(no subject)

[ewx]

High taxes so the state can reduce inequities or low taxes because people are better at deciding how to spend money than states are?

Encourage immigration to help grow the economy and support our aging population, or discourage it to reserve jobs for the people already here?

More speed cameras, because people can't be trusted with fast cars, or higher speed limits, because they can?

Abolish the monarchy as anachronistic and undemocratic, or preserve it as an important element of constitution and tradition?

Subsidize local producers to preserve traditional ways of life, or cut subsidies and give the rest of the world a chance to improve itself through trade?

Stay in the EU, or leave? Let Turkey in, supposing it carries through its reforms, or keep it out at all costs?

Longer prison sentences, or try to rehabilitate criminals?

Bring back the death penalty, or not?

Get out of Iraq now, or stay (and maybe take out Iran's enrichment facilities)?

Dozens more nuclear power stations, ubiquitous wind farms or import gas from unsavoury eastern regimes?

What should be done about pensions? (Abolish means testing on the grounds it discourages saving? Higher taxes to support retired baby-boomers? Encourage or force people to save for themselves?)

Comments

[nmg.livejournal.com]

These are all rhetorical questions, right?

[ewx.livejournal.com]

If they were rhetorical, I'd have included the fox hunting question.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

High taxes so the state can reduce inequities. Encourage immigration to help grow the economy but be very firm with the new population about the common core of values that are expected of residents. More speed cameras, and hide them, but higher speed limits in some places where it's safe. Preserve the monarchy because doing anything about it would be a distraction and a big hassle, but as an important element of tradition, not constitution. Subsidize local producers to preserve traditional ways of life in a few very specific cases, but mostly cut subsidies and give the rest of the world a chance to improve itself through trade. Leave the EU if we can't fundamentally change the rules of our engagement. Give Turkey the free trade benefits and structural support for reform, but not membership. Longer prison sentences. Bring back the death penalty as a choice for people who will be imprisoned for life, possibly, not sure about this. Stay in Iraq for as long as the Iraqi government wants us to. Keep a close eye on Iran. Various sources of power, but some of it will probably have to be nuclear in the medium-term. Fund pensions out of higher inheritance tax, means-tested support for the worst off pensioners, and state-backed equity release on homes, eg allow Council Tax to be taken as a charge against the estate, not a revenue bill.

VOTE FOR ME!

[scruff.livejournal.com]

Not really relevent, but I love that icon ^.^

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Apparently he's turned into a fat animal lately, I haven't seen him in a year or so...

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Fund pensions out of higher inheritance tax, means-tested support for the worst off pensioners, and state-backed equity release on homes, eg allow Council Tax to be taken as a charge against the estate, not a revenue bill.

You've done your homework: last time I looked, that view existed in a small number of policy think tanks and economists in correspondence with Frank Field MP.

I would agree with all your points, except this one:

High taxes so the state can reduce inequities

The policies are already in place to reduce inequities: the minimum wage, the imposition of external standards in education, and the beginnings of a progressive welfare system. Better implementation - and welfare reform - would do far more than 'tax-and-spend' and, ironically, give scope for tax cuts.

We already have high taxes: if you earn half the income of a GP in partnership in a suburban practice, you are on higher rate tax. Is that anyone's definition of rich?

Now think how much tax that is: with NI contributions, that's 51 pence in every extra pound you earn. No, sorry, we missed out the hidden tax on income: employers NI contributions. Another 9%. Much of what you buy out of the remainder is taxed as VAT - the effective rate is difficult to calculate but can be estimated as 4%. Council tax. Fuel taxes and road tax. The disgraceful ACT deduction from pension funds.

However you look at it, the middle classes face a marginal tax rate of two-thirds of their earnings, and an effective tax rate well over 50%.

Bear in mind that these people are sufficiently valuable to their employers that their availability in the workforce is insured by private health schemes (the ethos of precursor schemes to the NHS!) and they pay a fortune in securing and insuring their property against criminals: both these expenses are payments in lieu of failings of the state, as we define it's role in Britain. We won't cover the particular problems of education in London.

Like my season ticket - well over a grand a year - I question whether I'm getting what I'm compelled to pay for. Still higher taxes would greatly increase the inequities, by the simple analogy of my ripping up the season ticket and buying some German bourgemobile to commute to work: the rich - or those on half a Doctor's income - will go flat out to avoid tax, having the skills and financial incentives to do so, and will eventually vote their way out of all participation in the Social Contract. Take a look at the demographics of suburban and inner-city America for the result: the middle classes have no common interest in educating the poor, and are fiscally segregated from all liability to do so.

I believe that even higher taxes in Britain will result in economic contraction, a taxpayer revolt, and at least two terms of well-financed and widely popular rabidly libertarian government. Picture a society of gated communities with security guards, private schools and hospitals: an aspirational lifestyle for the half of the population with skilled jobs, and no reason to care about the world outside the walls. What would they ever know? The news media they choose to buy will never say a word about it, except to convince them that the Surbiton Community Wardens PLC are doing a splendid job of policing the community security boundary, and that everyone has made The Right Decision.

I happen to believe that we have common values, and in the common good, and that the state can and should provide those things which we can do better collectively than as individuals. But even higher taxes are far more divisive and inequitable than you realise.

Of course, it could be that you meant 'High Taxes' rather than 'Higher Taxes'.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

You've done your homework: last time I looked, that view existed in a small number of policy think tanks and economists in correspondence with Frank Field MP.

What can I say, I live at the cutting edge of modern political debate. It's a shame really that Frank Field isn't more prominent at the moment, he's got it all more or less sorted.

Is 31,400 my definition of rich? Well, it would do me, but I take your point. On the other hand, is 40% my definition of high tax? Probably not either.

I'm puzzled at your suggestion that the problems which exist in America were caused by excessive levels of taxation, I haven't had this suggested to me by any non-libertarians.

Apart from that, tax needs shuffling (let's cut VAT for a start), but I'm afraid you won't get very far trying to tell me that the British Middle Class are overtaxed, and I think you overestimate the abilities of accountants, if the government is determined that people will in fact pay. As a percentage of GDP we tax below the OECD average, never mind the EU average.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

I'm puzzled at your suggestion that the problems which exist in America were caused by excessive levels of taxation, I haven't had this suggested to me by any non-libertarians.

The massive outward migration to the suburban counties of the USA is one of the greatest - and least studied - population movements of the 20th Century. Early on, it was an aspirational thing - the 'rus in urbe' ideal, escape from the industrial city environment, tract housing with gardens. Later, there were ugly overtones of 'White Flight'. But as the movement gathered momentum, it became fiscally attractive. In extreme cases, near-compulsory.

Here's why: externalisation of costs. You live and pay taxes in a suburban county, you work in the city. You've escaped paying the high costs of the city's infrastructure, which is intrinsically expensive because of the demands placed upon it (partly by you!) and also in need of repair and replacement. Unlike the newly-built and low-maintenance utilities of your nice new suburb.

You've escaped paying for schooling, housing and policing people who don't earn as much as you do - and as a middle-class American, you're pretty low-maintenance and self-supporting anyway, so the social spending in a suburban county of like-minded people is going to be very, very low. Unless you choose to vote more for the County School Board, which sounds like a good thing to do.

Also, for some reason, the suburb consists of relatively wealthy people and the tax burden is relatively low - everyone's pulling their weight. This is the most severe inequity in America today, because the burden of taxation in the inner cities fell on the people who remained, and their average income kept on going down as the flight to the suburbs continued. You can't tax people on the welfare roll, you can only tax people with taxable earnings and so the tax rate in the cities rose, and rose, and rose.

That's the fiscal incentive to the suburban segregation of the United States. It is a major factor preventing the return of the families to the regenerating districts of Manhattan and Brooklyn: sure, it's fashionable to be there in a warehouse loft when you're young and free but there's a major financial incentive to move out to the 'burbs when the kids arrive.

It's not so much excessive levels of taxation that caused these problems (though yes, libertarians do say that) as a failure of taxation policy. Rising taxes in the inner city were a part of that failure: without redistribution across county boundaries, they had to rise, and still the tax take fell as more of the highly-taxed moved out. That movement was, of course, pushed further by an accelerating decline in the urban environment: the tax take fell below the level required to support tolerable policing, schooling and environmental maintenance.

It's difficult to isolate cause and effect in a vicious circle, but easy enough to see that the the social compact can break down - and high taxation will induce taxpayer revolt, with a physical, fiscal or political mass migration to a much harsher society.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Sure, but that's an argument about distribution of taxes, not overall tax levels - the answer is probably higher taxes for some people, to create more positive conditions in run-down areas. It's an argument about placing too much of the burden locally, and it's part of the one we're having in the case of the balance of funding review of council tax really, isn't it? There'll always be tensions between having one system for areas which are fundamentally different, and two systems when actually they need to work together - there's a rural deprivation problem here, which is about having any services at all - if you don't have a critical mass of people who need them, why have schools, medical centres, bus services, or post offices?

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

In what sense are income taxes not a cost for employers rather than for employees? The £N/month at the top of my payslip doesn't get to me in any sense, except that people asking after my income to see if I can afford a house for some reason want to hear that figure; if only I could pay mortgage repayments out of pre-tax income, that makes sense. The issue is that, to get me the £0.76N/month for which I'm willing to work, my employer is having to pay out of revenue £1.09N/month or so, so I have to produce 50% more for my employer than I'm prepared to take home.

This is an argument against employing people, but I don't see what effect it has on me as an employee: an income-tax rise comes to me simply as a pay cut.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

In a strict sense, none. The same amount of money is transferred from the Employer's salary account to the employee's, whether taxes are levied on one account, or the other, or deducted at the point of transfer.

Perception is another matter. Employers perceive themselves taxed for the privilege of employing you, when they pay employers' NI; you perceive yourself as taxed when you pay your own stamp, and the income tax.

French and German people don't perceive themselves as taxed when their employer is hit with ever-higher payroll taxes, and they keep on voting for governments that do exactly that. Companies, of course, have no vote - and MEDEF (the French Employers' Federation) has very little influence over socalist governments. Precious little over any other, either.

Which brings us to the point: who negotiated it? If French unions, or ours, could mandate a transfer of all income taxes to the employers' salary account, and negotiate that salaries stay constant in all tax regimes with the employer making up the balance, would we have a fiscal paradise?

Bear in mind that I worked for years in a company that bit the bullet on the one-off costs of sacking cosseted French and German employees, and transferred their jobs in a steady stream to London. Those that moved here were paid a lot more salary, for a lot less cost to their employer. The Parisians were miffed to have lost the legal and contractual 'job security' they used to have; the realists (ie the new Londoners) knew full well that a job is only secure if it's economically viable. And an electorate that votes the bills onto 'someone else' lives in a fantasy world, not in a viable economy.

And that's it, really: you pay the taxes in a way that makes it quite clear how much you pay for voting tax-and-spend. Anything else is an expensive and futile lie that will eventually cost you your job.

[megamole.livejournal.com]

Am an Evil Neocon Fascist^W^W^W One Nation Tory, so my answers are:
[1]a [2]a [3]b (or else do what they do in Singapore, and put compulsory lights on cars that flash when the car is over the limit)
[4]b [5]b [6.1]a [6.2]a [7]a [8]a [9]a [10]b (wind farms) [11]c
(waits for the lynch mob).

[mtbc100.livejournal.com]

High taxes with lots of openness about how spending decisions are made, including citation of evidence.

Encourage immigration for immigrants who are likely to be economically active, which is a lot of them. We need to work on integration, though, which doesn't mean we make them more like us.

More speed cameras *and* higher speed limits. Current limits are very poorly enforced. Also spend more time having police out looking for the many cases in which people are going under the speed limit but too fast for the conditions: the safe speed depends a lot on the current and recent weather, the car, the driver's current state, etc.

Preseve the monarchy, for now. It doesn't much get in the way and works fairly well, at least until constitutional reform can be rather better thought out. Recent reforms seemed to me to be based more on ideology than evidence.

Cut subsidies, lower trade barriers, provide aggressive relief and retraining for workers in declining industries.

Stay in the EU but also work to spread values and encourage trade with Commonwealth and NAFTA countries. Let Turkey in, if it properly reforms.

Not longer prison sentences, but maybe harsher ones. Definitely more rehabilitation, including diagnosis, training, etc.

No death penalty.

Get out of Iraq as occupiers pretty quickly; install a representative government to whom we offer strong benefits for inviting us to stay and do various things. Similarly with Iran: offer them significant nice things, including a mutual defence pact, for not pursuing nuclear things.

Use more nuclear power, but under very open inspection. (AFAIK, many nuclear incidents have been caused by people cutting corners or doing other patently daft stuff: more to do with human stupidity than technological failings.) Aggressively fund pursuit of alternatives: hot fusion, petrol-substitutes from crops or dead chickens, etc.

Pensions: no means testing, higher taxes, softly-higher retirement age (e.g. government guarantees they will find a part-time job it's reasonable to have you if they don't want you fully retiring yet).

[gerald_duck]

My (long) answers are here.

[the-aviator.livejournal.com]

According to Beeb News (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/3944579.stm), the Queen is to be decommissioned shortly anyway:

The company of HMS Inverness, based at the Faslane base on the Clyde, has been given the Freedom of the City.

The Sandown class vessel is being decommissioned as part of the Government's defence restructuring.

The ship shares the honour with the Queen and two regiments, the Highlanders and the Highland Gunners.

[aldabra]

You wouldn't like to ask these one at a time over a fortnight, so we can have seventyeight deep meaningful conversations rather than one unmanageable heap?

[mtbc100.livejournal.com]

He'll do that on GROGGS instead. (-:

[ewx.livejournal.com]

The original context (which I'd link to except it's not universally readable) was someone asking "which party should I join", so the combination of all the questions isn't entirely gratuitous. I might trickle them out once per week day though, weekends not exactly being prime time round here...

[gerald_duck]

Aha! I was wondering where this was leading.

Given my answers, I suspect the answer is "God alone knows". I intend to wait until nearer the time, and then vote tactically.

Unless voting for a Labour party run by George Brown (with Blair, Blunkett and Straw out on their ear) is an option by then, in which case I have an easy and relatively attractive choice. Perhaps.

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

I assume you mean GORDON Brown, rather than a rhetorical Labour Party run by the late and often inebriated member for Belper?
If so, AND if all this wasteful, sinister and downright un-British ID card nonsense is dropped immediately, AND with those three aforementioned goons out of the way (and you can add Hoon, Reid, and C. Clarke to that list) - I might, just might, seriously consider voting Labour for the first time since 1997. Until then I'm stuck with either the LibDems or the Greens, depending upon who's on the slate in my ward/constituency.

[gerald_duck]

Erk! Yes. Braino — sorry.

Gordon Brown is, indeed, whom I meant.

Now you mention it, there are quite a few complete fools in the current cabinet, not just the ones I thought of. Conversely, many of the more sensible people like Robin Cook and Chris Smith have been given the shove (along with the complete no-hopers like Byers).

As I said, relatively attractive. Perhaps.

[angoel.livejournal.com]

Medium Taxes. There are a number of things that the state can do more effectively than individual companies - the natural monopolies - and it should do these well. For the other things competition usually seems to work out better in the long run. With regard to reducing inequalities, I don't believe that redistributive taxation works - salaries will just move about to provide similar remuneration as in the current system, but with different taxes being paid. What does need to be done is that money needs to be put into creating a decent education system, which involves paying teachers better.

Similar, or slightly more relaxed immigation rules as there are currently.

Sensible speed limits, enforced sensibly. At the moment, there are spots where the speed limit is overly slow and so everyone ignores it. These should be regraded at the speed that actually reflects the sensible maximum speed.

Keep the monarchy. An important element of tradition.

Cut subsidies, and give the rest of the world a chance. Subsidies should possibly be given, but more for stewardship of the land, rather than throwing chemicals about and producing as much as possible.

Stay in the EU, but try to reform it to improve transparency, accountability, etc.

Rehabilitate criminals. I think that anti-social behaviour orders, for example, are a very useful tool.

Don't bring back the death penalty.

I don't really know enough about the international situation to give a sensible view on Iraq and / or Iran. I do think that trying to cut or at least diminish the support for Israel from the USA would be a positively good thing, though.

More nuclear power stations. In the same way that the deaths from roads far outweigh the deaths on the railways, the environmental impact of coal fired and gas power stations is way bigger than that of nuclear power. 'Green' power is all very well, but it's not very practical, and environmentalists nimby an awful lot of sensible proposals.

I think that a key to pension provision is pension that people pre-fund while they are at work, because this helps to mitigate population profile problems. In that line, I think that getting rid of the tax rebate on pension funds was stupid as it gets rid of one of the main incentives to pre-fund for both the individuals and the employers who often provide pensions. With regard to the base pension, I do think that decreasing means testing a lot would be useful to get rid of beaurocracy, and make things simpler to understand.

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Taxes about where they are now (you decide if that's high or low) but apportioned more in line with actual public opinion (e.g. less on wars and more on education/health).

Immigration, but - argh - perhaps with stringent suitability-to-work or existing-job-offer criteria? We wouldn't be the only place to do that if so.

More speed cameras where they can be proved to work, lower speed limits in most places, higher speed limits on motorways (but lower ones, more strictly enforced, during adverse weather conditions). There's no need for anyone (bar emergency vehicles) to do more than 20mph in housing estates, but 70mph is now 'slow' on motorways, and higher speeds work well (I-90 in South Dakota, for instance, is 75mph, and Germany has 81mph as a guide but in fact has no upper limit on most autobahns).

I like constitution, tradition, and also economic lure (the decorative teatowel industry would collapse without them).

Subsidize, or the employment situation gets even worse. The rest of the world has a big market without us anyway, and there are good structured programmes in place for the most needy/improving. There's also the variety argument - we're losing a lot of native species (many hundreds of types of apples, for instance) because they're no longer economically able to compete with bland corporate Golden Delicious and so on.

Leave the EU - but if we stay, give Turkey a fair chance to follow through on promises.

Rehabilitation and education before the fact too. Start much younger, and try to improve the general attitude of the populace towards crime. (No matter how small-l liberal one is, there are very few good arguments in favour of arson, burglary, etc., but far too many people seem to characterise their burglar relatives as 'loveable rogues who mean no harm'.)

No death penalty.

Argh. We shouldn't be there, but what do we leave behind if we go right now? And will we be blamed for it for ever more? (And what will that lovely Mr Bush do to us if we back out now? Do we trust him not to bomb us and claim he thought we were France?)

Um. Dunno. Wind farms probably.

Pensions do my head in, it's all so much of a mess I don't know where to start thinking about it.