They\’ve not actually published this over at Liberal Conspiracy, at least not yet. But it\’s in the RSS feed.
And Dear God this is the most outrageous stupidity:
The analysis from the Resolution Foundation and the IPPR think tanks to be published early in the new year is the most detailed examination of the potential impact of the living wage on the public finances yet.
The living wage is a pay level calculated as the minimum hourly rate for a basic but acceptable standard of living and currently set at £7.45 outside London and £8.55 in the capital.
The new analysis suggests that its introduction nationally would add around £6.5 billion to the gross annual earnings of the country’s employees.
However, the report shows that the Treasury would collect more than half of the initial financial gains from a living wage – around £3.6 billion – in the form of higher income tax payments and national insurance contributions, as well as lower spending on benefits and tax credits.
But the study also examines the extra costs to the public purse of paying a living wage to all public sector workers. It suggests that wage costs would increase by more than £1.3 billion – leaving an overall public saving of more than £2 billion.
As a start, the report will recommend, all Whitehall departments and London boroughs should pay their staff at least the living wage by April 2015 and explore the costs of paying sub-contracted staff the same rate.
The London weighting means that most public sector workers already earn at or above the London living wage, so introducing the living wage for all staff would cost relatively little in the capital but would set a precedent for others to consider following. Only six London boroughs currently are accredited living wage employers -Lewisham, Islington, Camden, Lambeth, Hounslow, and Southwark.
Five million people are paid less than the living wage, three million of whom are women. Yet more than 85 per cent have permanent contracts. More than 3 million households (13 per cent) contain at least one adult earning less than the living wage.
Fewer than 45,000 workers have achieved a living wage as a result of recent campaigns.
Just consider what they\’re saying: we can increase the wages of the poor because we tax the wages of the poor a lot! See!
Or for a longer version of their logic.
The complaint is that people don\’t get enough to live an acceptable life on their wages. But don\’t worry, raising their wages enough so that they can live an acceptable life won\’t cost much: because as you can see from our numbers we\’ll nick half of their new higher wages anyway.
Why not, you know, just stop nicking money from poor people\’s wages in the first place? As I\’ve been arguing for years now, raise the working poor up out of the tax net and the minimum wage is your damn Living Wage!
And why the fuck are you cunts so excited about the idea of taxing the poor anyway?
I can recall a time when many of the lower paid working class paid no income tax at all. Also, purchase tax was structured to bear least on the lower income groups. And you could buy a home for hundreds of pounds rather than hundreds of thousands.
Jesus, what is with the fucking swearing?
“Demetrius // Dec 21, 2012 at 2:06 pm
I can recall a time when many of the lower paid working class paid no income tax at all. Also, purchase tax was structured to bear least on the lower income groups. .
”
Hopefully that will be UKIP’s aim at the next election
By the same logic, hospitals could save a fortune on blood transfusions if they just took blood out of the right arm and infused it to the left.
Easy.
Tim. Agree with the ideas, but the choice of words could come back to hurt UKIP if you’re not careful, rather like the London candidate. The MSM, lefties etc, will use anything to stop us.
Not sure the choice of words could hurt anyone much – since if they’re going to complain about a non-candidate swearing about taxing society’s poorest, the obvious response is to ask them if they don’t think that’s something to swear about…
I must say living in the modern world is a bit fraught.
I hear these pontifications and keep thinking “I’m getting old, I’ve missed something here”.
But I haven’t.
Somehow, you can get to spew your shitty ideas into the public domain even though you have an IQ less than the average dandelion.
Swearing is all about the tone and intent. A good friend of mine routinely greets me and some others with “hi, cunt, how are ya?”
They have also missed that they have dumped £5 billion of wage costs pa on private sector employers. That will end up as some combination of a surge in unemployment and a spike in inflation, depending on how much of the costs can be passed on.
So how exactly will that help the poor?
As always, the answer to wibble like this is …
‘So if it only has an up side, why not make it £10 an hour. Or £20. Or £1000. Would that be even better? And if not, then why not?’
There’s obviously the attraction of saying “Let the folks just keep what they make, and not tax it, and hey presto, there’s a pay rise for them!” But a part of that which has to be dealt with– is it to be part of a permanent alteration to tax policy, or will it be enacted with sunset provisions that require it to be re-enacted over and over? And what about the argument that removing folks from the tax rolls means that they won’t “have any skin in the game” and thus, their voting strength will be brought to bear to shift the tax burden to make those already paying tax pay incrementally more– the old “Representation without taxation is ALSO tyranny!” argument? America is dealing with this sort of problem, it’s part of the whole Fiscal Cliff issue; the US seems to be making a right hash of it, so why would Britain fare any better?
Its enough to make a Saint in heaven swear as my mam used to say.
Who decides what a ‘basic but acceptable standard of living’ consists of or what the rate should be to achieve this? What are the measurable criteria?
Its all a load of bollocks, just another excuse for extending state control over business.
Tim is correct, if the object is to give the less well off more disposable income then stop taxing them.
F**king obvious innit.
Wouldn’t it be better if the working class just worked for nothing? I mean they could all stay in the workhouse during the week and go home for 2 hours on a Sunday before getting back to work again. If they were late back they could be flogged as an encouragement to consider their betters. What say you goof olk, honest and true?
I’m assuming its James Fudge the High Court Judge ?
It might be better to leave the working class with their everyday freedoms (pigeons and whippets obviously) as it stops them from hanging the bourgeoisie and elite from lamp posts using piano wire.
Alternately, the Halifax Gibbet could be relocated to Victory Square…sorry Trafalgar Square.
Not sure we’d need tumbrels this time, just pinch the G4S prison-to-court vans.
James Fudge: I insisted that my factory workers converted to atheism so I didn’t have to give them those two hours on a Sunday. I do give them half an hour on Fridays to impregnate each other though, which both raises morale and provides a nice little earner selling the results to Latvian organ harvesters.
So who ends up paying these increased wages?
Taxpayers.. through increased rates.
So lets tax more..
Seems typical LD thinking…
The sentiment is very well said. I have even turned a couple of staunch labour supporters to the idea that maybe it would be a good idea if you just did not take the money off the low earners in the first place. At one time we had a family income of £51,000 approx and 3 kids, I was livid to find that we were able to claim child tax credit courtesy of Mr Brown, whats that about? Don’t take the money off me in the first place you one eyed scottish idiot.
Your choice of words is what I may have used in conversation with the bods in the pub, certainly one fits for Brown, but not on your blog.
“I was livid to find that we were able to claim child tax credit courtesy of Mr Brown, whats that about? Don’t take the money off me in the first place you one eyed scottish idiot.”
But the point of that system isn’t to make you better off as such. It’s to co-opt you into the system and make you dependant on the handouts. If they didn’t take it off you, they couldn’t dangle it back in front of you latter now could they?
It’s the same with low earners, they take money off them to make their lives better. The state is better at making spending decessions for poor people after all.
How about cut all taxes and all regulations and just make everything that much cheaper. Less government = higher living standards and more freedom.
In short, David Moore, to keep us on the plantation.
They make the same “argument” about anyone they perceive as “rich.” That can be anything from assets I would regard as significant to as low as five digits.
“No one needs that much money,” they say. They want it, because they know better how to spend it.
But mostly so they have you completely in their thrall.
It is obvious no one has looked at :-
http://realitymoney.page.tl/ before coming out with such arrant nonsense.
I’ve said it before, but one last time.
The very last fairley miniscule increase to minimum wage caused BQ industries to chop 20% of the working hours of every part time worker.
This was due to 3 years of falling income and 3 years of increases to minimum wage.
The minimum, or indeed the living, wage take no notice of the actual situation. They just look at inflation and assume any business can continually push up its margins to cover the increase.
But if that isn’t possible,if the work isn’t there to do, then jobs are shed.
So this year, for just the 2nd time since the 2007 recession began to bite, we chopped hours.
Every single P/T worker was WORSE off financially after their 20p an increase than before.
Only the dimmest of dimbots or the wonkiest of wonk tanks cannot see that there is never an easy solution. All breakages must be paid for.
If the living wage came in tomorrow, 30% of people would be instantly redundant. Or possibly a 100% if we just continued on paying the fantasy salary until the money ran out.
This real world example is often touted by the left as ..Well, you can’t be very profitable if such a small change would sink you?
What they miss is ALL costs increase year on year. And some cannot be cut. fuel,lighting, heating, plant, rates, rents, insurances, materials.
In fact, what most businesses find is the one fixed cost that is available to be axed is personnel. Sorry lefties, but its the truth. And , often, by axing personnel, its then that a company can look at smaller premises, less vehicles, less energy use etc.
It might also help if the share of wealth produced went to wages rather than profits, the opposite direction to the way its gone over the past 30 years. But then we couldn’t even think of that, could we. As the man said, ‘The class war is over and the poor bloody infantry lost it’.
Have you seen the price of Piano wire ??
Wow, raising the Living Wage to this level “saves £2bn”. So why not double it? We’d save even more!!!
Stoke on Trent Council decided they would pay all their low paid workers not the Minimum Wage but the Living Wage. Mid 2012.
End 2012 they decided they had no money left, cut overtime and asked staff to take unpaid leave and work overtime for free.
Needless to say they are a Labour Council with as much knowledge of finance and the real world as I have of advanced brain surgery.
David // Dec 21, 2012 at 2:21 pm
It is the UKIP policy and has been for some time. The fruitcakes and nutters worked out how economically inefficient and socially damaging it was (is) to tax and withdraw benefit at such low levels of income. See UKIP policies 2010 elections.
Combined with a flat[ish] tax and high Nil rate band, such an arrangement would take millions out of the grasp of the state altogether, which is why the political class won’t do it.
And for our next trick laydeez-n-gennelmen we give you our wind and solar powered perpetual motion machine! drum roll!, cymbal tish!
The IPPR and the Resolution foundation are also sponsoring a number of undergraduate courses in finger counting and seeking postgrads who wish to follow internships in advanced hubris.
This sort of lunacy is not new. In the 60’s one of the lads I worked with had a pay rise due to some Labour legislation . His increase was 15 shillings a week (75p) . this pushed him into a higher tax band and he ended up half a crown (12.5p) worse off. The union would not support him when he went to the boss to ask for a pay cut.
john2008
It goes back even further than that. In the 1860s drivers on the Glasgow and Edinburgh Railway ( I think that’s where it was ) were earning so much that they had to start paying income tax and petitioned their employer for a pay cut.
I simply don’t understand how the low paid will pay anything approaching 50% of their additional income in tax – this has to be a misleading or false comment. The aim is to remove the burden from the taxpayer of tax credits and housing benefit as subsidies to employers who don’t pay their staff enough to live on. If an employer can’t afford to pay their staff properly then they don’t have a viable business. And another thing, if London workers are already getting London weighting which produces a gross liveable wage then they shouldn’t get an uplift. I very much doubt public sector workers of any number are paid below liveable wages too. Socialists don’t realize that “liveable wage” would reduce people’s reliance on the state and destroy their crooked gerrymandering crusade – its really a conservative / social democrat theory……am I still a cunt?
……Well, you can’t be very profitable if such a small change would sink you?……
All changes happen at the margins. For many businesses it might be as painful as a gnat’s bite, but as long as you have marginal businesses there are some for whom it is the executioners axe.
Do jobs not count if they are in marginal businesses?
The impact of increasing wages for those claiming Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit is as follows:-
For every £1.00 increase in take home pay the claimant loses 65 pence Housing Benefit and 20 pence Council Tax Benefit so for every £1.00 increase in take home pay they get to keep 15 pence.
For many claimant taking them out of tax meant they got a higher wage but then lost 85 percent due to reductions in their Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefits.
You’re missing the point. The goal is to replace benefits with wages, not to actually make these people substantially better off but give them back the integrity of earning all of their income. Out with subsidies! Nobody earning a “wage” should receive benefits – this can only work if employers pay what the job is worth. And for the record “no” jobs in marginal businesses are not worthwhile – this is just an extension of the govt creating civil service non-jobs like the Blair/Brown govt did. The present govt is now faced with making unpopular cuts to the civil service which has been pre-stacked with ready made Labour voters…….
Quite right, cunt.
Stop ALL these benefits. Housing benefit, child benefit etc etc. You want a child? You pay for it. You want a house in London that I can’t afford? Move to Rotheram. etc.
Pingback: Misunderstanding in wage benefits
And wasn’t it Labour, and specifically Brown, who did away with the 10% tax rate?
People arguing for the “living wage” should look at the experience in Germany. To cope with the economic problems caused by re-unification certain firms were allowed to pay less than the minimum wage. Result? Economic revival and more people in work.
DWWolds
Germany does not have a minimum wage…..
Alex,
The proposal is that local authorities should pay staff the Living Wage. That’s the public sector, not the private sector. Which makes the whole argument completely ridiculous. State pays its employees more but then takes the increase back off them again via more tax and less benefits. It’s a wash.
What this WOULD do is transfer funds from local government to central, of course.
I find the argument that local authorities paying more would encourage private sector employers to follow suit completely unconvincing. The staff don’t do the same jobs.
“And why the fuck are you cunts so excited about the idea of taxing the poor anyway?”
This is the kind of idiocy that gets spouted by the kind of evil little bastards who insist that paying taxes is a social good; if it is a privilege to pay taxes, then ensuring that more poor people pay more tax means that they are “more involved in society”.
If you are of the view that the paying of tax is morally righteous, then it is obvious that the more people who pay tax, the better.
It is a mind-set that is, in my humble opinion, utterly evil.
DK
And very nice to see you back, Sir.
I’m a cnut said “I simply don’t understand how the low paid will pay anything approaching 50% of their additional income in tax – this has to be a misleading or false comment.”
It is quite simple really. Using the marginal rates as follows Income tax is 20%. NI Class 1, which starts before tax starts is 13% and withdrawal of Tax Credits is at 39.5% Taken together it comes to 71.5% And if the person is on Housing benefit/council tax benefit, that is withdrawn at 83% (5/6ths) of what is left, so that someone on housing benefit the marginal rate of tax and loss of benefits is almost 96% of earnings. Do you want to keep just over 4p in every £1 you earn?
And if you want to put it even better, how many extra civil servants do we need to operate the present complicated system, but I suppose that was another Gordon B-Ruin increase the client state non-job creation programme too.