I'm guessing that this is going to come and bite him big time.

[SupremeSpod]

I would argue that the problems are not because it's become morally unacceptable to make money but because it's become morally acceptable to use the making of money as an excuse to behave in a morally unacceptable way.

Are you saying that tax mitigation is immoral?

[Scoobos]

In my view <general disclaimer>

The hatred comes from the fact that with the Banking collapse and the subsequent bail out with PUBLIC MONEY - people know their enemy.

Inventing the term "banker bashing" isn't going to make people forget that the things that they took for granted in the social system are being systematically dismantled in order to fund a few fat cats.

Of course people are going to turn against the CEO's / MD's of massive multinationals , if they are getting public toilets closed in the name of austerity.

The victorians could afford some of the stuff we're trying to tell the public we cannot, its all just a big bloody scam. If a bailed out bank turns 1.1 billion profit, then whats wrong with wanting at least 20% of it back?

In Australia, Rudd took a different option - and injected $2000 per person back into the economy, in the form of a cheque from the revenue! This appears to have worked (they also have manufacturing and industry intact).

Here, we spend 3000 per head (approx) giving it to the banking system:

The Financial Services Club's Blog: How much have the bank bailouts cost UK taxpayers?

Are we surprised the educated middle to lower class are annoyed? really?

If we truely believe in market forces, then bank or no bank, we allow the rush... You have to believe that the market will kill poor performers and wean out the crap. Propping up failing businesses , does no one any good - especially if thats done by reducing costs and outsourcing your native workers in the name of shareholder returns to people who dont even live here.

[LisaContractorUmbrella]

In my view <general disclaimer>

The hatred comes from the fact that with the Banking collapse and the subsequent bail out with PUBLIC MONEY - people know their enemy.

Inventing the term "banker bashing" isn't going to make people forget that the things that they took for granted in the social system are being systematically dismantled in order to fund a few fat cats.

Of course people are going to turn against the CEO's / MD's of massive multinationals , if they are getting public toilets closed in the name of austerity.

The victorians could afford some of the stuff we're trying to tell the public we cannot, its all just a big bloody scam. If a bailed out bank turns 1.1 billion profit, then whats wrong with wanting at least 20% of it back?

In Australia, Rudd took a different option - and injected $2000 per person back into the economy, in the form of a cheque from the revenue! This appears to have worked (they also have manufacturing and industry intact).

Here, we spend 3000 per head (approx) giving it to the banking system:

The Financial Services Club's Blog: How much have the bank bailouts cost UK taxpayers?

Are we surprised the educated middle to lower class are annoyed? really?

If we truely believe in market forces, then bank or no bank, we allow the rush... You have to believe that the market will kill poor performers and wean out the crap. Propping up failing businesses , does no one any good - especially if thats done by reducing costs and outsourcing your native workers in the name of shareholder returns to people who dont even live here.

And you don't think that the banking crisis had anything to do with handing out mortgages like smarties with the insistence of the Government at the time as the housing market was the only thing propping up the economy? The fury at the banks is media and government generated as there has to be a scape goat so that the masses don't riot (often) and the government are hardly likely to 'fess up and say fair cop guv it was our profligate spending and bad management that caused this little pickle

[Scoobos]

we'll have to agree to disagree, though I also think people who took out mortgages at 100% on properties 8x their joint income was also bananas.

It's all bananas and we need to look at a different way than the mutated overgrown beast of multinational captialism we have now... In my opinion.

I know a guy who was on contract at one of the big banks during this, and ran - EVERYONE in treasury knew what was happening; he told me months before to warn my uncle regarding his fund (in the US) and was proven right.

The problems were caused by investing in pools - not the UK housing market, it had little to do with what happened in the US - that caused this, sub prime in the US and selling mortgage books to each other. (again, my personal view)

Oh and 1 thing we can all agree on, hopefully - is that "Dave" is a nob.

[alluvial]

Oh and 1 thing we can all agree on, hopefully - is that "Dave" is a nob.

Nope, I think he's more of a knob.

[doodab]

Are you saying that tax mitigation is immoral?

No. I'm saying that for the past 20 or 30 years big business has been happy to ride roughshod over consumers in the name of profit and the governments of the day have mostly let it happen, almost to the extent of letting them write their own rule books, with occasional intervention where things have really gotten out of hand. Executives of large corporations are legally obliged to put aside moral considerations and do what is best for the shareholders leading to a decision making calculus where human misery is measured only in terms of the cost of compensation.

If someone complies with the law then of course they must be considered as behaving reasonably, but a tax system that apparently allows someone with an income of several millions to pay a lower tax rate than someone on a below median income is inherently unjust. So yes, I would consider that some tax mitigation measures might be immoral, but an individual choice to exploit them when they are actually legal cannot be considered so. I would also argue that there is a certain dubiousness in the practice of tax advisers who seek ways to subvert the intent of the law while staying within the letter of it, in much the same way as a lawyer who defends a mass murderer and seeks to obtain his freedom on a technicality when his guilt is not in question is treading a very fine line.

Ultimately there is envy, anger and many other negative things sloshing around in the zeitgeist at the moment, but it seems to me this an inevitable consequence of an economic system that allows a wealthy few to get rapidly wealthier while leaving the majority little, if at all, better off. It's obviously not a state of affairs that the majority are intuitively going to consider just. There is more and more evidence from behavioural economics to suggest that human beings have a heuristic idea of "fairness" that they employ when acting in an economic capacity and a system that fails to acknowledge that is fundamentally flawed.

[doodab]

And you don't think that the banking crisis had anything to do with handing out mortgages like smarties with the insistence of the Government at the time as the housing market was the only thing propping up the economy? The fury at the banks is media and government generated as there has to be a scape goat so that the masses don't riot (often) and the government are hardly likely to 'fess up and say fair cop guv it was our profligate spending and bad management that caused this little pickle

The financial industry had it coming. For years they have been taking the piss with endowment misselling, pension misselling, ridiculous penalties for late fees, even ridiculous fees for paying off a loan early. Nobody liked them before the financial crisis, so to blame it all on a bit of media spin is frankly ridiculous. It's 50 years of frustration coming out, not 2 or 3.

[NotAllThere]

... a tax system that apparently allows someone with an income of several millions to pay a lower tax rate than someone on a below median income is inherently unjust...

No it isn't. If their absolute tax bill was less, then that would be unjust - but the tax bill of the person on millions is many times higher than the person on £20K a year. Tax rate is neither here nor there; high tax rates for the rich have been shown time and time again to produce less revenue for the government.

[moggy]

we'll have to agree to disagree, though I also think people who took out mortgages at 100% on properties 8x their joint income was also bananas.

It's all bananas and we need to look at a different way than the mutated overgrown beast of multinational captialism we have now... In my opinion.

I know a guy who was on contract at one of the big banks during this, and ran - EVERYONE in treasury knew what was happening; he told me months before to warn my uncle regarding his fund (in the US) and was proven right.

The problems were caused by investing in pools - not the UK housing market, it had little to do with what happened in the US - that caused this, sub prime in the US and selling mortgage books to each other. (again, my personal view)

Oh and 1 thing we can all agree on, hopefully - is that "Dave" is a nob.

agreed and the banks who approved the 8 times joint salary mortgages at 100% were just as bananas!!

[doodab]

No it isn't. If their absolute tax bill was less, then that would be unjust - but the tax bill of the person on millions is many times higher than the person on £20K a year. Tax rate is neither here nor there; high tax rates for the rich have been shown time and time again to produce less revenue for the government.

The optimal tax rate from the treasury's perspective is neither here nor there. To someone on 50k paying ~30% tax and struggling to make ends meet, someone earning millions and paying 25% is getting a far better deal, and telling him that screwing him harder than the other guy makes your life as a politician easier isn't going to end well. A politician can argue with him till he's blue in the face, at the end of it he'll decide the politician is a ****** and vote for someone else, because his fundamental inbuilt idea of what is and isn't fair says that he's getting screwed.

That is the fundamental problem. You need to reconcile the economics and mathematics of large scale systems with an intuitive idea of fairness that evolved in much smaller social groups. It requires a better metric of utility than cash.