Miliband and Price Freezes

Loughton_Monkey

grizzly1911 wrote: »

In the case of FTSE 100s probably less than that. It was an example for illustrative purposes.

This suggests 26000 top earners have salaries over 500K.

.......

“The rich are accelerating away from the rest of us: the top 1,000 have added £35.4 billion to their wealth in a single year, a gain of 8.5 percent since last year"

......It calculates that if everyone on salaries of more than £150,000 took a 10 per cent pay cut, those in the bottom 25 per cent of earners could increase their hourly pay from £6.80 to £7.35 on average..

Interesting thesis.

But I always 'sniff' something a little bit sinister when people like (in this case) the Higher Pay Unit feel the need to throw out random stats that are disjointed and a bit meaningless.

First they talk about how many people on £500K+, and then talk about the top 1%, followed by the top 1,000, and finally start bleating on about taking 10% away from people earning £150K, most of whom are none of the above.....

They can't seem to make up their minds which particular segment they are 'aiming' to vilify.

Do they take into account, for example, any degree of 'repatriation' of high earners from other countries/tax regimes as a result of Osborne cancelling the 50% tax? It doesn't say.

If the percentage of people earning, say, less than £12K were to reduce to 15% [Just guessing] from, say 18%, that would be universally applauded as "good". In other words, the percentage earning > £12K has increased. Go up to £25K and do the same calculation. If that percentage has increased, that's good.

What I can't work out is at which stage, journalists, politicians, and the public think this increase (with corresponding decrease in those earning less than £X) becomes bad. Seems to defy logic.

John_Pierpoint

Tancred wrote: »

So, are you advocating genocide as a way to solve the poverty problem in Britain? It's certainly a novel idea. Even Hitler and Stalin missed out on this one.

I don't think you are as stupid as you are pretending to be.
When I talk about legal economic entities, I am talking about the joint stock limited liability company (a great invention a few hundred years ago), the trust (another clever concept created by common law over centuries), the partnership, from marriage to LLP, and all the variants created from them such as the pension fund, the friendly society, the co-operative, the charity etc. etc.
All these entities, in which individuals come together in a common purpose, adapt to changing global economic conditions or they crawl away and die.
Only the individual is protected from that final sanction, should they fail to adapt to economic reality.

Democracies are built on a different currency, handed out every 4 - 5 years, its called a vote and it is collected in by a few hundred individuals who promise to make society better, by spending an ever increasing amount of the national wealth on behalf of those individuals.
By printing money they also manage to demonstrate that 2 + 2 does indeed equal 5.

In its simplest form that is what the current administrative impasse in the USA is all about - just how long will the rest of the world continue to subsidise USA. and just how long will the rich agree to subsidise the poor within the nation state.

John

BTW I did not know there was a gene that pre-determined its carriers to poverty ?

My history book says that both Hitler & Stalin both eradicated groups of society they decided were impeding their economic model of the perfect society.
In the case of Hitler it was those those with mental "defects", Gypsies, homosexuals, communists and those worshipping an old testament God. After enslaving them in work camps, and working them to death he resorted to gassing them.
In the case of Stalin, as well as exiling his "deviants" to camps intended to develop Russia's Asian hinterland; in the Ukraine, he simply robbed and bypassed those not prepared to accept the Marxist "equality" economic model, and starved millions them to death.

Interesting thought a bit nearer to home: Was the outcome of Irish potato famine c0ck up or conspiracy?

Kennyboy66

Generali wrote: »

It's ok, Socialism has apparently ended scarcity so nothing needs to be rationed any more. The solution is to get the richest few people in the country to pay for everything for the rest of us.

http://conservativepapers.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/soviet-gulag-camp.jpg

Is there an equivalent to Godwin's law for any any internet discussion around equality and fairness to end up mentioning Stalin and Gulags ?

"I wanted folks who glibly compared someone else to Hitler or to Nazis to think a bit harder about the holocaust"

Are some genocides are more equal than others ?

Kennyboy66

Generali wrote: »

How many people are represented by the blue line, a couple of thousand perhaps?

I'm sort of surprised that as a student of economies & libertarian you think that income inequality doesn't matter.

1) it easily leads to political corruption (South America being a nice example)

2) Economic power begets political power (lets say the USA as the rich & lobbyists seek to game the system)

3) Just as perfect equality doesn't lead to maximum growth, then neither does extreme inequality. Surely there is, like taxation, an optimum point.

antrobus

Kennyboy66 wrote: »

I'm sort of surprised that as a student of economies & libertarian you think that income inequality doesn't matter.

1) it easily leads to political corruption (South America being a nice example)

2) Economic power begets political power (lets say the USA as the rich & lobbyists seek to game the system)

3) Just as perfect equality doesn't lead to maximum growth, then neither does extreme inequality. Surely there is, like taxation, an optimum point.

The interesting thing about income inequality however is that the real inequality isn't between rich people in the UK and poor people in the UK, it's between everybody in the UK and everybody in (say) Malawi.

What is your 'optimum point' for the redistribution of income from the UK to Malawi?

michaels

Kennyboy66 wrote: »

I'm sort of surprised that as a student of economies & libertarian you think that income inequality doesn't matter.

1) it easily leads to political corruption (South America being a nice example)

2) Economic power begets political power (lets say the USA as the rich & lobbyists seek to game the system)

3) Just as perfect equality doesn't lead to maximum growth, then neither does extreme inequality. Surely there is, like taxation, an optimum point.

Actually it is worse than you think, income and wealth inequalities led directly to the financial crashes of the thirties and the noughties, see my paper on this.

thor

Loughton_Monkey wrote: »

Whenever I hear politicians rabbiting on about "sustainability" - a word they don't fully understand - I find myself screaming that they should look, first, at the 'sustainability' of Britain's economic model of high taxation/high government interference/high benefit & welfare systems - all of which encourage sloth, tax avoidance, low productivity, increased reliance on the state, and a blame culture with lack of any personal responsibility.

Those bankers have a lot to answer for that's for sure!

grizzly1911

michaels wrote: »

Actually it is worse than you think, income and wealth inequalities led directly to the financial crashes of the thirties and the noughties, see my paper on this.

Which paper?

penrhyn

The Beano?

DominicJ_2

Who does he thinks going to build the 500,000 windmills his climate change act ordered?