From the Mirrlees Review we get this chart. Showing the true and vile cost of neoliberalism:
As the Senior Lecturer tells us:
If you want an explanation of the consequence of neoliberalism that’s it: over the thirty years when it ran rampant the higher your income was the larger the increase in it was too.
Quite terrible that inequality increased.
Of course, we can view this another way. Neoliberalism led to the real incomes of 95% of the population rising by more than 50%.…
See MoreQuite how Alice in Wonderland the world view of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is can be shown in this piece of logic from her. That a rich – and presumably powerful – couple of women are being sentenced for a crime shows that we don’t prosecute the rich for breaking the law.
Umm, yes, an actual instance is proof that the thing never happens. Please don’t go into science AOC, the cannonball falling from the tower shows that gravity doesn’t happen.…
See MoreAn interesting little number stemming from the divorce of Mackenzie and Jeff Bezos. She, of course, now becomes the world’s third richest woman as a result of the roughly 4% of Amazon she gains. And, well, the marriage vows do indeed still mean I thee with my worldly goods endow even if they’re not said. For that’s what that legal contract of marriage does say. So, you know, there we go.
It’s just that with this divorce settlement we’ve got little points being made like this:
MacKenzie, a book author, is now one of the richest women in the world, according to The Washington Post.
As we’ve pointed out before people have a very strange series of beliefs about initial public offerings, this idea that the Lyft IPO is going to make some set of people rich. This simply isn’t so, they’re already rich, that’s why they’re having the IPO. They yesterday owned something that was of value, they today still own something which is of value. That’s how this capitalism and markets thing works.
Thus this is just silly as the basis of an article:
Here’s who will get rich from the Lyft IPO
Well, no one, actually.…
See MoreOne of the things that the usual progressive whines about inequality miss is that the more unequal the incomes in our society the more tax revenue there is to pay for progressive goals. For we do indeed have a progressive taxation system with respect to incomes. So, if the better off among us start earning less money then there will be less tax revenue. Or, if they leave the country for somewhere more amenable, there will be less revenue to pay for all those diversity advisers, five a day consultants and whatever else it is that Jocasta and Tristram do to be paid a crust these days.…
See MoreIt’s difficult to insist that Britain doesn’t have a progressive taxation system when we get numbers like this. That some 87,000 Londoners paid more in income tax than the entirety of Wales and Scotland. Actually, it’s impossible to insist that we’ve not got a progressive income tax system when we’ve got numbers like this:
In London, the picture is even more stark. The city has 4.2 million income tax payers, but just 87,000 individuals earning over £200,000 a year paid nearly half the £43.8bn
Abigail Disney, as one of the heirs to the Disney fortune, thinks that rich people should pay more in tax. Which is fine, just copacetic. Right after she leads the way by paying more tax – voluntarily – herself. She can do so by simply sending a check to the Treasury. Make it more than the cost of a stamp and it’s rumoured that they’ll even send a thank you letter.
The heiress, 59, has long been a proponent of lowering executive paychecks and taxing the rich more.
Varied – Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, you know, the brain dead end of the Democrats – seem to think that if you just whack up the rate of tax on the top taxpayers then you’ll get lots more tax revenue. This isn’t in fact so. As we’ve pointed out before those 70 and 90% marginal top tax rates of the 1950s didn’t mean the Federal Government collected more of GDP in revenue. And the percentage of GDP collected by the income tax was actually lower:
We can also look at the percentage of GDP raised by the income tax.
HMRC has just released its estimate of what tax reliefs cost the Treasury each year. This is sparking, as it obviously will, demands that some to all of these be closed so that ever more of the economy can flow through government. The thing is, the targets being aimed at are peanuts as opposed to the Great Big Nuts of the system that should be targeted.
By far the largest of these reliefs is VAT rates.…
See MoreWe’ve an historian, Rutger Bregman, sounding off at Davos and there’s a certain problem with his point about high tax rates. For he seems to think that having high rates means more money is collected – this is not so. It’s especially not so concerning the United States which is a bit difficult as it is the United States he uses as his example. What happens is that what he thinks he knows runs smack into empirical reality in the form of Hauser’s Law.…
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