me privatisation is shorthand for someone makes money out of it... and where does the money come from??

 

This deserves a better answer than I have time for now. Privatisation IS an ideology. A lot of people only do their job because they are paid to do it. Perhaps most jobs are boring - I suspect even the best have a lot of boring time in them. So if you leave people doing jobs they have to do but do not like they will perform minimally. Privatisation is meant to incentivise people to obtain better results - to do this they cut out waste and reduce the number of people employed to the optimal number required to do it. As a result costs are less and that creates the profit. An organisation with no profit incentive -especially one unionised will simply employ too many people unproductively. This has been a feature of the UK economy at the very least since the last war and although under Thatcher productivity improved it is still lagging far below our international rivals - even Italy. We need to cut out people doing jobs that even they know are not a stretch for them and get them into more productive work -especially smaller high tech jobs.

The green policy for example is to "create" 1 million jobs in the public sector - but they won't - they will simply employ 1m more people and say they are performing jobs whereas in reality they are not adding to production and as they are paid for by ythepublic purse that is simply taking money from other people to create fictitious jobs.

A country only thrives by creating productive jobs - and that is aided by the profit incentive. It is not evil - it is not just feathering the beds of the rich - it is growing the economy and creating wealth - much of it going to the new employees and a lot into taxation which can then pay for social needs. Public funds by definition can never do this as the money just goes round in a circle.

 

Tonight the news has come through that Jean-Marie Le Pen has been suspended from the party he founded. His daughter who now leads the Front National has been trying to put a better face on a political party with some very unpleasant and divisive policies. He has refused to shut up and has been spouting off yet again about gas chambers being just a footnote that happened in the past. Every now and again I see some member of UKIP saying what he/she really believes, then of course people are told that it is not official policy, and Farage has to come and say that he makes the policy.

Today also our part of the country was visited by the Prime Minister. His first stop of was at a plant where they make parts for computers, but the American owners have decided to shut the plant because it is too expensive to operate and are moving the operation to Hungary. There was hope among the employees that he would come up with a rescue plan, but he had to admit he was not able to, instead pointed at the help that was available at the job centre. That has not helped the government ratings any. He then went to have a look at some of the medical research programs at the large university hospital in Poitiers. A small amount of funding does come from central government, but the greatest part from private companies who work in partnership with the research teams. Of course the private companies hope one day they will make a profit from their input, but without them the valuable research would not happen at all.

 

That is one the myths about the current system that annoys me the most. Let's give everything to the private sector and we'll all be rich, as growth is good for everyone.

The stats say otherwise...

Billionaires and politicians gathering in Switzerland this week will come under pressure to tackle rising inequality after a study found that – on current trends – by next year, 1% of the world’s population will own more wealth than the other 99%.

Ahead of this week’s annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in the ski resort of Davos, the anti-poverty charity Oxfam said it would use its high-profile role at the gathering to demand urgent action to narrow the gap between rich and poor.

The charity’s research, published on Monday, shows that the share of the world’s wealth owned by the best-off 1% has increased from 44% in 2009 to 48% in 2014, while the least well-off 80% currently own just 5.5%.

Oxfam added that on current trends the richest 1% would own more than 50% of the world’s wealth by 2016.

Winnie Byanyima, executive director of Oxfam International and one of the six co-chairs at this year’s WEF, said the increased concentration of wealth seen since the deep recession of 2008-09 was dangerous and needed to be reversed.

In an interview with the Guardian, Byanyima said: “We want to bring a message from the people in the poorest countries in the world to the forum of the most powerful business and political leaders.

“The message is that rising inequality is dangerous. It’s bad for growth and it’s bad for governance. We see a concentration of wealth capturing power and leaving ordinary people voiceless and their interests uncared for.”

Oxfam made headlines at Davos last year with a study showing that the 85 richest people on the planet have the same wealth as the poorest 50% (3.5 billion people). The charity said this year that the comparison was now even more stark, with just 80 people owning the same amount of wealth as more than 3.5 billion people, down from 388 in 2010.

Byanyima said: “Do we really want to live in a world where the 1% own more than the rest of us combined? The scale of global inequality is quite simply staggering and despite the issues shooting up the global agenda, the gap between the richest and the rest is widening fast.”

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Separate research by the Equality Trust, which campaigns to reduce inequality in the UK, found that the richest 100 families in Britain in 2008 had seen their combined wealth increase by at least £15bn, a period during which average income increased by £1,233. Britain’s current richest 100 had the same wealth as 30% of UK households, it added.

Inequality has moved up the political agenda over the past half-decade amid concerns that the economic recovery since the global downturn of 2008-09 has been accompanied by a squeeze on living standards and an increase in the value of assets owned by the rich, such as property and shares.


So we're just giving more wealth away. The rich don't want to share, the only way to prise money away from them is to increase taxes on high earners and increase government control/powers.

Is this the ideal solution? No, ideally in the current system people wouldn't be so greedy, but unfortunately without pushing their hand nothing will happen...

 

I'm sure people are more productive if they enjoy their work, but I'm not convinced this depends on whether their work is privatised or not. Rather it is a consequence of the culture in and management of the workplace. In working for 12 years across a broad industry, Leisure and Tourism, I came across both large profitable privatised companies with very dissatisfied workforces and also happy hard-working committed teams, not highly paid, working for publicly funded organisations.

 

Hardly fair to the Greens - what you are describing there almost describes to a 't' the Tory Workfare scheme - I'm not sure of the number of such placements, but two years ago, the government's target was 850,000. I say 'almost' because the main difference is that Workfare placements are made in the private sector, usually with larger corporations - meaning a source of free labour for them. Growing the economy and creating wealth, yes - but none of it going to the poor sods who have to do it. And of course the positions filled were previously filled by tax paying employees, so government coffers lose all that PAYE into the bargain. What the Greens are proposing may well be the answer - true the jobs may basically be non-productive, but putting more money into the pockets of those at the bottom will surely stimulate the economy more than simply giving it straight to large organisations who immediately move it off-shore? Trickle up instead of trickle down?

I'm sure that cologne could word it better than that...

 

In the UK the top 10% of earners pay more than 55% of the total income tax. Top 3,000 earners pay more tax than bottom 9 million.

The richest 1% in America pay 24% of federal taxes

The higher earners are paying more than their share of tax. Harold Wilson tried squeezing the rich until their pips squeaked but it failed miserably. There is no way it is possible to obtain an international consensus on a policy to implement a high tax regime. If the UK tried to introduce it in isolation it would lead to a massive flight of capital and entrepreneurs.

Don't forget the Germans and French even failed to force Ireland to increase its low rate of corporation tax as part of Ireland's bailout deal. Ireland were desperate for the cash but realised that they would have lost an enormous amount of business if they had weakened.

 

Interesting number of comments.

If creating 1 million new public sector jobs in an economy that has virtually full employment would stimulate that economy why not create 2 or 3 million new jobs? Even if those people just sit in a room doing nothing? That has to be the craziest idea I have ever heard.

Oxfam - that would be the organistion that pays it's "executives" 6 figure salaries, outsources it's fundraising and supports tribal warlords in Africa to maintain their presence - they, like a lot of charities in this country need to take a good look at themselves first.

 

Cologne has only just arrived back from work - and it's after 10pm ! But you're right BB, even if they gave everybody an unconditional basic wage it would stimulate the economy through the trickle up effect - this is basic Keynesian economics and was far more accepted before the 80s than it is now. The post war boom was based on spending power from below. As for privatization - it equals theft. Namely they take away what belonged to us all and then try to sell it back to us. The problem was that the people did not think they owned all those assets like coal, steel, the railways etc. otherwise this theft would not have been possible.