Friday 29 August 2008

Sarah Palin for Vice-President!

Having little or no interest in* the outcome of the contest between The Authoritarian Interventionist Protectionist and The Other Authoritarian Interventionist Protectionist, I have followed Becky's lead and added SP's delightful visage to my side bar.

* Let me re-word that: Having no interest whatsoever in ...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

If she smoked a pipe she'd be perfect.

Anonymous said...

O/T You get a mention on Ministry of Truth

"Looking over the comments in DK’s original post, the one comment that comes closest to nailing the real issue here is that of Mark Wadsworth:

"This whole ‘inequality’ thing is a red herring. It’s low and average earners we should be concerned about. Reducing taxes (and benefit withdrawal) on low to average earners is easy and relatively cheap (in terms of lost tax revenues); as is increasing employment levels (scrapping Employer’s National Insurance, getting rid of regulations, scrap NMW, leaving EU etc) thereby making it easier for people to work (in the most literal sense) their way out of poverty and/or up the ladder."

Yes it certainly is about what happens to low and average wage earners in the economy and not about the general spread of inequality and it is about enabling people to work their way out of poverty and up the ladder.

Where he gets it wrong, and badly wrong at that, is in making the assumption that increasing employment levels by stripping away things like the National Minimum Wage, etc. will tackle poverty - it won’t and won’t for precisely the same reasons that the liberal free market of the 19th Century created massive inequalities and left large sections of the population living in abject poverty in what was, then and now, one of richest cities in the world - London.

Creating jobs, alone, isn’t enough to deal with these issues, you also have to put some sort of mechanism in place the precludes outright exploitation, which could mean regulation and a minimum wage but need not necessarily take that form. A citizen’s basic income would do pretty much the same job if set at high enough level, one that forces employers to offer better than poverty wages simply to attract employees, once the level of the basic income payment and the income tax regime attached to it is factored into the equation.


You advocate a citizen's basic income, right?

Mark Wadsworth said...

WOAR, ta for tip off, I shall enter the fray ...