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  • EADD Moderators: Pissed_and_messed | Shinji Ikari

Jeremy Corbyn: A very old fashioned breath of fresh air?

Why do working tax credits even exist? From what I can gather all they do is allow employers to pay people less and post the savings on their balance sheet as profit.

If the government gradually forced employers to gradually bump up peoples wages to the maximun threshold for tax credits the government outlay would effectively be zero no?
 
well that is the point, they are supposed to be raising the minimum wage, except they wont do it until 2019, but the tax credit cuts will hit immediately next spring if it gets thru.

interesting that the low paid, the disabled, the sick, are being bled dry while the tories give another cut in corporation tax to the massive companies, down to 18%, the lowest in europe.
 
My "obvious" solution would be zero income tax at the statutory Minimum Wage. This would simplify the process of setting on an employee at Minimum Wage, since as an employer you would have no tax liability in their respect at first, and so should encourage the creation of jobs. Only minimum wage jobs, for sure; but after a year, a good worker ought to be well-placed to negotiate a pay rise -- or walk away, and straight into another job.
 
Doesn't the starting rate of tax already nearly do that? Anyway, i prefer the idea of Basic/Citizen's Income - in the future the amount of jobs per people is just going to get worse with automation and what have you - we need to separate people's ability to not starve from their 'price' in the job market. If the basic income was enough for all our needs, then employers really would have to entice us to work for them, putting the balance of power round the way it should be. Keynes predicted this would have to happen - he thought by the year 2000 - the capitalists saw the writing on the wall, and so we got neoliberalism in the 70s to stop keynsianism in its tracks; but in the long term it's either keynesianism or neo-feudalism.

As well as the Greens, basic income is also liked by quite a few capitalists and libertarians because it would actually be very cheap to run compared to means tested benefits.
 
Basic Income would certainly be even better. It's the Penny Post principle all over again. The original, revolutionary idea was to charge the same flat rate of postage irrespective of distance. If you were to work out the exact price to send a letter based on size, weight and distance, the additional effort required to work out the correct postage would end up making even the cheapest postage rate cost more than a penny. By charging a flat rate, and bypassing the expensive calculations, it's possible to deliver a letter from anywhere to anywhere else for just one penny.

Compared to a plethora of means-tested benefits, just paying everybody the same amount would save a fortune in administrative costs. It's a lot easier just to prove that somebody has been paid once and once only, than to prove how much they are entitled to, right down to the n'th degree.

And you can pay it to absolutely everyone, and just claw it all back in taxes from those who are working.
 
ponch said:
Why do working tax credits even exist?
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Created by labour to give the illusion that working "pays" & to compensate people forced into low paid work by benefit cuts. Financial slight of hand, basically, propaganda to convince the tax payer that government of the day was cutting benefits for "scroungers".
 
BecomingJulie said:
Basic Income would certainly be even better. It's the Penny Post principle all over again. The original, revolutionary idea was to charge the same flat rate of postage irrespective of distance. If you were to work out the exact price to send a letter based on size, weight and distance, the additional effort required to work out the correct postage would end up making even the cheapest postage rate cost more than a penny. By charging a flat rate, and bypassing the expensive calculations, it's possible to deliver a letter from anywhere to anywhere else for just one penny.

Compared to a plethora of means-tested benefits, just paying everybody the same amount would save a fortune in administrative costs. It's a lot easier just to prove that somebody has been paid once and once only, than to prove how much they are entitled to, right down to the n'th degree.
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This actually reminds me of my time working in housing benefit. It coincided with Thatchers iniquitous Housing Act which allowed landlords to charge just about what they wanted, and rents exploded. EVEN TODAY THE HOUSING BENEFIT BILL, WHICH GOES INTO THE POCKETS OF LANDLORDS NOT CLAIMANTS, IS THE SINGLE LARGEST PORTION OF THE SOCIAL WELFARE BILL. Think about that the next time someone says 'scroungers' to you.

Anyway, to relate to what Julie said. Each week we were given yet another yellow file of changes to rules and regulations. Each local authority HB section even had to have its own rules and regulations section set up, so complex were the changes becoming. This added ridiculous claimant waiting times and while that meant some even lost their dwellings, it never meant rich landlords lost (except maybe some interest) their increasingly obscene share of taxpayers money that Thatcher was handing to them.

I often thought the rules and regs were deliberately complex to fuck up claimants. They certainly benefitted landlords. Still do. Go back to that capitalised sentence and have a good think about it.

Revolution. It takes five seconds. Just five seconds. To start thinking about....
 
Before Jeremy Corbyn announced that Labour MPs would be given a free vote on whether to launch air strikes against Syria, he was a dangerous terrorist sympathiser who would have us live on our knees.

Now he has promised a free vote, he's bringing the country to the brink of war.

Can anyone say "damned if you do, damned if you don't" ?
 
Cameron had to call him a terrorist sympathiser last night because the tory-majority foreign affairs select committee voted against his strikes, and the number of labour 'rebels'(/warmongers) was diminishing as they were getting emailed by their future voters; also the 70,000 claim was quickly morphing into a 45 minutes claim and was being ridiculed. Hameron's hoping he can jingo enough tories back onside to balance this - i'm hoping he's overreached (though it looks like the vote will pass (the lib-dumbs have joined.

How can anyone listen to this Corbyn interview and still conclude that cameron sounds more credible? http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06q65kg

(or maybe i'm just a maoist/stalinist/ira-ist/islamist who hates my country)
 
We've already lent air crafts and crews to the Americans - we're already bombing Syria.
 
Well, yeah. It all keeps BAE Systems in business ..... The alternative is, shock, horror! Job losses!

Personally, I wouldn't begrudge the cost of putting every BAE Systems employee permanently on the dole. The world would be a safer place, too.
 
Sid said:
We've already lent air crafts and crews to the Americans - we're already bombing Syria.
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Plus there's the small matter that british planes were actually bombing syria directly in secret up until a few months ago, in direct contravention of the previous syria vote; i think the original report was in the Daily Mail, but it was grudgingly admitted in parliament. This fact has gone right down the memory hole now: not a single mention of this fact in any of the media reports on the current situation.

Also down the memory hole is the report (daily mail again but corrorborated) of the SAS on the ground in syria, dressed up as islamists and fighting against assad/for terror.

Similar to that time in iraq when SAS were captured by iraqi police dressed up as islamists with bombs which they were trying to plant in a mosque: remember that bit of film (from Basra?) when an iraqi crowd set a tank on fire and one of the 'heroes' in it tried to escape but caught on fire? They were using the tank to break into the prison to free our SAS terrorists.

(reminds of the mitchell and webb sketch were they're both nazis and mitchell says "i've just noticed...our uniforms have got a lot of skulls...are we the baddies?")

...

Just to add a bit more tinfoil to the fire (the source is biased, and yet this isn't unbeliveable): Israeli Colonel captured by the Iraqi army while he was working with Islamic State http://www.globalresearch.ca/guess-...eli-colonel-caught-with-is-pants-down/5491582

...Of course no reasonable person in their right mind would suggest there might be a link between Israeli military dealings with the ISIS and other anti-Assad terrorists in Syria, especially in the Golan Heights, and the oil find of Genie Energy in the same place, and with Netanyahu’s latest Golan Heights “rethink” appeal to Obama. That would smell too much like “conspiracy theory” and all reasonable people know conspiracies don’t exist, only coincidences. Or? In fact, to paraphrase the immortal words of Brad Pitt in the role of West Virginia First Lieutenant Aldo Raine in the final scene of Tarantino’s brilliant film, Inglorious Basterds, it seems that ‘Ol Netanyahu and his pecker-suckin pals in the IDF and Mossad just got caught with their hands in a very dirty cookie jar in Syria.
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Nice to see some intelligent posting on here for a change. Yes I would say with Syria we (Britain and America) definitely are the baddies. I would say it is pretty clear we would have been raging war in Syria with or without Isis ever existing. It's the last one in the house of cards so to speak, the house being the Middle East.

I see the government has more planes at the ready to fly to Syria, clearly they are confident of winning the vote later today.
 
It's a bit of a joke really - we've got 8 planes (russia 70, america 100+) - we just want to get in on the carve up (or being pessimistic, want to get in on the start of ww3 (that's one way to stave off the imminent financial catastrophe)).

Syria is seemingly about pipelines: Qatar wanted to shove one through there (and the west wanted them to to cut into russia's gas supply to europe); syria wouldn't have it - then iran wants to shove their pipeline in to undercut the qataris, and we couldn't have that. From the western point of view it's all about encircling russia: the great game hasn't really changed since the 19th century. It's all spelled out by Zbigniew Brezinski in the grand chessboard (apparently (i'll read it one day)) - it's not even a secret. Then there's the 'pivot to asia'.
 
8 planes? Where did that info come from?

I'm not on board with engaging with Syria! IMO not cool, that's all I'm going to say on the matter. Britain is wrong.
 
Sadie said:
8 planes? Where did that info come from?

I'm not on board with engaging with Syria! IMO not cool, that's all I'm going to say on the matter. Britain is wrong.
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Britain currently has eight planes bombing Iraq. But that's ok because we are going to send another eight to help them bomb Syria. Cameron has made a big thing about some special "Brimstone" missiles we have which will make all the difference in Syria. We have TEN of these missiles (plus a shitload of other more useless missiles).

Amazingly, the Daily Mail is the only newspaper to come out totally against the bombing of Syria. Surreal days when you find yourself on the same side as the Daily Mail.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/a...ENT-Mr-Cameron-hasn-t-case-bombing-Syria.html
 
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