Quote Originally Posted by KerrAvon View Post
I’m not clinging to anything. It was you that raised financial institutions when you said: Yes, the ifs have their opinion. But other financial institutions have theirs :and put over opposing arguments to the ifs. I asked you which financial institutions and you put up your links today to columnists in Left leaning publications.

The columnists that you linked to do not put up comprehensive arguments; they completely ignore the pension impact of Labour’s plans and one repeats the Labour myth that the rich are paying. The New Statesman ducks the issue by misrepresenting what the IFS said.

I will confess that I haven’t watched the canary video. I saw which site it was on and assumed that you were on the wind up. I’ll take a look at some indeterminate point in the future.


You are just not getting the economics of this, raging. Let me take you through it step by step to see if we can work out where you are going wrong:

1. If you take significantly more money from companies in taxation, then unless they are printing it, that money has to come from somewhere.
2. The companies affected by increased taxation have to take that money from their employees, their customers, or their shareholders.
3. If their shareholders take the hit in reduced dividends that means reduced income for pension funds that provide pensions for millions of working people.
4. Reduced income for pension funds means reduced pension fund growth that either has to be addressed by increased pension contributions (from those millions of workers) or reduced pensions (for those millions of workers).

Let me put it another way; when you say: You predict that it is inevitable that companies will inevitably pass on the costs to the people it serves (worker /customer/ahareholder. [sic] , which implies that you think there is another source. Which source do you have in mind? You raise the possibility of higher productivity as a solution, but don’t explain how that is to be acheived. Taking more money out of business is likely to reduce investment and reduce the option for increased productivity and it is a massive increase that you are calling for. It’s never easy to rasie productivity and your options are to have the same number of employees producing more or producing the same with fewer employees (or somewhere between those two points on a sliding scale.). So how many job losses are acceptable and why do you think companies haven’t raised productivity already if it is possible?

You might well believe it a mistake that that raising taxes – as Labour intend to – to the point where the overall tax burden on companies to will be the highest in the G7 and well in excess of both Germany and France and will make us uncompetitive, but, with respect, what has that got to do with anything? If Labour is elected, they are planning to do exactly that. Your views are irrelevant and my view is that we might all end up wishing that they hadn't.

And still nobody has offered a coherent argument as to why companies will choose to stay and be part nationalised and taxed to the hilt. HSBC and Unliever – both massive tax payers - have threatened to quit the UK in recent years. Why would they stay for Labour? Plenty more have the capacity to do so – a particular feature of the large British companies is that they often do far more business outside the UK than in it. Why stay in a country that makes you unwelcome?

I’m not being evasive about Miliband. I can’t recall the 2015 Labour policies and have no interest in looking them up. It was an anonymous phase in Labour’s history (just like Long-Bailey’s will be). I can’t recall how I voted in 2015 (but know that it wasn’t the Tories, because I have never voted for them in a General Election). It’s possible that I did vote Labour (one of the handful in the constituency where I live – If the Tories were to lose it they would probably be struggling to get very far into double figures).
I am completely getting the economics. Unlike you however I am accepting the IFS warnings but also weighing them up with alternative viewpoints from other economists (dress it up all you like but the three people I linked to are all economists) and balancing a whole picture which I find risky but on balance of the risks that we know are inherent in taking the conservative manifesto approach, keeping the same track and continuing to underfund essential services and in turn leading to the unnecessary suffering and deaths of countless more UK citizens, I am (despite my stated reservations on how Labour have over reached) hoping that voters opt to try something different. Whereas you are simply presenting the IFS findings as the whole picture and as a certainty.

I think it quite possible that tax hike on business could result in a mixture of some firms taking hit on profits and protecting customers/employees/shareholders, some will do a mixture of all of these. Some that are able to will move to wherever they can find where they can retain their present profit rates. But corporation tax would still, at the maximum increase, be where it was in 2010 and companies traded then. WE have in recent years (40 years) traded business profits at the expense of social services and infrastructure and we need to redress the balance. There will be winners and losers under these proposals, and it is likely that there will be impact in jobs/shares/pensions/prices as the balance is re-addressed. But the market will still operate to create wealth and jobs, keep prices competitive and keep employees happy. For those that lose out to whatever extent in shares/pensions/prices we have the benefits of vastly improved services, health and social care, technology and transport infrastructure etc. We can holler questions and arguments at each other til we’re blue in the face. We aren’t going to convince each other. The bottom line is that I am willing to take the risk for change (and it isn’t just taking risks with other people’s money, this affects my job too) but you feel the risk is too foolishly big to take. That’s fair enough. But that does mean that you will be left with the same deterioration as before as services struggle to keep up with demand. Maybe you could join Fire’s side and argue to remove immigrants? I can’t think of anything else that you could do. You’re repeated failure to tell me what you would like to see happen, from any party, to improve public services and care suggests that you have no idea, that it isn’t politically solvable and therefore you support doing nothing? I know a party that supports that!