Originally Posted by
ragingpup
I’ll try to be clearer. By FACT I mean the amount that if you are the IFS, you take the amount of corporation profits at one point in time and perform a calculation of how much public revenue would be lost if (from that amount) if you cut 1% (or any other %) off the corporation tax. I’m taking it as a calculation based at any one point in time. This I presume is how the IFS arrived at the amount of 16.5 billion per year it could cost the public purse to cut 1% off the corp tax rates BEFORE (sorry about having to emphasise my key words using caps, I’m trying to help you understand) behavioural responses come into play. I acknowledge that at this point, the 16.5 billion becomes at estimate and I’m happy, if it makes you happier to refer to it as the IFS does, as an estimate.
So – I repeat, before behavioural responses, the IFS estimates that a 1% cut (or cut, as you like to say) costs the treasury £16.5 billion pounds. I accept that such a cut is likely to have a positive economic impact to some extent and would agree with the IFS points generally. But what I and others on here are primarily concerned about is to what extent does the benefits of such cuts to the economy:
1. Make its way back into public revenues to compensate for the huge amount of money lost annually to our services? You can provide no evidence of positive benefits to public services to justify such a cut to our purse. To be clear, I’m not denying that there will be reciprocal positive impacts to business and employees for such, but the world I see developing around me in recent years, in my work, in schools and from people who work in key services, the evidence is that money is being cut from services that is not coming back down. This is the fundamental aspect of what we are trying to get over to you. If these cuts don’t somehow lead to improvements in our public life and services, then your claims that it generates wealth doesn’t go far enough, and I think this is the crux of where you and us are so opposed.
2. Help to compensate for the job losses to the public services that such cuts have made in recent years. You blandly squirm around my question by saying that we have fewer public servants than it is desirable, but as you are pushing me to answer ridiculously unanswerable questions, I ask again: how many job losses in the public sector are you willing to accept for a further 1% cut on corporation tax?
Re: JRF foundation and the your rather comical observation that “selective quoting is a dangerous game”. Do you not see the irony in the FACT that you have read both reports and have done exactly that, using key quotes to back up your own world view? (I refer back to my initial reservations about re-entering this debate – that we would just end up quoting sources at each other, again!). But as it happens, I think it is fair for the JRF to point out (and for you to highlight) that there has been an improvement in poverty levels from the mid 90s, but crucially this stopped circa 2012 and since then the JRF have warned of a serious downturn:
• 400,000 more children are living in poverty than in 2012
• 300,000 more pensioners are living in absolute poverty than in 2012
• “Very little progress has been made in reducing poverty among working age adults”
When was the first corporation tax cut? 2010 when it was cut from 28% and has incrementally gone down every under successive governments to it’s current 20%. And if the IFS is estimating amounts to the effect of £16.5 billion per 1% cut, might it be that the huge amount being lost to the public revenues (with no evidence of it’s recovery and trickle down into either public life or services), might the amount of cuts, and the impact on the society we see around us be related?