And your argument isn’t about the money when you refer to the number of billionaires and suggest that the less well off need more? That’s as silly a point to make when you did it as when Roly did.
Ok. So your first link indicates that the number of billionaires in the UK is growing primarily because of the arrival of entrepreneurs from outside the UK. What would you like to do – ban them? One assumes that having arrived they at the very least employ local people and consume within the UK such as to generate tax revenues. Abramovitch, who is mentioned in the article, is a case in point. You may not like what he is doing at Chelsea (or Chealsea as the proof readers at The Guardian would have it), but the fact remains that he is injecting cash into the club, which then goes on to employ people.
James Dyson is mentioned in the article. I don’t believe that he had a particular privileged upbringing and recall reading that he had to re-mortgage his house and live on his wife’s salary from teaching whilst he developed the vacuum cleaner that made him rich. He came up with a good idea and took a risk to develop and sell it. What do you want to do? Take his wealth away.
Of course, other people’s wealth has risen through the rise in property prices and the rise in other asset values that has been driven by Quantitative Easing. As a house owner you will have benefitted from the former and as a person with an interest in a pension fund, you will have benefitted from the latter. It remains open to you to give both away if you feel that the growth in your wealth is wrong.
And what is Labour would do about the growth in billionaires? I don’t think nationalising the Royal Mail or the tuition fee bribe is going to have any particular effect upon them (save, of course, that injecting a minimum of £176bn into the economy by way of nationalisations will further drive up asset values).
Did you actually read the second article that you linked to? It explodes some of the common myths surround tax and benefit enforcement, including the notion that tax avoidance is a huge problem within the UK.
The article suggests that HMRC has 300 or so people working in its Affluent Compliance Unit – investigating people earning £150 000 plus. The fact is that you don’t need many people doing that work, because they aren’t many people earning such amounts. In addition, if you set aside your prejudiced assumptions for a moment , it’s not clear that there is a significant problem within the £150 000+ earning group; the major route of tax evasion is by the non-declaration of earnings. Yes, some of that might well fall within the £150 000+ group, but it has to be equally likely to arise through plumbers, taxi drivers, builders and the like not putting work through their books (which, by the way, is devilishly difficult to prove).
Benefit fraud, on the other hand, is committed by a larger number of people (that must be the case given that the amounts involved are often relatively small and yet £1.2bn per year is going down the tubes) and so a larger number of investigators is required. You may be happy with the notion of this sort of thing not being investigated, but I don’t think may people would agree with you:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-...wales-31837534
The notion that you could swap the benefit investigators into high end tax investigations is slightly bonkers by the way. The skills required are very different – high end tax investigation will require forensic accountants and lawyers.
The tuition fee bribe is a bribe no matter how you dress it up. I’m guessing that the ‘major wrong’ you are talking about is that people used to get free tuition, whereas now they don’t? That ignores the fact that far more people go to university now than used to (in part, because the income from tuition fees makes it possible to offer more places). And if it is a ’major wrong’ for people to be treated differently why is Labour so vague about what it will do about pre-existing student loans (saying hat it would be ‘dealt with’ during the election campaign, but then being ever so coy afterwards about what that actually meant).
And if Labour is so keen to address ‘major wrongs’ through different generations being dealt with differently, why is it proposing to impose VAT on private school fees? Wouldn’t it be a ‘major wrong’ that parents of children attending such schools would have to find 20% more after a Labour election victory than parents of children who had been privately educated in the past?
You missed my question by the way: What are your views on Labour planning to spend billions on the bribe and nationalisations whilst declining to reverse the benefits cap on the grounds of cost? Put another way, how do you think a food bank user would feel about Labour rejecting the notion of lifting the benefits cap on cost grounds whilst planning to give £7bn a year to predominantly middles class kids to go to university? Do you think he might consider that a ‘major wrong’?
Originally Posted by KerrAvon
Reply With Quote
