Rich wankers always promise to leave - Phil Collins, Paul Daniels, but they never do. Let's try to get a written contract and sue if they don't. Paying tax is a social duty from which we all benefit. We should be publicly shaming corporations and individuals who evade it.
Tuesday 6 October 2009
Bye Tracey! Take Damien with you?
Tracey Emin is planning to leave Britain because tax will rise to 50% on any money earned over £150,000. Brilliant. All those one-joke, limited, attention-seeking ligging artists whose work is funded and bought by shyster Tories like Saatchi can get lost: they're the spirit of vacuous, consumerist 90s Britain, rather than commentaries on it.
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10 comments:
So you are criticising people who have worked hard, made a good living for themselves and are now being unfairly taxed?
Socialism never fails to amuse me.
A: they haven't worked hard. Hirst employed a team of people on very low wages who worked hard. Despite selling one very poor piece of work (the diamond skull) for £50m, he sacked a load of them.
B) 'Making a good living' through being a charlatan should be criticised
C) They aren't being unfairly taxed. They're being taxed more than fairly. Under Thatcher in the early 80s, they were taxed at 80%+.
Apart from that though, you're spot on.
But that's only a few specific people. Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Phil Collins...got no time for any of them.
But there's lots of genuinely hard-working people who will be hampered by this tax rise. Where's the motivation to work harder? To aspire to more?
"You should revel in your status, not in the money you have" New Labour will shout. But that same Government has had a love-in with the banks for the past decade, as well as fiddling things to get as much dosh as possible. Hypocritical.
And for all young voters - we don't remember Thatcher's reign. As awful as it was, this is of no interest to us now. Please stop banging on about what someone did in the 80s, and address what you are going to do now.
Not you, specifically! I mean Golden Brown and his cronies.
There aren't 'lots' of people who will be affected by this - it's less than one per cent of the population, who mainly make their money from socially useless activities such as banking, speculation and professional sport. Taxing them progressively more is fair - they benefit from public services even more than others.
Why should the megarich aspire to more? How many yachts should everyone have?
There's little point criticising me for New Labour's hypocrisy - I've been making that point since 1994.
Ewar, I'm disappointed by your rejection of the lessons of history. How can you understand the present if you don't know anything about the past? Especially a recent, relevant past in which the seeds of the current disaster were sown - monetarism, the Chicago Boys, deregulation etc. etc.
You know my prescription for the future - a Tobin tax, higher taxes, nationalisation of the means of production, camps for dissenters.
Just because it affects a small proportion is irrelevant - if you did a survey tomorrow the majority of people in the UK would bring back the death penalty - but that does not make it right. Majority rule is sometimes a scary thing, as is pandering to the majority.
Banking is not socially useless. Yes, they are bastards at times, but I'm happier with my thousands in a savings account and not in a shoebox under my bed.
I'm not talking about the "megarich" here - I'm talking about the people who work hard, and move up the ladder. If they are scared off by taxation though, it will discourage them from progressing.
And this is the problem I have with Socialism in a nutshell - I am absolutely not a Tory, and I dont think this is Tory babble, I just believe that it's the miracle of capitalism that is allowing me to sit here typing this to you on a laptop computer whilst I'm watching a TV which is insanely huge and offers me hundreds of channels. Some of us like progress, we like change, we like ambition. We don't want to live in communes.
Rejection of history thing is a little different - I'm aware of the nightmare Tory era, and what it spawned. As I'm not a Tory, I don't like it anymore than you do. But that point was more about New Labour: I paid a lot of attention to their conference, and every single day some Labour person started blathering on about what the Tories did years ago.
This Labour government has been in power now for 12 years - so there is no reason to keep on banging on about what the Tories did 20 years ago. As WWE wrestler John Cena once said: "Don't tell me what others have done, or what you did in the past. Tell me what you've done for me recently".
I know which people to quote, Voley. Oh, I know.
"We should be publicly shaming corporations and individuals who evade it."
Hear bloody hear Vole!
I don't want to get mixed up in the war of words above but I can't understand why anyone earning £150k wouldn't want to contribute a massive chunk of that towards ensuring others survive with a reasonable standard of living. There's only so obscenely big a house can get.
Ewar, I'm not talking about retail banking (although their recklessness with mortgages is reprehensible), I'm talking about wholesale banking, reinsurance, CDOs and investment banking - hedging, shorting etc - this is where the serious money is made, not in retail banking.
An example. Shares were invented so that a company could raise money for investment - new factories, perhaps - buy selling a part of the future profts to investors. This seems sensible to me.
Then shares became commodities traded without regard to the underlying qualities of the issuing company, leading to volatility. The company was then at the mercy of traders who were uninterested in the company's prospects, because they could turn a profit if the price altered fractionally overnight, so a company's investment plans were dependent on people who didn't care about it.
Then short-selling appeared: borrowing some shares, selling a massive amount of them in one go, leading to a price drop, at which point you buy them back and return them to the owner, keeping the difference between what you sold them for and what you bought them back for.
If you're a company looking to build a new factory and your share price halves overnight, you don't get to expand, however good your prospects - but some yuppy in London/Tokyo/New York has made millions. Oh yes, and any pension fund which has invested in your company for the long term is now also broke, and so are its pensioners.
Ewar - more stuff isn't progress - it marks social poverty, environmental destruction and atomisation. The 'miracle' is built on credit (debt) and near slave labour, conducted in far away countries. I'd be well up for the 'more stuff' argument if that applied to the world's population, but it doesn't: we're grabbing an obscene amount of the world's wealth by outsourcing the work and keeping the money.
I'm ambitious and progressive - I want a more equitable, less consumerist society in which we all rise together.
I should also point out that the richest, happiest, safest societies in the world are the ones which have the highest tax rates: Norway, Sweden, Denmark. There very much is a link. New Zealand's not far off either. They believe in the common good - we've been conditioned to believe that that drags us down as individuals (it's there from the 17th century literature).
Lou - do you really think that the rich actually want to contribute? Why do you think that 'tax efficiency' services are so profitable? It's a huge industry dedicated to helping the greedy rich hide their cash, by tricks such as 'non-domicile'.
You're being far too public-spirited. The rich resent the rest of us. They do buy bigger houses, yachts, second homes, bigger cars and Damien Hirst 'art'. Gibbon pointed out that Rome fell when the rich stopped building public libraries, baths etc, and started building higher walls around their estates. This was also true in revolutionary France. In the US, it was expected in the 19th century that the rich should invest in public works, if only to keep revolution away (hence Carnegie's free libraries, and Bill Gates's fund) - this has broken down here.
Ewar - I don't see a distinction between the Tories (who instituted free market monetarism in the UK) and New Labour, which consciously jettisoned social democracy in order to get elected. I'm not a supporter, and I see the ideological arguments underlying the changing labels.
That said: minimum wage, sure start, tax credits. For all his idiocy, Gordon Brown did save capitalism (unfortunately), whereas the Tories openly campaigned against regulation and explicitly advocated doing nothing while the high street banks failed. So actually, Labour is a better bet.
Almost forgot. I didn't call the financial sector 'socially useless' - Hector Sants, the head of the FInancial Services Authority did. He runs the regulatory authority, so he should know.
After only having about 4 hours sleep, and suffering from man-flu, I have no choice but to acknowledge your comment and accept that you are right. About everything.
But that's what I like about politics - I hate the bastard Tories as much as you do, but we can still have a healthy debate about stuff. Played, sir.
Always a joy, Ewar. Hope you recover soon.
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