Sunday Thoughts

I find it depressing than the super rich have been allowed to get away with murder and things like health and education have to be sacrificed to pay for the mess they have caused with their greed.

No one ever hears government saying the super rich need to be cut, that their offshore tax havens need to be shut down and that they should be made to pay

Instead its health, education, transport which has to be cut, squeezed and bled dry, with each political party trying to prove how macho they are when it comes to these cuts. Then there are the attacks on the most vulnerable of society by politicians hoping for catchy headlines and tabloid approval.

If there is the merest whiff that the super rich might have to ya know contribute to this planet we live in, they get smelling salts and threaten to leave. David Osler put it best

The idea that the rich should hand over a higher proportion of their income than the less well off has been a mainstay of the broadly progressive outlook since Lloyd George’s people’s budget of 1909, and it is high time the principle was restored.

It is not as if the elite live on another planet. It is unacceptable for a small number of plutocrats to pay little or nothing to the public purse, while benefiting disproportionately from the things for which it pays.

Even if they do use private hospitals and independent schools, who do they think foots the bill for the tax credits that subsidise the low pay on offer to many of their employees, the roads their chauffeurs drive them along, or the streetlights outside their offices, and to give just a handful of examples?

Favourite Letter Of The Week

This is a great letter to the Guardian

Simon Jenkins's assertion that the public sector should take a hit because it has been feather-bedded at the expense of the "productive sector" of the economy – when those flagships of the private sector, the banks, have just been handed hundreds of billions of public money – is a breathtaking inversion of reality (Crude, but fair. The public sector must take the pain, 16 September) .

Just how productive would that sector be without public sector education and training to supply its workers; public sector healthcare to keep them fit for duty; state benefits to subsidise poverty wages; publicly funded transport infrastructure to deliver their goods?

Most of what (foreign-owned) manufacturing still operates here does so thanks to massive government subsidy and tax breaks; those rugged free market champions, the farmers, would mothball their tractors without those nice subsidy cheques from the Brussels they affect to despise.

We all know who caused the meltdown, and it wasn't nurses, firefighters or even trade union barons. There is no excuse for not sticking it to the greedy, stupid, cynical bastards responsible, starting with a truly progressive tax system that goes right up to 100% and beyond of any bonus, incentive or backhander not directly and transparently earned by socially useful endeavour.

Root Cartwright

Radlett, Hertfordshire

I couldn't agree more, its a shame that the same people who got us into this mess have been let off with what to me seems a slapped wrist and are now leading the 'recovery'.

Why aren't the bankers, the elites being made to pay for the chaos they have caused?

Depressingly enough this will all happen again, bubbles will form faster and then burst faster.

Saturday Musings

'The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent' John Maynard Keynes

The great illusion those that work in the stock market have is that risk can be controlled, that they will find some magic trick to keep the money flowing and each time it proves a load of nonsense and we end up where we are today.

the conclusion is that the markets are more instinctive than rational, staggering volatile and driven by herd mentality, short-terminism and greed, always have been, you only need to study the Tulip bubble in the 17th century, or the collapse of Long Term Capital Management in 1998 but most city boys are under 30 and have probably never experience a recession, and each time they promise that 'it'll be different' and this has proven yet again to be a massive delusion, they just don't learn.

You can't do much about greed, because that will always be there but it is much worse when combined with stupidity.

The last time Britain was in a recession it lasted 15 months, so it is sure to be around the same and even longer this time.

Its such a joke, when Gordon Brown was Chancellor his belief in 'light touch' (read no regulation at all) has contributed to the current mess the UK is in. It was such a stupid idea to let the banks police themseleves, you'd have to be a serious moron to believe that they would be capable of restraint. Compare this situation to Spanish banks, which had much tighter regulation and thus avoided bad loans, the Spanish economy is not a picture of health but their banks are largely still standing.

People like Nouriel Roubini, Lib Dem MP Vince Cable etc. warned about this for months but were either ostracized or laughed at. But they proved to be true, they may not of been able to predict when but they could predict that it would happen.

I have a very simple solution, tax the super rich and stop giving them a free pass. I mean surely if your filthy rich you would not really miss some of your money being taxed, it hardly makes a ripple. But I forget that's how they got filthy rich in the first place, by avoiding tax and opening up a Cayman Islands account.

Further Reading

The Crisis Reaches the Master Class

David Osler - Britain in recession: time to debate ideological basics