I’ve told you before, do not believe the likes of Howard Reed and Richard Murphy!
Long before the crash, the wage share of GDP slid from 61% to 56%, money syphoned out of working pockets into profits in the longest wage squeeze in more than a century.
It is not true that the economy comes in two parts, wage share and profit share. They are lying to you.
It comes in four parts. Wage share, profits share, employer paid taxes on wages and consumption taxes.
The wage share fell: the profit share did not rise. It was the other two, the taxes (employers’ NI and VAT) which rose.
It was Gordon Bloody Brown, not the capitalist bastards, that did this.
On Monday, this year’s new living wage rate will be set, currently £8.55 an hour in London, £7.45 elsewhere. It’s calculated annually by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s minimum standard, a sum set by what public opinion says is the least people need for a socially acceptable standard of living. A man should have a pair of shoes and a pair of trainers. A child should have four outings a year to a zoo, farm or Christmas panto. Parents should be able to afford a £50 birthday present for a child, plus £50 for a party. That’s luxury for those surviving on less, with the minimum wage at just £6.31. There are five million full-timers earning less than £13,350.
And that living wage is a pre-tax number! If we simply raised the tax free allowance (for both income tax and both NIs) to the minimum wage then the minimum wage would be above the living wage.
It’s the fucking taxes on the poor that make them poor!
What could be done? The Treasury would save £3.5bn if the living wage became the minimum wage in the private sector, by receiving more in tax and paying less in tax credit subsidies.
Crippled Jesus Christ on a fucking pogo stick. You’re justifying paying the poor more by gloating about the amount you can tax off the indigent fuckers?
Doesn’t anyone have any shame any more?
Equal pay day falls on 7 November, the day women stop being paid because of the gender pay gap. Forcing equal pay audits, so employers had to reveal how much less they pay women, along with rights for higher paid jobs to be part-time, might end the pay gap – which stands at 35.6% for part-time women.
No it fucking doesn’t! Female part timers earn more than male part timers. The gender pay gap for part timers is negative. You are using female part timers as compared to male full timers. And even the Women and Work Commission had the damn good grace to acknowledge that part timers are always going to get paid less than full timers. And the Statistics Ombudsman rapped Harperson on the knuckles for using these numbers as well.
Normally Polly’s just misguided but this is flat out lying.
With all this stuff at the moment about media and privacy etc isn’t it about time we passed some laws that state that anything in the media stated as fact must, indeed, be a fact.
I’m getting into this EU human rights stuff (well, if you can’t beat them, join them) and I think I have the right not to have my head filled with incorrect facts.
If we could sue such peddlars of bullshit, Polly would be bankrupt overnight.
Dear Mr Worstall
I think you’ve just invented tax poverty.
With a catchy name like that, all the lefties will have to be on your side.
DP
>Tim
Does a person on minimum wage really pay income tax. Surely the government equates the income tax into the minimum wage level and then sets it accordingly. So it is the employer , or the consumer , who is paying the income tax.
judging by the Polly self appreciation society going on in the comments section of the, i dare anyone to actualy point out the fallacy of her argument and get one positive response. Its like the self infection ward of a NHS hospital,. And not matter what you say you’re an evil tory profit maker and should be stoned for daring to question saint Polly.
missing > of the article.
Well, at least this time murdered kids aren’t being falsely used as political weapons. That is an improvement.
If they work more than 29 hours a week, yes they do. And they start paying National Insurance at a mere 17 1/2 hours a week.
Really? You seriously believe that our politicians actually try and work things out that way?
You can make all sorts of claims or have all sorts of discussions regarding the actual incidence of income taxes – but they are only really relevant in a free-ish wage market. Which, by definition, doesn’t apply to anybody on or around the minimum wage. The result is that the minimum wagee (unnecessary? neologism?) is the person with less dosh in their pocket. Hence, pragmatically, they pay the tax.
Of course, literally, the employer will pay the tax through their PAYE system but that’s yet another (albeit often conflated) way of looking at things.
But if the income tax was abolished would the minimum wage not just be set at a lower level. Leaving the person with the same amount of dosh in their pocket.
unless you a seriouse that the govenment does not work out the impact of income tax when deciding on what the minimum wage is going to be.
Reduce the minimum wage? Hardly.
As evidence can I place the fact that while the Coalition has been steadily raising the tax threshold, it has also been steadily raising the minimum wage.
“A man should have a pair of shoes and a pair of trainers.” I do – plus a hardly-used pair of shoes that don’t fit any more, a pair of wellies that ditto, and two pairs of sandals, one in an advanced state of decay. I don’t own slippers.
Does this make me a poor old pensioner or a fat cat bastard?
Are any of them by a brand that Naomi Klein disapproves of, dearieme?
“Dinero
November 1, 2013 at 12:40 pm
>Tim
Does a person on minimum wage really pay income tax. Surely the government equates the income tax into the minimum wage level and then sets it accordingly. So it is the employer , or the consumer , who is paying the income tax.
”
What country are you from? Obviously not the UK.
It sounds like a great country, what is the immigration policy?
How easy is it for Brits to got there?
“Broken union power since those days was painfully displayed in the humiliation of Unite at Grangemouth”
Yeah! The police turned up when a neighbour ‘phoned about the flying pickets trying to get local kids to beat up an Ineos director’s small children.
A shop steward was not actually sacked but did resign resigned when the independent consultant hired at the cost of his nominal employer accumulated proof that he spent one-quarter of his paid time not on union business but on Labour Party business.
Those are signs of broken union power?
That sort of power deserves not just to be broken but crushed into powder and dissolved in acid.
The “living wage” is based on what *some* people think that *other* people *want*, *not* what they need. The J Rowntree list of wants for the unemployed includes some luxuries that I have never had, even though I am unrepentantly middle-class (public school and Oxbridge – scholar in both cases, but far-from-wealthy middle-class to start with) who has worked for more than forty years. Admittedly I *do* have a pair of trainers – I bought my first pair when I was 37 – but if I stopped running I should not need them, so I don’t regard them as a “need” for the non-running majority.
“There are five million full-timers earning less than £13,350.”
Some work in so-called “Investment Banking” because we like the job and are well past any need to keep up with the Joneses, let alone the Gateses (and we didn’t spend every penny on champagne when we were younger). I should like to watch Polly trying to argue for a minimum wage for the self-employed in “Investment Banking”.
@john77, I think you’ll find that £13,350 is an annual, rather than an hourly, rate.
If you’re not suffering from kwashiorkor you’re on a living wage. QED.
@ JamesV
I have never had a weekly, let alone hourly, rate that high.
I first noticed the phenomenon when I recognised a top analyst in his sector who had worked for Greenwell (older readers will know that it was one of top research firms before it was taken over after “Big Bang”) at a conference; he must have been past 70 – his junior colleague fought in Korea – and could have afforded to retire but had not done so.
I do know of examples where pensions are larger than earnings (but not many because English people don’t tell you their earnings so it is only when one let something slip)
when the government decides on the minimum wage it considers all the expenses that make up the cost of living – one of which is income tax – therefore if the minimm wage was free from income tax then the minimum wage would be lower .
Dinero, the minimum wage is gross figure. Whether the individual pays income tax or not (part timers may very well not) the tax doesn’t come into it.
Dinero does have one of the most naive views of politics I’ve ever seen (or is just taking the piss)
Dinero
“when the government decides on the minimum wage it considers all the expenses that make up the cost of living – one of which is income tax – therefore if the minimm wage was free from income tax then the minimum wage would be lower .”
It does not such thing. It looks at how many votes a small increase will get them from low wage earners compared to how many votes it will lose them from the people paying the bill.
At no time will the actual economic impact be considered.
I disagree. She is normally lying.
“A man should have a pair of shoes and a pair of trainers.”
Holy cow, I’m poor! Who knew? Gimme my trainers, Cameron, you bastard!
A child should have four outings a year to a zoo, farm or Christmas panto. Parents should be able to afford a £50 birthday present for a child, plus £50 for a party.
£50 for a birthday present for a child? And presumably the same at Christmas. And four trips a year to a zoo, farm or Christmas panto. (Why Christmas panto? In what sense is that interchangeable with a zoo or farm?)
I’ve just realised my childhood was riddled with economic abuse. Stuff being brought up in a home with parents who loved each other and loved their children; forget being brought up in a home which emphasised education, hard work and thrift: what really matters is that we couldn’t afford the equivalent of £50 birthday presents, had small parties, never had a family trip to a panto (actually that was more for taste than financial reasons; I went once with Scouts), rarely went to a zoo and visited farms fewer than the regulation four times a year.
This “minimum standard” really is anything but. It’s modest, yes, but no more modest than the upbringing of plenty of us in the Eighties; and, dare I say, not anti-socially modest. Children brought now up as I was then are hardly likely to find themselves ostracised at school as a result of it. Unless that school is Badminton. Or wherever Poll sent her own kids.
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