Each side of the political divide has a different take on the best solutions to the debt mire and flatlining economy. This report, entitled 'Project Armageddon' asks: what if both sides are wrong? And if they are, just how fucked are we? [PDF]
tullettprebon.com/Documents/strategyinsights/...Posted Nov 29, 2011, 4:14 PM UTC
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"Britain has no automatic entitlement to high quality of living or to a welfare state" and "Choices will have to be made between economic efficiency on the one hand and spurious concepts of ‘fairness’ on the other" make their theoretical framework fairly clear. They call specifically for major deregulation of business, in case you were still guessing.
In other words, a bunch of self-serving hard-right tosh.
The report is from a brokerage firm, so the lack of cuddliness is unsurprising, don't you think? It's not 'right wing tosh' though, however much you might feel it oozes Tory. The thinking in this report is fairly dry and factual. The slant is expressed from the mindset most apparent amongst the people who have the world bought and paid for. Read beyond the bits that make you want to spontaneously break out the Internationale and get some insight into the mind of your enemy.
Anyway, what's your solution to the general state of fuckedness?
Here's a radical solution:
Tax all income, regardless of source, at the current highest rate of tax. Abolish National Insurance and tax banding. Remove the minimum wage, together with all tax credits and means-tested benefits. Provide a "citizen's income" paid by the state to all long term residents (people who've lived here with a right to work for more than 6 months) that's sufficient to cover basic human needs - sensible rent, food, water, heating etc - and the cost of getting to job interviews.
In such a world, some people will continue to not work - but they already do, they just scrounge the system. Some people will do weird working patterns - 3 months here, 6 months there, 2 days elsewhere. Firing is less painful for the bottom rung of workers; the highest rung pay more in than they ever have before.
That sounds like a sensible idea. It could go further to include a citizens dividend. I can't find the precise figure, but I remember reading a while back that close to 40 percent of tax revenue is swallowed up by administrative, compliance and general bureaucratic bollocks costs. A citizens income could not only lubricate the UK's social and economic functioning, but would make government intrinsically more efficient by - thus perhaps making lefties and righties happy.
Feeling deathly tonight, so please excuse brevity.
Political doctrine? Ha.
I don't have a solution; I'm not an economist. I'm a writer. But I feel that deregulating businesses further is likely to serve the economic powerbase rather than the populace at large. Seems like "The sheep are starving, so let the wolves do what they want." I don't doubt the diagnosis; I'm just leery of the treatment.