PollyT: Taxation, propaganda and spiteful irrationality.

Polly has been spreading unreason so close to a lie that you could not fit a cigarette paper between them.

Here goes:

Polly, you appear to have a perverse misinterpretation of what goes on.

“All that capital gains tax would otherwise go into the exchequer to be spent according to the democratic decision of taxpayers.”

No, Polly, you are wrong. The only way you can have the money spent democratically by taxpayers is to reduce the tax they pay. This way they each decide for themselves where that money goes. State largesse is NOT democratic.

“Instead the taxpayer sees their own money purloined and spent at the whim of the giver.”

No, Polly, you are wrong. The money does NOT belong to the taxpayer. It never did and never will. It either belongs to the owner or it is purloined, to use your word, by the Treasury and spent at the whim of the Treasury. The Treasury never “gives” unless it has already taken.

“Every time anyone donates to a cat sanctuary or cruelty to dogs in Japan, the taxpayer is obliged to contribute another 28% on top, willy-nilly (and often nilly).”

No, Polly, you are wrong. The taxpayer does not contribute a penny. They never do in such cases. What happens is that the Treasury does not TAKE that 28% for itself, but allows the giver to give all the money they give without the Treasury grabbing its piece. Maybe this “28%” malarkey is confusing people. It used to be either 20% or 40% depending on if you paid top rate tax. This dodge to 28% could be seen as a sly trick to disconnect the relationship between the giver’s tax and the tax refund. It certainly gives your argument a momentary fig leaf, but I am having nothing of it.

“So long as they fulfil the very basic requirements of probity, registered charities may cover a multitude of crankiness and inefficiency:”

The State is incredibly inefficient with our tax money. A tax £ ends up in the Treasury with the spending power of 30p it is so inefficient and bad at its job.

“cut-throat wasteful competition between near-identical tin-rattlers, advertising campaigns that distort important social issues; or empire building charity managers with little genuine assessment of their outcomes. “

Just like government lobby groups, quangos and other parasitical tumours on the Nation’s body.

“Of course many are excellent, but, good or bad, the taxpayer has to pony up that 28% extra for every pound put in a tin.”

As above, this is just wrong.

“Donors with their hefty cheques can cause serious trouble for good charities doing difficult, skilled work. Masters of the Universe are used to running the show themselves in their own companies, and they think they know best how to run any organisation. Sometimes they do, but sometimes the cash comes at a high price. Once they've got all the "toys", the danger is that using their money to run poor folk, their schools, their estates or their children is just the most fun toy of all.”

Just as the State sticks its dirty fingernails into the “third sector”. New Labour is as we speak undergoing a concerted plan to totally ruin this area with precisely the results you accuse private people of. In the case of the State, it is not even their money they are using to destroy things!

“I suggested to this particular Master of the Universe (who happens to give to an excellent programme) that as well as giving by whim, wouldn't paying more tax be a better way for the wealthy to pay their dues? He used the usual high-earner's get-out: governments won't spend his money as well as he can. If he gives it, he can direct it exactly where he wants. No doubt we'd all like to do that with our taxes, but the better way is to elect a government to spend it as rationally and accountably as it can.”

That is not possible, Polly. Do you actually believe that nonsense? Governments are the WORST spenders going.

“There is no evidence that charities spend money better: indeed researchers are too polite to conduct the sort of thorough, value-for-money scrutiny of charities that the state is subjected to.”

Ah, but this is not the point. People can choose which inefficient charity they put their money into. Being charities, they might be inefficient, but with no profits, some redistribution may occur. This is unlike the State, which the payee, the taxpayer has limited or no control over what moonbat causes the State decides to spend money on and when it does it often spends money hiring fat, inefficient private parasitical organisations which siphon of vast sums in consultancies and profits for the non-deserving few.

“The truth is, if the top good philanthropists got together and admitted that they now have more money than is decent, they could make a huge difference. Quite a small group of powerful clan chiefs of the City could change the tax-averse culture of the rich. They could shame the non-domiciled, the private-equity tax evaders, the trust fund inheritance tax cheats and their whole wicked tribe of tax advisers bent on denying the state as much money as possible.”

How about backing flat tax which would pretty much solve the issue and make life easier for everyone, not just the rich? No, you like “progressive” taxation, don’t you, Polly. Nasty, discriminatory and unfair “progressive” taxation that is used as a vindictive form of social engineering.

“They could advocate a top tax rate of 50% on earnings over £100,000. That would only affect the top 1.5% of taxpayers and it would bring in £4.5bn every year. “

No, it would mean more people try to evade tax and that UK PLC becomes more expensive and so less competitive.

“Consider this week's Joseph Rowntree Foundation report on the growing chasm between rich and poor. Earmarked for the neediest, that same £4.5bn would be enough to lift half our poor children over the poverty threshold.”

The best way to lift the poor is to provide a vibrant, low tax, efficient economy so the poor can find work and live their lives. Making the rich poorer is not the way to make the poor less so. As Winston Churchill once said – "We contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.".

“ (while ordinary taxpayers will be obliged to contribute another 28% to whatever causes take his fancy).”

Repeating a lie is the classic trick of propaganda. Polly, you are repeating a lie yet again.

“ It is good to give - but it's even better to pay your taxes.”

And better still to have those taxes flat and fair!

Breakthrough Britain

The report is out. It is a shame that the launch was marred by daft scaremongering on one policy point by the BBC and other media in a successful attempt to whip up bleats about discriminating "against" unmarried and single parents. Daft.

However, the good news is that it does seem that the findings are being praised, even if the recommendations are not unanimously agreed upon. This means we work done can produce further suggestions using a baseline of inputs.

The key areas are:

• Family Breakdown
• Economic Dependency and Worklessness
• Educational Failure
• Addictions
• Gambling
• Serious Personal Debt
• The "Third" Sector

Before I continue, I am reading the briefing, so I apologise if I respond inaccurately or in ignorance of the full report - I am very happy to be corrected if that is the case.

Family Breakdown: Some good thoughts, yet the worry I have is that yet more people will be involved from the State who will wish to manage the situation, not prevent it.

1. The State should allow voluntary groups to operate more freely but not be gatekeepers to funding, which will always have strings and so distract and undermine sincere intent. I cannot stress this too much - State funding will pollute the Voluntary Sector with their agenda and glacial timescales. This does not appear to be well safeguarded here - quite the reverse. A Minister for the Third Sector - the rot is setting in.
2. I have long made the case for no additional benefits to be given to people on benefits or housing who increase the size of their family unit and I remain convinced of this as the "least worst" option. There is nothing here to reverse the perverse incentivisation of feckless procreation, to put no finer point on it. This adds to my suspicion that all these people are there to manage the problems, not prevent them.
3. I do think it is right to consider the concept of "family" as a single taxable entity if children are involved, allowing all legally bound adults to transfer their tax allowances to the household that is there to support the children, including grandparents. Civil partnerships, yes. A cohabiting couple, no, but a grandmother and mother?, yes. This report does at least move a little in that direction.
4. I find it distressing that no mention is made about the entropic programming pumped out by the BBC and others, such as Eastenders, which appears to be a "Blueprint for Dysfunction". Where are the strong media role models are needed to promote self-reliance, fortitude, courage, moderation, inventiveness and other qualities? Our State broadcaster often seems to have decided on the role of "recruiting Sargent" to keep our Social Services fed with a plentiful supply of "customers"!

Economic Dependency and Worklessness: The recommendations do not appear to do more than tinker and they tinker in a way that requires more oversight and inspection, so more "salaried unemployed". Some things suggested are an improvement, but this is a missed opportunity to put forward significant changes in the context of all the other recommendations. The nettle has not been grasped. No talk of Flat Tax and a fat personal allowance, which is key, IMHO, to boosting productive employment, taking the low paid OUT of Income Tax and enabling a smoother and more rewarding segue from dependency to self-reliance.

Educational Failure: This has excellent stuff - to allow the formation of independent schools free of LEA control and allow parents to switch to such schools, taking the underlying funding with them - it is vouchers by any other name but articulated properly (for once?) so that it makes it hard for the Sociofascists to disingenuously denounce. This alone could do so much, it is hard to articulate the importance this could have on our society. Alas, I feel the LEA Mafia will stomp on this as soon as their rice-bowl is threatened. A pox upon them!

Addictions: Tinkering. Totally misses the key issue of removing the criminals and pushers from the loop. There is only one sensible way to do that and that is to make the supply of drugs not economically viable for criminals to bother selling or recruiting new customers (i.e. pushing). This is through low cost, flat fee supply at regulated outlets. Until you stop the "marketing" end, you are fighting an uphill battle to kerb usage and the crime that is caused by the addicts needing to feed their habit. Many of the recommendations are great if you are in the State machine - lots of jobs. You know the rot is well and truly set in here, with terms like "treatment journey" - the poison of the NHS behemoth leaks far and wide. This is about addiction - addiction to the State.

Gambling: Mostly Statist tinkering. Linking gambling treatment funding and the tax revenues raised concerns me for reasons I cannot quite articulate. No mention of Super Casinos, which is shocking. If the State earns zero revenue from gambling, it would consider it an irritant and not wish it to grow. I am convinced that Super Casinos are about tax revenues, which is DAFT as the taxes are on profits which will almost certainly be repatriated overseas, sucking wealth out of the nation. Maybe the State needs some treatment for their addiction?

Serious Personal Debt: This section does not hit home, in my view. IVAs are allowed and to an extent still encouraged, which I believe will do the opposite of the intended purpose. Considering how numerically illiterate people are, it is no surprise they are financially illiterate, too. I did not detect a way to formally and clearly display the terms of credit cards and refinancing. I know people should be responsible, but the State has a role, in my view, in the area of "weights and measueres" and more intuitive ways to display the consequences of various forms of credit should be put forward, including graphically.

The Third Sector: Alas, we see more moves to entrench the State into the activities of Voluntary Groups. The idea that the unemployed can be brought into volunteering is a good one, as long as it is not abused. This will be hard. It could sort out sheep from goats in terms of the sincere out of work who can volunteer and build up a CV, even if they are not actually in paid employment - this is "unpaid employment", which is at least a step in the right direction, the antithesis of Gordon Brown's 900,000 "salaried unemployed". I suspect the State will not hesitate to get its talons into this area, interfering in what projects can "qualify", so engineering and influencing the precise work of such entities. Once that is in place you are a short hop and skip to some dangerous ground in terms of mobilising masses. The TWO groups who should influence what happens should be those volunteering and those contributing.

The State should BUTT OUT. It is not good news for this area - the State is on the prowl - it has OUR money, but IT wants control over how it is spent. If the State wants to see more taxpayers money going on voluntary groups may I suggest it cuts out the middle man - itself - and lowers taxes.

The document does not tackle State housing, which I feel is a millstone in its current form. If you are in State housing, you need to ASK to move and apply to join the queue of the relevant Local geographic monopoly Authority. Not good for chasing work. That is a very bad thing. Housing needs to be taken out of the 'entitlement' sphere and into the voluntary sector. If housing is not a 'right', dysfunctional families will need to reform to remain housed. I sincerely believe 90% will reform themselves when faced with such a reality.

Overall some good points, and especially one of the two key issues - Education. However, drug reform is not dealt with and most of the other areas seem to reach for the State interventionist approach, with the serious risk of creating yet more organisations, QUANGOs and "bodies" that want to manage the problem yet, subconsciously, will not wish to eradicate it, as that will threaten their rice-bowls.

FibDumbs on Housing - more irrational dreaming.

Oh dear - The Fibberall Dumboldtwats have come up with another stream of irrational nonsensitude.

Sir Ming is a nice gentleman, but he really should stop listening to his party, as they are a bunch of morons, judging by this latest crop of ideas. I suspect in their impatience for results they did not wait for anything productive to grow, but just harvested the manure they spread shortly beforehand.

Sir Ming is right, sort of, when he says that Labour is ghettoising housing, leaving poor and vulnerable people living on large ‘sink estates’ which offered little hope or opportunity. He also said it was a national disgrace that one million children still lived in overcrowded accommodation and 130,000 children lived in temporary housing.

However, Sir Ming forgot to mention that it was not Labour that ghettoised people or created 'sink estates' per se. In my view it is the very concept of State-built/run/subsidised social housing that creates these problems. Sir Ming also forgets to mention the proportion of all these suffering children that were intentionally born into such conditions by their parent or parents and that the State actively encourages such births due to the prevailing mechanisms of Welfarism.

Sir Ming is, however, bang on when he says VAT should not apply to housing renovations, which are, in effect, necessities in most of the cases or if not they tend to increase Council Taxes. This is more an issue of taxation, not Social Housing, however.

Moving on to the other "ideas", we see they are strangers to reason.

Gerroff Moi Laaan'

He intends to allow local authorities to buy land zoned as farmland at farmland prices, re-zone it and then sell it on for a proft. This is almost jaw-droppingly naive, scandalous, corruptible, totalitarian hogwash. Local councils are bad enough without allowing them to get their greedy hands on land for redevelopment by their squalid golfing partners while taking a slice in to the bargain. On one level you can see that they have a point, for the council does get some form of payback for the increase in value of that land due to re-zoning but the mechanism and mode is so utterly ham-fisted and open to abuse. I have long considered Lib-Dems to be naive fools and this proves it yet again. Now, if the council built a tram line or electric trolleybus infrastructure - cables, transformers etc - to serve the land (note: not some poxy excuse of a bus service that will be withdrawn once the bunting is down) then I could understand more, for they would be seriously increasing the value of that land and integrating it into the community. However, as it stands the "idea" denies the original landowner its true value and tempts local councils to re-zone for fiscal purposes (which is polite) not community benefit. The scope for corruption is immense.

Would it not be better to allow land to be bought by developers of transport - rail, tram or trolley companies, for example - subject to local referendum, who then are the people to sell off the land for housing development once the infrastructure is in place? London grew like this. Surely we want people to live in houses with predictable, non-polluting forms of transport into centres of employment. Better still, build the housing right over certain stretches of the new railway and even over some stations. Hong Kong does this all the time. Each rail station becomes a massive high rise hub of housing, shops, offices. The MTR of Hong Kong works its assets hard and most benefit. Maybe it is indeed TfL that does the expansion into the Thames Gateway. They get the land, build the rail, tram, tube connections and develop the immediate station and air rights, then sell off the land around to fund the project. This might reduce some of the issues that happened around the Jubilee extension. If someone has a better idea, I am all ears!

Rental by Any Other Name

Another concept is equity sharing, but in this case the Lib-Dems want to not only control the price that the original property is sold at, but to also control the RESALE price too. This would mean, in effect, that once people are in such properties it is highly likely they will have to remain in such, limiting their choices in terms of purchaser and next home. They are unlikely to achieve "escape velocity" unless the housing market seriously crashes and then they would probably have achieved it anyway without the risk of a mortgage! Alas, this is a manifestation of do-goodery and patronising infantilisation of the population. It will simultaneously distort the market, imprison people and subject them to risks they would otherwise not encounter. They should be honest about what the true effect would be and just say they want to build Section Houses, Nursing Staff Quarters etc. for key workers and be done with it.

Communism by Any Other Name

The idea of spreading about the problem of sink estates has been bandied about by both NeueArbeit and the Lib-Dumbs. We already suffer from borderline Communism in planning where people are forced to build in "affordable housing" into their schemes which means the State has its dirty, interfering fingernails into each private housing project. This takes it further and seeks to spread out the sink estates like some perverse blend of homeopathic plague. Sink estates are not sinks because they are large, but because of the nature of some of the people in them and the nature of the relationship between the residents and their landlord, the State. Note that private Social housing rarely if at all becomes a sink estate. Spreading them about will not change the nature of the people, nor the landlord. In fact all it will do is make the total impact of the small number of dysfunctional residents more widespread. The State is an appalling landlord. "Social Housing" is by definition antisocial.

To resolve this:

• The Welfare State should be a safety net, not a hammock in which entire lives can be conceived, grow and then reproduce again.
• Housing to be provided mostly by the voluntary and private sectors where there is no "right" to housing, as all that "right" does is result in a hard, unwanted, unavoidable obligation on the taxpayer to provide it. If the obligation were truly desired, i.e. voluntary, then those individuals who wish to gladly pay money towards subsidised housing can fund the voluntary sector (OK?).
• Immigrants should not be provided State housing as they are, by definition, economic migrants and as such should be capable of looking after themselves.
• People who increase the size of their families while living in State housing either via additional children, marriage or the accumulation of "dependents" should not be considered for review of living space.
• Confirmed, granted Asylum seekers should be given time-limited assisted housing (say 6 months) until they are also economically active (which we are told they mostly are, right?) and then market rates should apply.
• We have many people not economically active including vast amounts of the 900,000 of Gordon's paper-pushing "salaried unemployed" whilst importing or at least allowing the inflow of labour. That needs to change.

The Lib Dem solution is like trying to cure dysentery by handing out nappies.

Fix the problem, not the symptom.

We know Hodge is a Barking MP, but...

...a grain of logic does occur in parts of what Margaret Hodge says - it is more measured than what the disingenuous Alan Johnson has said in reply.

Do not get me wrong, I do not wish to endorse Hodge, for I do suspect she was told what to say by someone (I suspect a Brownite lackey suggesting she walks towards a political cliff-edge) and that it contains much that I do not "agree" with due to it being an argument on territory and terms I do not wish to fight over.

I noted that the Labour talking head on the BBC Daily Politics, Fri 25th May, was very careful to talk only about EU economic migrants as part of his rubbishing of Hodge's point. I doubt this group is the main gripe affecting the beleaguered residents of Barking or indeed elsewhere and for them to dismiss Hodge's position was disingenuous at best. I am certain he knows what is being discussed - Council resources used to house immigrants before being used to house indigenous people.

Part of the problem is the focus on "need" and the metrics thereof which factors into the concept of "entitlement". I suspect many immigrants will cope with higher overcrowding, for example, far better than locals will and so this is used to gain a higher score in "need" terms.

What is not often discussed is:

Immigrants have chosen to arrive by free will - why should their self-generated situation be the responsibility of the State?

If someone is dependent on the State for housing, why does that enable them to claim others are dependent when applying for visas or other forms of entry? A person who is dependent is surely not able to claim that others are in turn dependent on them because in reality, by consequence, they all are dependent on the State. No, the State should be the one to decide that and the State should not be obliged to take on further "bootstrapping" dependents.

Further, anyone in State housing who has additional children is responsible for their predicament - it should not be the obligation of the State to provide them with ever greater housing.

I can see a sense of irritation if it is indeed true that Asylum Seekers are placed in private rented accomodation while the indigenous are placed in Sink Estates.

However, it is very narrow to discuss this issue on such terms. The problem is State housing or subsidised housing, period. The entire concept needs review and reform.

As I have posted before, I see nothing wrong with short term basic State housing for those who are genuinely proven to be an Asylum Seeker, but they should then switch to "commercial rates" to move them off into their own housing after, say, 6 months. There should be few places and few people that truly qualify for such status - e.g. practically nobody from E. Europe or places where a change of district or shift to a neighbouring country would not suffice.

This country has plenty of very cheap housing for the "terminally unemployed" but not where they want to be - "tough", is my response to that, frankly. Part of the problem of State housing is the very fact that it creates sink estates and often even when not, it blights the neighbourhood. Private slums can rapidly be sold on or rejuvinated if the desire or architecture permits. Voluntary groups such as Peabody do not have Sink Estates. To me this is down to the fact that to be housed by them is not a matter of "entitlement" (via forms, "need", buggins turn whatever) but of discretion.

The State is systemically incapable and pretty much by definition not able to employ the concept of discretion in such things as Welfare and housing. This then suggests the State is not the vehicle through which such things are provided.

The (Unwitting?) Assault on Charities

The government is currently trying to "engage" with the voluntary sector. More and more of the larger charities are providing public services funded by public money. This is a great danger, in my view.

However, only 26% of charities that deliver public services agree that they are free to make decisions without pressure to conform to the wishes of funders. This is a natural response, as who pays the piper, calls the tune.

It may be natural but it is not necessarily a good thing.

Surely, if the State enlists ever more voluntary organisations in this way, providing more funding and, naturally, wishing to have influence, then the "third sector" increasingly becomes controlled by the State and subject to its dogma, objectives and agenda. The charities will naturally bend towards the money, like a plant seeking sunlight. If only the reality were similarly without strings.

Charities that have to pander to the whim of the State cease to be able to innovate as freely or provide alternative, lateral solutons in the way that they traditionally have. They will almost certainly think twice about providing services, performing studies and especially speaking out against State dogma. We cannot trust the State not to lean on the charities to cease operations and activities which may expose their wrongheadedness.

Charities and the nation will lose out.

I think it is no use criticising the behaviour of the State once it begins funding charities or to criticise the Charities who yield, as this is a logical manifestation of what is a dysfunctional arragement. One that has country at large robbed of innovation, responsiveness and efficiency.

This does not excuse the State, however. They need to back off and allow charities to do their work.

Now, I am no friend of the oleagenous David Miliband, but stupid he is not. If he were, that might excuse him.

To think that greater State involvement would not harm, limit, encumber, distort, corrupt and shackle the voluntary sector would require innocence, no, ignorance and a level of imbecility and stupidity. Miliband cannot use that as an excuse.
So, Miliband either:

secretly knows the effect upon the sector, but will not admit it even to himself - his Sociofascistic reptile brain keeping the dark secret and motivation hidden from his higher thought processes.

or:

that he really does know the eventual consequences of these activities and he is just trying, quite successfully I might add, to fool the public at large.

Seeing as I refuse to accept that he is stupid and remembering that intelligence is no guarantee of wisdom or integrity, that leaves Miliband as being either a conscious or unconscious hijacker of our civil society.

If the State wants better funding for Charities, it should stop taxing people into oblivion and allow them to make their own choices. I know it is hard for political animals, central office wonks and their pet rocks to understand, but people who earn their own living tend to have pretty good judgement on what to spend their money on.