Mitesh B Karia was out and about taking photographs of public sector strikers today, this one has that je ne sais quoi...
Christmas Day: readings for Year C
9 hours ago
Wednesday, 30 November 2011
This is NOT satire (2)
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14 comments:
Or even, if I may make so bold, that je ne sais quoi.
The one that gets me most is where they refer to central bank money and guarantees as 'taxpayers money'.
Around 50% of the people you see on these marches actually believe the 'taxpayer' has stumped up the best part of a trillion quid for the banks and that is why they are on pay freezes / pension entitlement cuts.
Recycling too, I'd say.
Anon 22.08, oops, amended.
SL, their lack of grasp of basic bookkeeping knows no bounds. They vaguely understand that hiking their contributions merely serves to reduce HMT's annual deficit, but fail to grasp the quid pro quo that their unfunded pension promises (local government schemes aside) were part of what was driving UP the shortfall in the first place.
Ch, that's too deep for me.
Er take it from me, as a former insider, trying to explain to ones fellow public servants that because their salaries and pensions are all met (well so the theory goes) from the taxes collected across the land that it follows that :-
1. It is incontrovertibly the case and can easily be shown that their salaries and wages are ultimately provided by taxes leveied on the private sector and
2. It is therefore facile to pretend that the taxes etc that they pay "somehow" genuinely increase the governments tax take, and that it isn't just, well, churning what was already tax revenues
is (was) bloody hard and usually pointless, and of course explaining how when because the governments tax take wasn't/isn't sufficient to cover its outgoings, including paying the public sector salaries and wages the government then has to borrow money to do that, making it an even worse situation that generally didn't register either. I might just add that when Government Ministers, including much loved and missed former Chancellors of the Exchequer, could be heard and seen "explaining" that public sector salaries and pensions generated an additional tax take and factoring this in to their budget projections and the like and claiming that "not raising a particular tax resulted in money being taken out of the economy" well, you can't really be surprised, can you ...
Hmm. Would they be paying tax from their wages paid from - oh - I see where this is going...
Twats. The lot of them. Can we increase the 710,000? Now please.
Jeremy Clarkson has a very robust answer to striking public sector employees
"shoot them in front of their families"
Anon 23.56, I agree, pointless.
To cap it all, the unions are also claiming that if there's a reduction in the generosity of their pensions, a lot of people will opt out of the scheme completely, and thus end up claiming means tested old age benefits which will "increase the cost to the taxpayer in the long run", which strikes me as mathematically impossible.
PJH, if it were up to me, yes.
B, I saw that. My problem is that Clarkson is himself a high paid public sector employee.
But that placard points to the obvious solution. Meet the cost of their wages and pensions from the tax that they pay.
VFTS, splendid plan, their wages would promptly tend towards £nil.
But on the pensions alone, this seems like a perfectly sensible plan: the government spends, apparently, £169 billion a year on public sector salaries and pensions (just under a quarter of all govt spending).
So the govt could just put £169 billion (or whatever figure you decide) on the table and allow those still working to decide how much pension the retired ones will get and how much they would like as extra cash salary NOW.
It is therefore facile to pretend that the taxes etc that they pay "somehow" genuinely increase the governments tax take, and that it isn't just, well, churning what was already tax revenues
Money is all debt right? Why don't we all write IOUs for a million pounds? Then we can all be millionaires!
Money is simply temporal barter.
AC1
Anon 14:04 wrote
Money is all debt right? Why don't we all write IOUs for a million pounds? Then we can all be millionaires!
If you bought a house for a million pounds with a 100% mortgage last week that's exactly what you just did. Do you feel like a millionaire?
"B, I saw that. My problem is that Clarkson is himself a high paid public sector employee."
Not quite in the same boat. The BBC TV tax is ring-fenced to the BBC, so paying JC less would only result in the BBC wasting the money elsewhere. Also, AFAIK, the BBC can sell JC's output to foreigners for loads more money than he costs, unlike yer average public servant, whose output is for home consumption only.
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