whence & thither

[ahinton]

But "benefiting the public" is not the same as "what the public [tbd] wants". There is a separate concept of 'the public good'.

Yes, of course; however, I was minded to cite "the benefit of the public" as such in specific response to your reference to "(how much the development) will benefit the public". The question remains, however, as to the extent to which either public or private orgnisations are capable of committing or willing to commit actions that "will benefit the public" in any given instance.

[Serial_Apologist]

http://www.theguardian.com/commentis...fficials-mipim

well that's how it is eh?

There was an item on this on the London lunchtime news - demonstrators outside the venue; Boris admitted by a side entrance to deliver a speech to the assembled landgrabbers and hangers-on "deploring" property prices rising beyond most people's affordability here yet welcoming investers to freeload from the opportunities London affords! {Grrr emoticon}

http://www.placenorthwest.co.uk/news/archive/16959-mipim-uk-don-t-punish-london-for-our-success-says-boris.html

[visualnickmos]

There was an item on this on the London lunchtime news - demonstrators outside the venue; Boris admitted by a side entrance to deliver a speech to the assembled landgrabbers and hangers-on "deploring" property prices rising beyond most people's affordability here yet welcoming investers to freeload from the opportunities London affords! {Grrr emoticon}

A classic example of the time-honoured tory tradition of lies and hypocrisy. He is certainly well-advanced in rehearsal for the top job - screwed up London, the whole country next.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

one is struck by the thought that all transfers of public assets have the character of icebergs, much more is happening below the surface:

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-vampire-squid-strikes-again-the-mega-banks-most-devious-scam-yet-20140212

and not just public assets:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/the-great-british-money-launderette-at-least-19-uk-firms-under-investigation-for-alleged-conspiracy-to-make-20bn-of-dirty-money-seem-legitimate-9797097.html

but never mind the Toff Boys' Cousins & Pals make their commissions no matter what happens ....

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

giving lie to the toff boys narrative

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

the new economic tundra is cold very cold

my favourite economist, a Houston taxi driver put it best "If I don't have a F*****g $, I can't F*****g spend it!" way back in 1980 ....

the small state austerity economics voodoo is creating a zombie economy .... the collusion of the mandarins, Bank and politicians in upholding the dogma leaves us no hope ...

with falling real wages , especially in the middle stratas of income, we can kiss the arts goodbye as everyone struggles to pay for the kids, the bills, the dentist etc ... and as Toynbee notes - a much bigger tax bill to subsidise wages


a source article just in case you think the Graun is making it up

a growing share of the value from productivity growth is absorbed by pensions and higher salaries for topearners

no shit sherlock!

further:

We analyse the role of financial sector workers in the huge rise of the share of earnings going to those at the very top of the pay distribution in the UK. Rising bankers’ bonuses accounted for two-thirds of the increase in the share of the top 1% after 1999. Surprisingly, bankers’ share of earnings showed no decline between the peak of the financial boom in 2007 and 2011, three years after the global crisis began. Nor did bankers’ relative employment position deteriorate over this period. We discuss proposed policy responses such as transparency, bonus ‘clawbacks’, numerical bonus targets and tax.

i do not want to reward any top person - their collusive contributions to national poverty are too great for that and they need to pay the kind of tax paid by the rich when i was a kid [95%] - not forever but for a goodly while ... top people have benefited greatly from the recession and its woes, have sharpened and deepened the impact upon the rest of us, and have no intent nor idea of changing anything for the good of all ...

Dear Mr Milliband please remember, it is the economy stupid!

[Demetrius]

The 95 % Income Tax years was the first golden age of tax evasion - if recreated, you will hit the honest among the wealthy (if you believe that any exist) or noone at all (if you don't).
Establish an income tax without exemptions, loopholes, special provisions for certain types of income etc. at around the 40 to 50 % mark for high incomes; won't push the rich to leave; won't give them many chances to evade (at least legally), might just force some tax lawyers to diversify, poor darlings. The top Incomes then provide 1/3 to 1/2 of the national tax revenue, which, given their small number, seems alright. The incentive to perform well is still there, especially for those among the wealthy who earn their money without being bankers. (There are, perhaps surprisingly, still companies that actually produce something of physical value)

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

oh the rich leaving is one of the major attractions of high tax rates ... their function is social and political rather than economic ... the bankers are stealing cash in huige volumes, they can just give it back ... tax or criminal assets recovery i don't mind [noticed that no main board members of banks that committed fraud on the selling of PPI have gone to trial and that all their large rewards and pensions are left intact ... no petty drug dealer is shown such largesse]

Throughout the late-1940s and 1950s, the top marginal tax rate was typically above 90%; today it
is 35%. Additionally, the top capital gains tax rate was 25% in the 1950s and 1960s, 35% in the
1970s; today it is 15%. The real GDP growth rate averaged 4.2% and real per capita GDP
increased annually by 2.4% in the 1950s. In the 2000s, the average real GDP growth rate was
1.7% and real per capita GDP increased annually by less than 1%. This analysis finds no
conclusive evidence, however, to substantiate a
clear relationship between the 65-year reduction
in the top statutory tax rates and economic growth. Analysis of such data conducted for this report
suggests the reduction in the top tax rates has had little association with saving, investment, or
productivity growth. It is reasonable to assume that a tax rate change limited to a small group of
taxpayers at the top of the income distribution would have a negligible effect on economic
growth. For instance, the tax revenue projected from
allowing the top tax rates to rise to their pre-
2001 levels is $49 billion for 2013 or 0.3% of projected 2013 gross domestic product.

here

[Demetrius]

rest assured, if they leave, they will take the money with them. The problem lies in keeping them from legally cheating everyone else (including certain types of "rewards"), as you point out.

your quote points out one thing for me: in the current taxation systems, the top rate has nothing to due with anything, especially not economic growth. If people can get themselves out of paying taxes, they will do so. A higher rate will only act as an incentive to put more effort into evasion. On the other hand, if they can't evade and have to declare all income, which is then taxed, a 95 % rate is not necessary.

Mind, I'd like to hit them as much as anyone, but I prefer to do so efficently, rather than in a dark room using a cotton ball as blunt instrument.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

my sympathies too Demetrius

[ahinton]

oh the rich leaving is one of the major attractions of high tax rates

But the rich don't actually have to "leave" Britain as such in order to avoid swingeing rates of tax because they can visit more or less when they choose and, within reason, for as long as they may choose (subject to the location from which they enter the country); they just have to be careful what assets they retain in their own name in Britain and where their incomes are sourced and taxed.

[Serial_Apologist]

Furthermore it appears that Homebase's recent decline in business turnover marks a new stage in all this: people either working such long hours to try and keep up with increasing everyday costs that they have no time or energy for DIY are saving up whatever spare time long hours work regimes permit just to be with their families or loved ones. Even grocery necessities are being provisioned more from small retail outlets than yesteryear's big supermarkets, such as a brand new Tescos outside Cambridge that has just been mothballed indefinitely, according to this lunchtime's News at One, customers no longer having the spare time for weekend sprees with the family heading for the local Tesco Express or wherever for just a few necessities as and when.

[ahinton]

Furthermore it appears that Homebase's recent decline in business turnover marks a new stage in all this: people either working such long hours to try and keep up with increasing everyday costs that they have no time or energy for DIY are saving up whatever spare time long hours work regimes permit just to be with their families or loved ones. Even grocery necessities are being provisioned more from small retail outlets than yesteryear's big supermarkets, such as a brand new Tescos outside Cambridge that has just been mothballed indefinitely, according to this lunchtime's News at One, customers no longer having the spare time for weekend sprees with the family heading for the local Tesco Express or wherever for just a few necessities as and when.

A case of what goes around,...

[Serial_Apologist]

A case of what goes around,...

Steve Machin's comment in the Grauniad article linked by Calum in #83 that low pay looks like becoming structurally permanent rather than just an aspect of economic recovery bears out something I wrote in one of my first political postings on this forum - namely that without concerted resistance there is nothing to stop the ruling class from reducing Britain, Greece, Spain or anywhere else to the status of a third world-type economy - one similar to that of Brazil in which the bourgeoisie fence themselves off in separate gated enclaves surrounded by CCTV and barbed wire, protected by armed guards and dogs. These are powerful people who mirror with more ruthless determination than any other sector of society the wider sharing of wealth in the same political terms of gains and losses as the labour and progressive movement that forms the yin to capitalism's yang, with the pendulum moving too far away from their control seen as symptomatic of loss of their power, which can only be secured when the masses do their bidding without question or being permitted the wherewithals to oppose either by legal or illegal means. All the time the options for progressive reform are whittled away leaving class struggle mediated only by resort to tactics of survival as the only alternative - unless anyone can come up with a better one?

Both UKIP and Green politics without the class component are merely postponing the historical denouement.

[ahinton]

Steve Machin's comment in the Grauniad article linked by Calum in #83 that low pay looks like becoming structurally permanent rather than just an aspect of economic recovery bears out something I wrote in one of my first political postings on this forum - namely that without concerted resistance there is nothing to stop the ruling class from reducing Britain, Greece, Spain or anywhere else to the status of a third world-type economy - one similar to that of Brazil in which the bourgeoisie fence themselves off in separate gated enclaves surrounded by CCTV and barbed wire, protected by armed guards and dogs. These are powerful people who mirror with more ruthless determination than any other sector of society the wider sharing of wealth in the same political terms of gains and losses as the labour and progressive movement that forms the yin to capitalism's yang, with the pendulum moving too far away from their control seen as symptomatic of loss of their power, which can only be secured when the masses do their bidding without question or being permitted the wherewithals to oppose either by legal or illegal means. All the time the options for progressive reform are whittled away leaving class struggle mediated only by resort to tactics of survival as the only alternative - unless anyone can come up with a better one?

Both UKIP and Green politics without the class component are merely postponing the historical denouement.

Whilst your point is duly taken, my concern here would be that if this kind of thing were to be allowed to develop unchallenged, even the wealthy might well ultimately find that their gated existences would be of less benefit than some of them might have hoped; this is where the sense of "we're all in this together" - however sickening the notion might seem to be in the particular context in which it is customarily paraded - actually takes on meaningful credibility, in that history has witnessed how the slave trade finally failed and there's no earthly reason to assume that it wouldn't do so again should it ever materialise on the scale that once pertained.