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Fleece the Rich
Read more about: Irish Election 2007, Labour Party, Progressive Democrats, Proverty, Social Policy, Taxation
Whatever happened to good old Robin Hood and taking from the rich to give to the poor? (First posted on Skinflicks.)
I ask this in the context of the Irish Labour party proposing tax cuts which will disproportionately benefit the better off. Now we’d expect this from the 1% party, the Progressive Democrats. And sure enough, they didn’t disappoint during their conference at the weekend.
Fuhrer McDowell, who had vowed not to engage in what he called ‘auction’ politics before the election, waved a nice cut in the top rate of income tax to entice his well-heeled, but increasingly vanishing electorate.
Yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph, a paper usually considered to be the mouthpiece of the old guard Tories in Britain, has a fascinating little poll in relation to the rich in the UK.
Nearly three-quarters of voters believe that the wallet-busting, multi-million pound bonuses awarded to top earners in the ‘City of London’ are “excessive” and need to be curbed. The other quarter polled were, I’m guessing from the Torygraph’s usual readership, recent recipients of such bonuses.
The poll by ICM also revealed that nearly 70% of people think the gap between the highest paid and average earners is too large, and 43% believe Britain has become more selfish under Tony Blair.
The Loadsamoney stereotype of the city trader, as portrayed above by Harry Enfield, typified the excesses of the Thatcher era. But it has arisen again, only nowadays the stereotype of bling-bling excess materialism is considered a legitimate aspiration rather that worthy of contempt.
When even the Torygraph is complaining about excessive greed, you know that it is appalling in the extreme, especially when social inequity has never been so acute.
In commentary accompanying the stats, one New Labour MP Ian Gibson claimed that senior party colleagues are “very sympathetic to the rich. They have their holidays with them, they are envious of them.”
So here’s my question. Given that the gap between rich and poor has never been wider, and since Labour in Ireland are proposing tax cuts and Labour in Britain are holidaying with the superrich, who in the hell can I vote for who will promise to tax the have-too-muches and close the gap with the have-nots?
In other words, when even the allegedly left wing parties are playing the tax cuts game, who is the Robin Hood party?
Hey dude, remember the Berlin Wall? History. Joe Higgins was buried under it.
It’s not there any more. The option, I mean. The middle classes vote because they want to stay middle class, the lower classes don’t vote because (select one or more of the following)
a) they’re less than confident with reading and writing and afraid that they’ll be asked to do something that they can’t
b) they’re working 80 hour weeks each just to pay the mortgage ad therefore don;t have time to vote
c) it won’t make any difference anyway, one shower is the same as the next
The senior citizens all vote Fianna Fáil because for those few minutes as the local grassroots boys are heaving them onto busses to bring them to the polling stations they can forget past ills such as the same Fianna Fail people stealing from them by keeping their pension books, or delaying payments, or wrapping them up in bureaucracy after a bereavement because of arcane estate laws, and believe that they’re actually worth something, that they mean something, that they have something other people want - their vote. And they will give it willingly because that young man (the sixty year old bus driver) was willing to tlk to them, and for no other reason.
And the labour party - the leopard who’s spots need changing? The Labour party inverts McDowell’s maxim of radical or redundant, having as it sees it a choice between being centrist or in opposition. Taxation is a lost battle. No one wants it. Any of it. Income tax, wealth tax, everything should go.
Strange, I saw Joe down the Dail the other day…
Passing on your extremely generalist, not to mention offensive characterisation of the lower working class’s voting habits for one second, you’ve still failed to answer my question, except to say that taxation is a lost battle.
If it’s a battle, who was fighting on the increased taxation side? I can’t find anyone.
We have a third world health service that cannot and will not be fixed by privatising the simple operations for profit, as the current minister intends. We have some of the largest class sizes in Europe, many accommodated in antiquated or long-term ‘temporary’ mobile classrooms.
We’ve given away our windfall energy wealth to Shell, and FDI is collapsing around our ears as we speak.
The money for the NDP and all the other promises being made by all the parties has to come from somewhere. Anyone proposing a new upper band for the rich, as opposed to the current upper band for the middle income earners, gets my vote. I just don’t see them anywhere…
On Joe - it was a metaphor, and he remains anomalous in the Dáil, or at least his idology is so. Anyway, you know what I mean. Socialism has substantially been defeated by Capitalism (for the time being at least) and we are left with a society where, to quote Michael McDowell, a little inequality is no bad thing.
On the reasons why the lower working class don’t vote (and they don’t), I didn’t mean to be offensive. I know these things because I have worked with them in adult literacy and other areas, and I find it shocking that we as a society don’t see what I described as a problem. It’s a new disenfranchisement, a new class system, one that our liberal sensibilities should be shocked by. But the PD type consensus that gripped Fianna Fáil for so many of the last ten years (until perhaps the conversion at Inchadoney?) would have had us believe that the opportunities, the chances, the choices are the same for everyone, and we will not suffer for those who make poor choices, who don’t take their chances, who don’t grab the opportunities when they are presented to them. Where is your liberalism now? It’s certainly radical.
We’re both on the same page, I think. No one is for increasing taxes. The Labout Party of late (and loathe it as we might, McDowell was spot on to criticise Rabbitte for his philosophical volte face, adopting perhaps a more pragmatic, ends-justify-the-means type approach. Rabbitte’s challenge will be to bring the minds of his party with him.
Agreed on health, agreed on education. I believe that it is appalling that education does not have a higher priority, because it *can* be fixed with more cash. The health service is perhaps a little more tricky. But there are certainly vested interests holding it up.
One of the major problems has been the freeze on public sector recruitment. The increase in agency, sub-contract, and short term / part time support for public services represents a band-aid solution, and needs to be stopped. The spend in education and health (to an extent) is on capital projects far more than it is on people, and there I suspect lies a problem. I do hope that recruitment into the public services will be re-started and indeed accelerated in the next Dáil. As for the hospital consultants, I won’t say any more about those people than I have already said on my own blog, given the concern on this blog about libel laws.
The problem with your suggestion is that it would represent a punitive tax - it is unlikely, I suspect, that it would significantly change the tax take, and therefore what it would say is that there is a penalty for being very successful in Ireland’s economy. Incentives economics doesn’t like that, and in the absence of a cap on Income tax, the rich all pay far more in tax than we do anyway. The relative impact on their lives may be different, but why punish their success?
I can’t edit and I type too quickly and I don’t review properly.
Third paragraph second sentence should read:
The Labour Party of late (and loathe it as we might, McDowell was spot on to criticise Rabbitte for his philosophical volte face) have been adopting perhaps a more pragmatic, ends-justify-the-means type approach. Rabbitte’s challenge will be to bring the minds of his party with him.
The Modern media orientated election campaign demands auction politics, every party is guilty of it and it’s here to stay. The recent Labour Party proposal on tax is nothing close to the seismic idealogical shift that McDowell and FF are claiming it to be. McDowell put tax reform on his election platform, and begged Cowen to include a tax cut in the Budget, so the PDs could run for re-election on something other than a failing health service and the curse of gangland crime. Rabitte merely shifted the debate on tax reform to look at the standard rate instead of the higher rate effectively pulling the rug from under McDowell. This sent McDowell into on of his famous media outbursts and forced him to include a cut in the standard into his conference speech. FF were livid because they had the same idea but didn’t announce earlier. This is nothing but a good media coup for Rabitte, leave the berlin wall out of it