Corbyn's question, taxes and "entitlement"

[vetran]

How do you know his body isn't occupying the house?

Actually AtW is right - the clue is in the word 'Living'.

[MicrosoftBob]

This is the problem with Corbyn. People's QE is great. But it needs to be tax cuts - not benefit increases.

Just as shocking is that people like her will let themselves into the spotlight. They should be ashamed.

But how will the non working class (sorry Labour voters) afford 60" 4k tellys, Sky TV and 3 holidays abroad a year without increasing their benefits

[Zero Liability]

But how will the non working class (sorry Labour voters) afford 60" 4k tellys, Sky TV and 3 holidays abroad a year without increasing their benefits

Burberry have also pushed up their prices again. Tough times.

[AtW]

Burberry have also pushed up their prices again. Tough times.

I hope it's not one of those essential for life items like plasma TVs that could push up the inflation.

[SpontaneousOrder]

Seems this is the crux of it. "Bleeding heart Lefties" claim that in a civilised society, everyone IS entitled to a reasonable standard of life - a comfortable home, acceptable food, education and healthcare.

That's actually not that radical a position really.

Depends how you phrase it. You chose to rephrase

"People should have to endure forced labour to fund other less productive people's standard of living"

as

"in a civilised society, everyone IS entitled to a reasonable standard of life - a comfortable home, acceptable food, education and healthcare.".

One is a statement of reality, the the other is a facile platitude.

[SpontaneousOrder]

There is a lot of nonsense spoken about rich and poor , mostly because either side can use any emotive rubbish to justify their position. The real poor and real rich are actually only very small fractions of the population and any political decision taken on the basis of rich or poor arguments will have minor impact on the rest of us , governments who make political decisions based on such arguments are doing it simply for that reason , public attention , nothing else , two of the most banded about arguments of the last 5 years are "tax the rich" and "prosecute benefit cheats" they know dam well that taxing the small 1% of the population that have such wealth will bring in very little extra revenue to help those on lower incomes and the amount of effort in prosecuting people who defraud the state also brings in very little extra income, simply because they have no money or assets.

A large part of politics is all about kings clothes arguments that generally result in little change and extensively use right and wrong to suck people in to the dogma , it most always results in little or no change and just keeps politicians who love to harp on about the parity between what should be and what is, employed.

I'd rarther pay them an extra 10K just to STFU.

Thomas Sowell is the man.

Rich vs poor fallacy -

EVERY TIME some new income statistics come out, two predictable fallacies follow in their wake. The first is that the rich are getting richer, while the poor are falling behind. The second is that the real income of American families has not risen significantly for years.

These fallacies return as regularly as the swallows returning to Capistrano, though not nearly as gracefully. A typical headline in the New York Times proclaims: "In A Time of Plenty, The Poor Are Still Poor." Yet study after study has shown that "the poor" do not remain poor in contemporary America.

An absolute majority of the people who were in the bottom 20 percent in 1975 have also been in the top 20 percent at some time since then. Most Americans don't stay put in any income bracket. At different times, they are both "rich" and "poor" -- as these terms are recklessly thrown around in the media. Most of those who are called "the rich" are just middle-class people whose taxes the politicians avoid cutting by giving them that name.

There are of course some people who remain permanently in the bottom 20 percent. But such people constitute less than one percent of the American population, according to data published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas in its 1995 annual report. Perhaps the intelligentsia and the politicians have been too busy waxing indignant to be bothered by anything so mundane as facts.

Alarmists are not talking about real flesh and blood people. They are talking about abstract categories like the top or bottom 10 percent or 20 percent of families or households. So long as all incomes are not identical, there will always be top and bottom 10 percents or 20 percents or any other percents. But these abstract categories do not contain the same people over time.

Households do not contain the same numbers of people, even at a given time.

The bottom 20 percent of households contains 39 million people, while the top 20 percent contains 64 million. Comparing households is comparing apples and oranges.

If you are serious about considering the well-being of flesh and blood human beings, then you can talk about their real income per capita. But alarmists avoid that like the plague, because it would expose their little game for the fraud that it is.

Real income per capita has risen 50 percent over the same span of time when household income has remained virtually unchanged. How is this possible?

Because households are getting smaller. The very fact that there are higher incomes enables more people to afford to go out and set up their own independent households.

Behind both the statistics on inequality that are spotlighted and the statistics on ever-changing personal incomes that are ignored is the simple fact that people just starting out in their careers usually do not make as much money as they will later, after they have had years of experience.

Who should be surprised that 60-year-olds have higher incomes and more wealth than 30-year-olds? Moreover, that was also true 30 years ago, when today's 60-year-olds were just 30. But these are not different classes of people. They are the same people at different stages of their lives.

At some times and places, there have been whole classes of people who lived permanently in poverty or in luxury. But, in the United States today, the percentage of Americans who fit either description does not reach beyond single digits.

It is one thing to be concerned about the fate of flesh and blood human beings. It is something very different to create alarms about statistical relationships between abstract categories.

Despite desperate efforts of activists to keep "hunger in America" alive as an issue by manipulating numbers, actual examinations of flesh and blood people show no nutritional differences between people in different income brackets. In contrast to the gaunt and undernourished poor of other times and places, Americans in the lower income brackets today are slightly more likely to be overweight than is the rest of the population.

The magnitude of statistical differences may tell very little about the condition of human beings. A two-to-one difference in the amount of food available would be very painful if it meant that those on the short end did not have enough to eat. But a thousand-to-one difference in price between wearing a Rolex and wearing a Timex is something that can be left to the alarmists -- especially since both watches tell time with about the same accuracy.

And both are a lot more accurate than "income disparity" hysteria.

[DieScum]

The article spins it one way and makes a compelling argument but it misses the real issue. It's child poverty.

You can say they shouldn't have had more kids but it doesn't help the actual children who are living, breathing, innocent kids. Poorer kids miss out on a lot of the things that richer kids take for granted.

This isn't about irresponsible parents having too many children. Large, or simply just poor, families can come about through death, divorce, remarriage. As a society we can afford to give all children a decent start in life and targeting tax credits at families helps that.

Having said all that I think the idea of poverty being widespread in the UK is a complete joke.

I read a thread on another forum of a bloke experiencing "poverty in the UK". He was made redundant a couple of months ago and after rent he was left with "only" 325 quid for bills, food and living expenses. Jesus wept. Not a penny in savings and apparently he's hungry all the time and is shocked that more help isn't available.

[DodgyAgent]

The article spins it one way and makes a compelling argument but it misses the real issue. It's child poverty.

You can say they shouldn't have had more kids but it doesn't help the actual children who are living, breathing, innocent kids. Poorer kids miss out on a lot of the things that richer kids take for granted.

This isn't about irresponsible parents having too many children. Large, or simply just poor, families can come about through death, divorce, remarriage. As a society we can afford to give all children a decent start in life and targeting tax credits at families helps that.

Having said all that I think the idea of poverty being widespread in the UK is a complete joke.

I read a thread on another forum of a bloke experiencing "poverty in the UK". He was made redundant a couple of months ago and after rent he was left with "only" 325 quid for bills, food and living expenses. Jesus wept. Not a penny in savings and apparently he's hungry all the time and is shocked that more help isn't available.

I would imagine that child poverty is linked to dysfunctional families and most likely those on benefits. The problem with welfare is that it strips away any sense of personal responsibility. It does not matter how much the benefits are the damage they do is tragic. The left see welfare as some sort of virtuous institution that paying people not to work is somehow good for them. Tax credits are a very good way of getting people to work and thus take responsibility - not only that but work gives people the opportunity to move up and earn more. Tax credits may cost us money but at least it is far better than just paying people to do nothing.

The real let down is public services and housing. If schools were outstanding, healthcare immediate and efficient and houses built that enabled everyone to buy there would be no need to be rich.

[DimPrawn]

[BrilloPad]

I would imagine that child poverty is linked to dysfunctional families and most likely those on benefits. The problem with welfare is that it strips away any sense of personal responsibility. It does not matter how much the benefits are the damage they do is tragic. The left see welfare as some sort of virtuous institution that paying people not to work is somehow good for them. Tax credits are a very good way of getting people to work and thus take responsibility - not only that but work gives people the opportunity to move up and earn more. Tax credits may cost us money but at least it is far better than just paying people to do nothing.

The real let down is public services and housing. If schools were outstanding, healthcare immediate and efficient and houses built that enabled everyone to buy there would be no need to be rich.

On sky news there was someone saying that 4 out of 10 children only get a warm meal at school.

And I bet in 99% of those cases the parents have money for fags, booze, mobile phones.

I know paying benefits in food/housing vouchers has disadvantages. But surely there are more advantages.....