So is the 5th child responsible for its own wellbeing/welfare? Should this 5th child be left to turn feral?
When this child inevitably turns to antisocial behaviour under your system, do we lock them up?
Maybe we should sterilize the parents so we don’t need to deal with any of that.
So how do we pick who to steralize before they create “undesirables”? Should making babies require a liscense? And if you agree with the above, how do you square that with a libertarian world view?
I think you’re too focused on the parents being “punished” for their irresponsibility rather than the wellbeing of the child. It did not ask to be born.
“The problem with Maggie T is that she was a horrible cunt who was directly responsible for the vast majority of the United Kingdom’s current malaise.”
And at the risk of blurring the line between economics and politics, it has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt that ‘trickle-down economics’ (or however you would describe it) and the political choices that underpin that approach do not work.
Rich people do not share. They hoard.
Put money in the pockets of the poorest, that money will end up in shops and businesses. Put money in the pockets of the richest, that money will end up in offshore accounts.
Except, eventually parents die and society is left to deal with their neglected children.
Would it have been more productive to intervene earlier in their life and turn them into a functioning citizen or deal with the consequences with the adult they ended up turning into? Either way, the society that helped raise or neglect that child deal with the end-result.
Here is an interesting story from when the Tory’s got back in power.
Cameron’s agenda was to slash spending on public services and reduce taxes for the Rich. He set up the Office of Budget Responsibility to provide a degree of academic legitimacy for this endeavour, and the OBR dutifully backed him with the assertion that 50% of all Government Spending is wasted - money lost from the economy. This claim originated in a study into Government Spending by the IMF.
This was used as the justification for the massive budget cuts Cameron and Osborne imposed on departments in the wave of Austerity and Tax Cuts that followed.
The problem was that the IMF later admitted that study was flawed, and while Government spend does tend to average out at 50% waste, it was not even across all policy measures. Some policies actually have a positive return on investment while some really drag the average down.
It just so happens that - surprise surprise - policies that funnel money to already rich people, like tax cuts, have an awful return - almost 100% lost, while policies that get money in the pockets of poorer people, fund essential public services and meaningful infrastructure projects - have a return over 100%. (Flood defence - which was absolutely gutted under Cameron - return £8 for every £1 spent).
It’s pretty easy to understand why this is. Put a tenner in the had of someone who isn’t already able to afford anything they want, and especially in the hands of someone who isn’t meeting their basic needs, and they’ll immediately spend it. But if you give a very rich person a tenner, then it just goes off with all their other tenners - probably to some offshore account where it does no good to the country at all.
This did not stop the Tories continuing their ideological crusade to gut public services and give money to Rich People. Even though they fully understood that this was actively damaging the economy and starving it of liquidity.
There is no economic sense underpinning trickledown economics. It should now be utterly discredited. We’ve through forty five years of this shit now, and aside from a brief stint where Labour were actually investing in public services, things have got steadily worse and worse. For fucks sake, inequality is now so bad and people are so desperate, we’ve actually got fascism of the rise again. When people are turning to fascism, then it should be perfectly obvious a political ideology has failed.
Agreed.
Unfortunately this current mob have proved to be just as reluctant to buck this trend as the last horrible mob.
No matter how much people want it to not be true, low paid workers will suffer as a result of the NI increase, and some businesses may struggle or fold.
Increased income and corporation tax for super rich may have been the way to go, yet as far as I can see, Labour are either unable or reluctant to implement a tier system.
Surprising given the previous penchant for tiering
Not sure what else they could have done without breaking manifesto promises, apart from the glaringly obvious lack of wealth taxes and the lower than expected rise in capital gains tax.
I think that was a fairly pragmatic recognition that it would likely do more harm than good. UK productivity growth has been woeful over the last 18 years, and a big part of that is remarkably poor investment levels. Austerity weakened investment on the public side, and Brexit has absolutely hammered it on the private side. The unfortunate truth is that capital gains tax doesn’t just target the stock-flippers, but also weighs down private investment further. I think it is to Labour’s credit that they did not put ideological purity over pragmatic assessment of likely impact.
I think there was modelling done prior to the budget that suggested that Labour could hike it more than this, which is where I was coming from with that.
I wonder how much research in general has been done into the effects of CGT on investment levels, or if it’s just one of those things that has been assumed to be true like the Laffer curve…