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Why this presumption that "public" is better than "private"?
How do you knwo? Prove it? Just shows what you know about business! Its not just profit otherwise it'd be a very short road to travel down.
You don't know much about railways.
One reason for a lot of the problems which afflict the British railway system is that they were entirely built by private companies, for profit, on the cheap and without any direction from government. Hence, the network lacks coherence and many of the lines are too twisty and too lightly laid. The railways in private hands made only small profits after the initial 'railway mania,' and the duplication of services and multiplicity of locomotive and coaching stock types were very inefficient - as the government found out to its cost when it took the railways over for war service. The 1923 grouping helped, but even so, the railways were loss-makers. Romantics think of the 1930s as a great age of railways, because they're thinking of the prestige trains of the era which the companies were good at promoting, but in reality the railways were run-down, delapidated and undercapitalised throughout the inter-war period.
British Rail wasn't great, although it was hobbled at the start by a very generous compensation deal with the shareholders of the 'big four' companies. Short-sighted management and old company loyalties didn't help either. However, a fair case can be made that by the 1980s, given its budgetary constraints (and BR was always too closely tied to the treasury), BR was in fact one of the most efficient railway systems in the world. I don't have the figures to hand, but BR's subsidy amounted to less than a third per train mile than that of French or German railways, and yet BR had a higher percentage of 100mph+ trains, a comparable reliability record, rising passenger numebrs, and two of its four major divisions (Intercity and RailFreight) were running at a healthy operating profit.
The comparison becomes even more obscene when you compare late BR to the shambles the railway network's in now. No co-ordination, a lamentable reliability record, a less safe network, badly-designed and unreliable new trains (it's no coincidence that the ebst of the private companies, GNER, is using a BR design!) and, on top of all that, the railways actually get MORE in subsidy than British Rail!
Of course public railways are always inefficient and private ones are always better. Don't let the facts stand in the way of the dogma...
Btw, hello everyone.
Hello - excellent first post
Because when it comes to public services, it is..
Evidence A: Water companies.
Evidence B: The Railways
As it has been explained at length on this very thread.
It's all about profits when public services people must use is concerned. They don't even have competition.
That's a bit of the statement of the obvious. But whilst the British people would love to have low taxes and great public services when they're forced to have a choice have gone for moderate taxation and moderate public services.
So like the Lib Dem say, raised tax to 50% on amounts over £100,000 for starters. I'd go further and raise it to 60% on amounts over £200,000.
The other solution of course is ensuring individuals and companies pay the taxes they should instead of exploiting loopholes and setting up offshore companies. The Treasury would then have several billion more Pounds at its disposal to take care of the public services.
Rupert Murdoch alone defrauds countries across the world of several hundred million every year. Start with him and a few others like him.
The rich would leave. YOu wouldnt be able to tax them at all, therefore the treasury would end up losing money.
However few people could argue that an extra 10% on amounts over 100K as the Lib Dems are proposing is much of a rise. It really doesn't make much difference.
Someone rich can afford to move somewhere else where they will keep their own money, not see it stolen by the thieving treasury.
Your idea is not practical, its yet another pie in the sky left wing idea which would lead to national economic failure.
What the statists and the left wing in general always seem to miss is that all wealth is created by business. Without industry producing it in the first place it can never be shared out.
Drive away those who can produce goods and services and the amount of goods diminishes and everyone gets poorer anyway. Money is completely frigging useless as a medium of exchange if there is nothing to exchange.
All wealth is created by labour. Otherwise, how do you account for the existence of wealth before capitalism and before business in its modern form emerged?
Sorry in the modern world all wealth is created by business changing the shape and form of materials using labour.
In the olden world all wealth was created by individuals changing the shape and form of materials using labour.
Labour by itself is valueless. Otherwise I could become immeasurably richer by digging a trench and filling it in over and over again.
Only the good or service produced by labour has any value. The labour itself is worthless.
Everyone benefits from good public services and welfare systems. Including those rich enough not to use them (at the end of the day the people who made them rich do need to use them to get to work/be healthy/etc).
On someone who earns £150,000 per year, the extra tax would suppose a 5 grand per year increase. Do you really think they would move out of the country for 5 grand?
Perhaps the mega-rich should cease exploiting every last loophole in the book and listing their business offshore and start paying the taxes they should, and then there would not be any need to raise taxes.
You've just contradicted yourself there. If labour is what adds value - and I don't dispute that - then it obviously is not worthless!
Of course labour can be wasted, but it remains the means by which humans change and shape the world around us - whether controlled by companies or autonomous individuals.
But they could do that now, they could move to the US, earn more and get less tax, or even somewhere with next to no income tax. But they choose not to, why?
If there are no people who want what it is you are selling, then it has no value, regardless of the expenditure of labour caused to produce it. So labour hasn't got the slightest thing to do with an items value.
Labour has no value but what it makes does. If you were to replace all the factories in the world with machines that needed no repairing or maintenance then what they produced would be valuable still, even though no labour was expended making the same goods.
That is stating the obvious.
Yes it has. Of course scarcity (or otherwise) affects the price, but you aren't going to sell anything at a loss if you can help it so you need to cover the cost of making it, the lion's share of which is frequently acocunted for by labour.
And who would design and build these machines?
You simply can't take labour out of the equation. It's a vitally important component of any economic situation - except for impossible, hypothetical ones like the one you're outlining.
you would be amazed how many people can't cope with it on here. the amount of claimants that a country is a real and not fictional entity would flabbergast any thinking man.
You have confused cost with value.
On the contrary, I've pointed up your conflation of value and price.
It is the entreprenuerial people of this country who expose themselves to financial risk who create the wealth and its governments like the present one that misspends in!
If you've got money you keep it by minimising your tax liabilities and there are many ways to do that.
They also contribute millions in tax to the exchequer. If they left that would be millions less for your ASBO's and Bureaucrats. You either tax them at a reasonable level or they leave.
Far few people would 'benefit' from them if those people who contributed most to them were forced out of the country because the government was forcing them to give their money away.
Not everyones fortune is made by getting other people to work for them. Your jealousy is astonishing.
They might. And these days more and more people are paying the top rate of tax - it mounts up, believe it or not. Its funny, you are in no position to comment about people who have money because you have neevr been in that position.
According to you and those of your ilk there is always a reason to raise taxes. It is a bottomless pit, and god help us if someone like you gets into power. You could watch the well off of this country leave within a few months. They would leave behind a country where everyone pays 100% tax, but one immeasurably more impoverished and poor as a result of hese 'socially just' policies.
In this day and age the only way taxes are going is down.
I'm arguing that increasing from 40% to 50% on amounts over £100,000 is very reasonable.
I'm sure some rich people would disagree though, given that their concept of reasonable taxation would be 0%.
Not all... the majority are though.
No they won't. They would have left years ago if they thought they paid an intolerable amount of taxes. An extra 10% on top over amounts exceeding 100K is absolutely peanuts.
I am certainly in a position to comment about the effect paying taxes has on your spending power and lifestyle. For normal people like me (and you one day I suppose, unless you end up in a nice cosy CEO job) any increase or reduction in tax makes a hell of a difference. For the super-rich however it doesn't make any. They'll still lead the same extravagant life, own the same extravagant yacht and same superb mansion.
Why is it then that high-tax countries such as those in Scandinavia enjoy the most advanced, rich, well run and managed societies, public services and welfare systems in the entire world?
I'd agree too. Although 50% would be the absolute limit. Losing 50% of a wage is a lot to lose, and it is the maximum at which people would tolerate it.
But they DID leave when the tax burden was too high. When the highest rate of tax was lowered to 40% tax incomes from the richest 1% of the population actually INCREASED. People will pay their way, but they won't be ripped off to pay for scuffers to have Sky telly.
ETA: Scandinavia has well-run systems despite the taxation level. Make everyone pay 99% tax in this country and it will still be run appallingly, I think Labour in the 1970s kinda proved that. High tax doesn't equate good public service, in the same way that low tax doesn't equate a poor public service.
I'm not rich, and 0% sounds pretty reasonable to me.
£10,000 (at the very least) is not peanuts. Its no good saying 'it is to them', no it isnt. People do not get rich by throwing 10k around like that.
Someone who earns £100,000 a year is not super rich. As I said before, tax effects everyone - and it hits people on £100k especially hard because they pay the most of their income towards it. A multi millionaire might be able to survive it - fair enough - but if the treasury takes 70% of your 100k that leaves you with 30, thus it leaves you impoverished. What sensible person wouldnt leave if that happened?
They are exceptional countries who can afford to pour vast sums of money into unprofitable concerns because they are tiny countries. Look at France - that is similar to the size of the UK and wants to move towards Scandanavia. But they cant, they have 10% unemployment and massive government debt, as well a such a bloated state sector that it drags down the private sector with it. Anyway - Scandanavian countries are hardly dynamic economies, now are they?