Monday, 24 May 2010

"What would you cut?"

I've added to the lists being compiled over at Man In A Shed and Capitalists @ Work.

My latest blogpost: "What would you cut?"Tweet this! Posted by Mark Wadsworth at 18:36

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8 comments:

Anonymous said...

I assume your wish that any public sector pension of more than £10,000 be taxed at 75% - or, in case I've misunderstood where you stand on it, once there is a £10,000 personal allowance, then tax any public sector pension above £10,000 at 75% is in someway motivated by some reasoned argument, not just malice towards the public sector. Not all public sector pensions are unfunded and non-contributory - would you still stick by "all" or might you have "exclusions" for certain types of "public servant"?

24 May 2010 at 18:45
Mark Wadsworth said...

Anon1, that was just a suggestion; we could go for 50% rate on everything over £20,000 p.a., or we could run some clever spreadsheet that adds up the public sector employee's notional contributions and index those up in line with what a private sector employee would have got for the same level of NI contributions or something, and tax the rest at 75%.

The gimmick is that income tax on earned income dampens the economy because it discourages earning. Taxing an existing entitlement (see also taxing land values) just gets in tax revenues without discouraging future wealth creation :-)

Anon2, I'm a pacifist.

24 May 2010 at 19:26
DBC Reed said...

A rare outburst of common sense on Newsnight last night from representative of the Sheffield Chamber of Commerce.He pointed out apropos the approach of doctrinaire cuts:if you cut public services and just replace them with private sector workers you're not increasing wealth you're just substituting people.
To which I would add if you sack them and don't replace you have an absolute fall in wealth.

25 May 2010 at 08:14
Mark Wadsworth said...

DBC, nobody in his right mind is saying 'cut frontline services'.

'Frontline services' only cost about a third of what the government spends. Another third is welfare/pensions/redistribution (also perfectly acceptable).

But the final third is waste and wealth destruction on a massive scale (make-work jobs, quangoes, gold plated pensions, subsidies, first class travel, advertising campaigns, etc etc.).

25 May 2010 at 10:11
DBC Reed said...

I do not accept your basic proviso about people in their right minds.You are a bit of a pinko on a lot of issues and have even suggested that council houses are quite a good idea.(Gasp)The people in charge are of course Homeownerists but also represent the Landed Interest Reborn and Twice as Nasty envigorated by the over-mortgaged masses as electoral cannon fodder and having seen off the old LiberaL Manufacturing Interest with the deindustrialisation of Britain .The factory owners disappeared with the factories (Labour just wanted rid of the owners).
The point is: nobody really in their right mind thinks these people ,having waited so long, are going to stop with the eradication of waste.Productive and non-productive public-sector workers are so hard to distinguish ,just as they are in the private sector.(An old-fashioned private-sector factory has very few productive workers : most of the workers are ancillary to the machinery which creates the real increases in wealth).So the Landed Interest Reborn will just get rid of the lot
so as not to miss any.

25 May 2010 at 12:09
Mark Wadsworth said...

DBC,

1. I said 'nobody in their right minds', there are plenty of people not in their right minds :-)

2. I fail to see why any self-respecting right-winger wouldn't support having more council housing. There is plenty of demand for it (supply and demand, famous right-wing mantra) and the council can make a profit by building it (thus reducing the amount of taxes that councils need to collect).

3. As to your factory example, that is hokum. For every x machine workers you need a designer, a salesman, a cleaning lady and a tea lady, a bookkeeper, a lorry driver, a warehouseman, a clever bloke who understands computers and so on. That is far from saying that all these people are unproductive.

4. In any event, Labour turned out to the be most Home-Owner-Ist government of all time and you know it. My longer term concerns as to Lib-Con policies in this regard (and we cannot rule out that they let prices crash and blame it all, quite rightly, on Gordon Brown) are outweighed by my short-term glee at the bloodbath that is hopefully about to ensue in the ranks of the quanogcrats.

25 May 2010 at 14:02
DBC Reed said...

You are really not in your right mind ( in the nicest possible way)if you think any self -respecting right-winger is going to support the building of council houses.Your reasoning is fine but they don't do reasoning.
You may think cleaning ,catering computers and what have you in the above list are vital parts of the productive process but the cutters don't.In a public sector hospital these functions are already outsourced to private contractors for purely doctrinaire reasons.Front-line means in privatisation speak having contact with the public: anybody else has to be replaced by more expensive private sector substitutes.Funnily enough NHS computers,cleanliness and food are by-words for naffness.

25 May 2010 at 19:00
Mark Wadsworth said...

DBC: "Funnily enough NHS computers, cleanliness and food are by-words for naffness."

'Funny' you should mention that. I quote from UKIP's Small Business Mini-Manifesto, point 7.3:

Apart from a few isolated incidents, the overall record of UK restaurants is very good and most outlets trade for decades without any incidents whatsoever.

Ironically, it is the state-managed NHS itself that has the poorest record with regard to food safety. This is the area on which a UKIP government would focus first. Proposed franchises for NHS hospitals would specify higher standards for food safety.

25 May 2010 at 19:33

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