We are all in this together, well not if you are in a union.

marklv

The_White_Horse wrote: »

if I paid ZERO tax, i would be quite happy to pay for medical, education, street cleaning, street lights, rubbish collection etc.

If you want less tax then go off to the USA, but even there you will not find zero tax. There is no country that has zero income tax outside of the gulf states with their obscene oil profits, and even here there will always be some tax to pay!

marklv

Kohoutek wrote: »

I'm sorry, but citing the Gordon Brown School of Economics isn't going to give you much credibility.

I think you're making a reference to Keynesianism, but Keynes actually suggested saving in the good times which would allow deficit spending in the bad times to prop up economic activity. However, Brown borrowed in the good times and borrowed even more in the bad times. That is not sustainable for very long.

Another 'boom' in the asset based economy we had over the last ten years isn't going to happen...that would require an even greater proliferation of cheap money than before. Instead, we'll need to restructure the economy and make some painful fiscal readjustments, and adapt to the challenges in energy supply and demographics.

No, the current problems are due to the idiotic propping up of failing banks; that's why the government had to borrow so much. The UK taxpayer was landed with a multi-billion pound bill for this rescue, which was designed to help the shareholders of these institutions, not so much the depositors. I'm not qualified or knowledgeable enough to say what would have been a better course of action, but it's clear that the supervising authorities (the FSA and BoE) failed to do a proper job and warn the government in sufficient time for a more cogent rescue plan to have been worked out.

marklv

carolt wrote: »

Possibly he's still at school?

White Horse is the resident village idiot. He is just a troll who likes to shout nonsense because it makes him feel good. Read his posts and you'll see what I mean.

Kohoutek

marklv wrote: »

No, the current problems are due to the idiotic propping up of failing banks; that's why the government had to borrow so much.

The UK has run a deficit every year from 2001 under Gordon Brown, despite the fact that for most of the decade the economy was booming giving him record tax receipts. He expanded the number of state employees and number of state benefits to levels which could only be sustained if, as he put it, he had 'abolished boom and bust'.

The UK economy in the last ten years has been dominated by rising asset prices and a boom in financial sector profitability, which were both unsustainable and interlinked. It's ridiculous as you imply that there's another inevitable boom around the corner. Labour have done a terrible job managing the economy, now it needs big restructuring away from financial services and big government into more productive industries.

marklv wrote: »

It's clear that the supervising authorities (the FSA and BoE) failed to do a proper job and warn the government in sufficient time for a more cogent rescue plan to have been worked out.

Brown created the FSA and gave it the BoE's bank supervision authorities.

marklv

Emy1501 wrote: »

How do you work out teachers in the private sector are better then the public sector? As you say many do not have any teaching qualifications and some have only 3rd degrees.

The reason why the results are better are because they are selective. Many state schools would get 100% gcse A-C grades if they could choose the pupils they took.

Indeed. I underwent teaching practice in the early 90s recession when I did a PGCE and briefly considered teaching as a career. My second teaching practice was in an independent school and it was like heaven when compared to the state school hellhole I started off in. Classes of only 10-12 kids, pretty much all well spoken and behaved, all the book and teaching amenities you could possibly want, friendly colleagues, a nice relaxed atmosphere, etc. The state school was a battleground by comparison. You don't have to be a good teacher to survive in an independent school - just go through the motions and you'll be OK. Yes you do get judged more harshly on performance, but when the pupils have a much better attitude and usually also higher IQ than state school ones the task is made a lot easier.

In a state school you need to be a bloody genius! Even avoiding a nervous breakdown within your first term is an achievement. I think teachers in state schools do an amazing job under the circumstances.

marklv

Kohoutek wrote: »

The UK has run a deficit every year from 2001 under Gordon Brown, despite the fact that for most of the decade the economy was booming giving him record tax receipts. He expanded the number of state employees and number of state benefits to levels which could only be sustained if, as he put it, he had 'abolished boom and bust'.

The UK economy in the last ten years has been dominated by rising asset prices and a boom in financial sector profitability, which were both unsustainable and interlinked. It's ridiculous as you imply that there's another inevitable boom around the corner. Labour have done a terrible job managing the economy, now it needs big restructuring away from financial services and big government into more productive industries.



Brown created the FSA and gave it the BoE's bank supervision authorities.

I'll be honest with you - I don't have an economics degree and I'm not an economist, so I cannot get into minutely detailed discussions about the subject. I agree that there has been an excessive expansion of public sector jobs, though mostly this has been in the NHS. The Civil Service has expanded only due to the creation of a lot of quangos, and I agree that most of them should go. I also agree that benefit levels are too high in certain cases and I also believe that a lot of people with children are being unfairly subsidised by others through the tax credits and child benefit system. All these things need to be looked at, I fully agree.

What I don't agree with you about is that imposing huge job losses in the public sector will work - it won't. If there is work to do, someone has to do it, and if the person has been shown the exit door then you have to accept that the work will either not be done at all, done slowly by others who already doing other work, or done by an outside consultant who will charge more than the original person got paid. And of course you have to factor in the cost of making the original person redundant, paying him benefits, etc. Therefore it is only worthwhile making staff redundant when the work they do is absolutely not necessary at all. And how many jobs do you think exist in the core public sector that are not necessary? Not many. This is why any mass redundancies will damage public services severely and bring us back to the 1980s when you had to wait several months for a hip operation etc, etc.

You keep complaining about public spending, but we spend less on healthcare than most other developed countries. In France, Germany or Italy healthcare costs are a much bigger proportion of GDP, as are state pension costs. What we need to do in the UK is to have a NHS system that isn't solely financed through central taxation but has contributions by users (patients) as well. That could mean paying a modest fee for a medical appointment, paying a percentage of the cost of an operation, etc. All on a means tested basis, naturally. This is what is needed. And also we have to stop paying out enormous housing benefit handouts to huge jobless, often immigrant, families. All these handouts need to stop.

bigheadxx

marklv wrote: »

I'll be honest with you - Therefore it is only worthwhile making staff redundant when the work they do is absolutely not necessary at all. And how many jobs do you think exist in the core public sector that are not necessary? Not many. .

I would argue about one million based on the fact that there are about 1 million more public sector workers now than in 1997.

Manufacturing output has risen continuously since 1945 whilst employing an ever decreasing % of the workforce so why does the public sector need to increase by 15%, the wage bill by nearly 50% and its proportion of the workforce to 25% when it is plain to see that there has been no corresponding productivity improvements.

bigheadxx

marklv wrote: »

No, the current problems are due to the idiotic propping up of failing banks; that's why the government had to borrow so much. The UK taxpayer was landed with a multi-billion pound bill for this rescue, which was designed to help the shareholders of these institutions, not so much the depositors. I'm not qualified or knowledgeable enough to say what would have been a better course of action, but it's clear that the supervising authorities (the FSA and BoE) failed to do a proper job and warn the government in sufficient time for a more cogent rescue plan to have been worked out.

The shareholders of these institutions happen to be people like me who have to make their own retirement plans as they work in the private sector.

dktreesea

marklv wrote: »

.....
What I don't agree with you about is that imposing huge job losses in the public sector will work - it won't. If there is work to do, someone has to do it, and if the person has been shown the exit door then you have to accept that the work will either not be done at all, done slowly by others who already doing other work, or done by an outside consultant who will charge more than the original person got paid. And of course you have to factor in the cost of making the original person redundant, paying him benefits, etc. Therefore it is only worthwhile making staff redundant when the work they do is absolutely not necessary at all. And how many jobs do you think exist in the core public sector that are not necessary? Not many. This is why any mass redundancies will damage public services severely and bring us back to the 1980s when you had to wait several months for a hip operation etc, etc.
.....

Imposing huge job losses in the public sector may work to keep costs down quite well. Even if you have to replace the people you lay off, doing it "eventually" rather than straight away could save six months to a year's wages, say, and when you do have to bite the bulet and replace them, you could be replacing them with someone who has much the same level of working abiltiy but costs £10,000 a year less, simply because they haven't had the accumulated pay rises that one gets in somewhere like the public sector, just for sticking around for a long time. Crass though this will sound, it's a bit like havind a shirt made here, for £10 and replacing it with a smilar shirt, but made in China, for £1. The shirt's aren't the same, but they serve the same purpose, adequately.

When it comes to teaching, there are lots of newly qualified teachers who cost relatively little to employ compared to teachers who have been doing it for 10 to 15 years. You don't have to make people redundant. You just do something like closing down the school and not offering the teachers who worked there another post. Meanwhile, at the receiving schools you employ two or three newly graduated teachers to absorb the pupils from the closed school.

I wouldn't like to work in customer facing parts of the public sector, like teaching, or front line NHS staff, these days. The thing is with the politicians and their war cries of "first class health care for all, not jsut the rich!" or "state school education must be as good as private school education. The can't pay/won't pay must not be disadvantaged compared to those do pay!" we've ended up expecting private patient/student attitudes and outcomes from people whose jobs we're not prepared to do, most of us, at any price.

I was in a hospital today. While the people I saw were efficient and courteous, the intensity of their experience was horrible to watch and, I don't believe, helpful to patients getting healed. A hospital is meant to be a healing environment, not one where people are rushed through like sausages on a conveyor belt.

vivatifosi

marklv wrote: »

Rubbish. Small firms pay less because they are less profitable and can make fewer economies of scale, and therefore have more overheads proportionally. Large employers pay more because they have more financial clout, so the comparison needs to be made between employers of similar size, regardless of whether they are private or public sector.

Actually that's not true. If you look at the average salaries of companies, the factors that influence salaries are not so much the size of the company but the line of business that it is in and the type of work the typical worker within that company does. Therefore large retailers will pay significantly lower average wages than say, small legal firms.

Having said that there is also evidence within industries of higher pay among small firms. Take for example small, niche IT firms. They can often have average salaries of say £70k, higher than the average across larger firms. I'd argue that large firms set the benchmarks in terms of salary expectations within an industry but small firms will pay what they need to (and in some cases what they can get away with) to run their businesses.