The Politics Thread 3.0

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Oblomov Boblomov
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PostRe: The Politics Thread 3.0
by Oblomov Boblomov » Tue Apr 11, 2017 7:41 am

I've always preferred the idea of raising the personal allowance and introducing additional gradients into the tax band structure.

0% up to £12,000 then
10% up to £16,000 then
20% up to £24,000... etc

It would make life harder for the self-employed when it came to submitting tax returns, that's for sure :slol:.

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PostRe: The Politics Thread 3.0
by Moggy » Tue Apr 11, 2017 8:33 am

Errkal wrote:Labour to raise minimum wage to £10 an hour

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/l ... r-10193118

On one hand it is good to improve things for those on low wages, however in the case of my wife this will put her on minimum wage for a job that she has done a lot of training for (Vet Nurse).

This sort of thing although helping those on low paid jobs doesn't encourage people to better them selves as the step up in pay for working harder, learning more, having more responsibility etc. is eroding away every time the minimum goes up because on the minimum gets raised, everyone above it stays the same.


I do understand what you are saying (and this isn't going to happen anyway as Corbyn will never win an election) but I think people look at things the wrong way. You/your wife should be angry that she is badly paid, not that other people are earning the same as her.

Let's say your wife earns £20k a year. If everybody else suddenly earns at least that, then it has not made your wife worse off, it's just helped other people that are badly paid.

The anger should be that she is worth £25k or £30k and her employers are not paying her in accordance with what she is worth. What some spotty teenager in McDonalds earns is irrelevant if she is being underpaid for her work.

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Rocsteady
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PostRe: The Politics Thread 3.0
by Rocsteady » Tue Apr 11, 2017 9:48 am

Totally agree with Moggy. And people would still want to better themselves as - taking your wife as an example - she still has a more rewarding job with better promotion prospects than Timmy working as a Asda cashier. Other countries (like Australia) have a far higher minimum wage than ours and still manage to fill all their better jobs.

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PostRe: The Politics Thread 3.0
by Errkal » Tue Apr 11, 2017 11:37 am

I think it is good to increase the minimum, I just think more should be done to ensure that employers raise pay in line with inflation. Otherwise all that happens is over time you get worse off and gradually end up on the minimum.

It must be gooseberry fool being on the minimum and very hard to live at that level and that should be helped, however employers have no obligation to do anything for those over the minimum so you end up gradually getting worse off over time as inflation creeps up and you stagnate.

In some professions there is progression etc. but in some there is not, the pay is the pay and it bascailly the same everywhere, vet nursing is one of those I gave it as an example as it is low paid compared to the training needed and something that if Labour do what they say would become a minimum paid job despite requiring training and expense to do (professional registrations, constant training etc.)

As I say helping those at the bottom is good and should be encouraged, but more needs to be done ensure employers raise pay inline with inflation as a minimum for all employees, if they want to add extra increases etc. cool, but with inflation should be a standard requirement otherwise what is a good wage for a skilled job one year can become a minimum wage skilled job a few years later.

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PostRe: The Politics Thread 3.0
by Meep » Tue Apr 11, 2017 6:19 pm

Hmm, I know it seems unfair a times but in a capitalist economy a job is worth what the market decides it's worth. If enough decent candidates keep applying to a profession when clearly there is no supply issue then there is no pressure pushing wages up.

What you seem to want is system were wages must always go up. This would make the labour market non-functional because there would no corrective mechanism to deal with oversupply or shrinking demand for particular qualifications.

If you want government to start dictating what employers should pay people in particular professions then you are going to need a massive swing to the left politically. Not even Labour under Corbyn are going that far.

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PostRe: The Politics Thread 3.0
by Errkal » Tue Apr 11, 2017 7:33 pm

I guess in a way, i think supply and demand should have an impact, but once the role is in place it shoudl go under by inflation.

There should be no job x pays y rule, but i think the lre should be whatever you pay someone when they start it should then track inflation from that point on.

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PostRe: The Politics Thread 3.0
by KK » Wed Apr 12, 2017 10:45 pm

Guardian wrote:Britain’s largest police force have warned there has been steep increases in gun and knife crime in the capital over the past year, adding that years of budget cuts may at least be partially responsible.

The Metropolitan police said gun and knife crime rose 42% and 24% respectively and that recorded crime was up across virtually ever category, in figures released two days after Cressida Dick took over as commissioner.

In a briefing on Wednesday, Martin Hewitt, the force’s assistant commissioner, sought to pin some of the blame on cuts to funding. “It would be a naive answer to say that if you cut a significant amount out of an organisation, you don’t have any consequences,” he said.

Since the Conservatives came to power in 2010, the Met has made £600m in savings and has to find a further £400m by 2020. Hewitt said other factors impacted on crime figures and conceded that the force could also work more efficiently.

Previous rises in some crime types have been recorded, with some explained away by the Met as statistical anomalies because of changes in how they are measured.

However, Hewitt said this was no longer explained the rise in London, saying there were “genuine increases” in virtually every category of crime. Overall, crime in the capital was up 4.5% to nearly 774,737 offences, with 16.72% counted as solved, down from 18.8% the previous year.

He added that while the figures were up compared with last year, London was safer now than a decade ago.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/201 ... udget-cuts

When you think of tough on crime you tend to think Tories, so this is a big failure.

Doesn't make Khan look good either residing over rising crime rates. You can see that coming up in the next mayoral elections. 'Crime went up by x%! under your watch.'; 'Your government cut funds by x' and so on and so forth.

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PostRe: The Politics Thread 3.0
by Return_of_the_STAR » Wed Apr 12, 2017 10:47 pm

KK wrote:
Guardian wrote:Britain’s largest police force have warned there has been steep increases in gun and knife crime in the capital over the past year, adding that years of budget cuts may at least be partially responsible.

The Metropolitan police said gun and knife crime rose 42% and 24% respectively and that recorded crime was up across virtually ever category, in figures released two days after Cressida Dick took over as commissioner.

In a briefing on Wednesday, Martin Hewitt, the force’s assistant commissioner, sought to pin some of the blame on cuts to funding. “It would be a naive answer to say that if you cut a significant amount out of an organisation, you don’t have any consequences,” he said.

Since the Conservatives came to power in 2010, the Met has made £600m in savings and has to find a further £400m by 2020. Hewitt said other factors impacted on crime figures and conceded that the force could also work more efficiently.

Previous rises in some crime types have been recorded, with some explained away by the Met as statistical anomalies because of changes in how they are measured.

However, Hewitt said this was no longer explained the rise in London, saying there were “genuine increases” in virtually every category of crime. Overall, crime in the capital was up 4.5% to nearly 774,737 offences, with 16.72% counted as solved, down from 18.8% the previous year.

He added that while the figures were up compared with last year, London was safer now than a decade ago.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/201 ... udget-cuts

When you think of tough on crime you tend to think Tories, so this is a big failure.

Doesn't make Khan look good either residing over rising crime rates. You can see that coming up in the next mayoral elections. 'Crime went up by x%! under your watch.'; 'Your government cut funds by x' and so on and so forth.


Well the tories and the voting public were warned. May's changes when she was at the home office to stop and search rules have not helped either.

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Lex-Man
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PostRe: The Politics Thread 3.0
by Lex-Man » Thu Apr 13, 2017 7:13 am

There have been a number of cuts to the police recently, so I'm not really surprised that crimes gone up.

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Preezy
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PostRe: The Politics Thread 3.0
by Preezy » Thu Apr 13, 2017 11:07 am

Just going back to the minimum wage chat, my opinion on it is that workers should be paid based on their productivity, not what policitians think they should be paid. Workers should be able to sell their labour for whatever price they want, even if that's below what the government has decided is the minimum.

I think it's fundamentally wrong for a government to say to a person that unless a business is willing to pay you the minimum wage, you have to remain unemployed. There are people out there who want to work, have a job and a purpose but simply can't offer the productivity to earn the minimum wage, why shouldn't they be allowed to work for less?

Has been very interesting to read all of the varying opinions on the matter though, definitely food for thought (and one of the reasons I love this place).

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PostRe: The Politics Thread 3.0
by Moggy » Thu Apr 13, 2017 11:11 am

Preezy wrote:Just going back to the minimum wage chat, my opinion on it is that workers should be paid based on their productivity, not what policitians think they should be paid. Workers should be able to sell their labour for whatever price they want, even if that's below what the government has decided is the minimum.

I think it's fundamentally wrong for a government to say to a person that unless a business is willing to pay you the minimum wage, you have to remain unemployed. There are people out there who want to work, have a job and a purpose but simply can't offer the productivity to earn the minimum wage, why shouldn't they be allowed to work for less?

Has been very interesting to read all of the varying opinions on the matter though, definitely food for thought (and one of the reasons I love this place).


People can work for less if they want to. Plenty of cash in hand jobs out there. Maybe they could go cockle picking in Morecambe Bay or work as sex slaves for violent pimps?

The reason for the minimum wage is to try and protect people and ensure that people are paid a fair wage. Saying that people should be free to be paid less will just result in a race to the bottom.

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PostRe: The Politics Thread 3.0
by That » Thu Apr 13, 2017 12:27 pm

Preezy wrote:Just going back to the minimum wage chat, my opinion on it is that workers should be paid based on their productivity, not what policitians think they should be paid. Workers should be able to sell their labour for whatever price they want, even if that's below what the government has decided is the minimum.

I think it's fundamentally wrong for a government to say to a person that unless a business is willing to pay you the minimum wage, you have to remain unemployed. There are people out there who want to work, have a job and a purpose but simply can't offer the productivity to earn the minimum wage, why shouldn't they be allowed to work for less?


Sure, so, let's say we want to reconcile the two goals of (a) not having a minimum wage and (b) everyone earning enough that they can feed themselves and rent a room. The way we would wrangle this - and to an extent this happens now with some low-wage workers - is that the government would effectively subsidise that job through in-work benefits. Because of this subsidy, very-low-wage jobs could end up being a drain on the public purse and possibly the economy as a whole. So a benefit of the minimum wage is that it ensures that only worthwhile jobs (from an economic standpoint) are created.

EDIT: To expand: You may think it's better for a company to create a job and pay something of a person's income, rather than having them be job-seekers whose entire income come from the taxpayer. But in a system where large wage subsidies via in-work benefits are acceptable, workers at the lowest end of the productivity spectrum would be taking a job purely to qualify for in-work benefits (which I imagine would be higher or less hassle than unemployment benefits, to encourage people to seek work). It would make no difference to them whether they were paid £5/hour and topped up £2/hour, or paid £1/hour and topped up £6/hour, right? So for what are currently minimum-wage jobs, there would be no incentive for employers to pay more than £1/hour. So now instead of just paying for unemployed people, the taxpayer is paying for them plus every low-end job. It would cost a fortune and the transfer in wealth wouldn't be to the poor or unproductive, it would be to the business CEOs who are saving money in wages.

EDIT 2: So you might say "Don't subsidise those jobs! Let the free market sort it out!" but then you're back with the set of problems we had before we had any social welfare safety nets like benefits and minimum wages -- people will inevitably take woefully-paid jobs out of desperation, but they'll only be slightly-less crushingly poor and still very much living in poverty. The free market won't fix that.

EDIT 3: (I keep thinking of extra things I want to say about this...) A universal basic income would fix some of these problems. If you pay everyone a bare minimum to live on and have work be something you do for spending money, then these problems go away and there's no ethical concern with a job paying £1/hour (because there's no life-or-death pressure to take that job). For this to be workable I feel our society needs a somewhat greater capacity to automate unskilled work than we have currently, but we're getting there slowly.

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Meep
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PostRe: The Politics Thread 3.0
by Meep » Thu Apr 13, 2017 9:17 pm

Preezy wrote:Just going back to the minimum wage chat, my opinion on it is that workers should be paid based on their productivity, not what policitians think they should be paid. Workers should be able to sell their labour for whatever price they want, even if that's below what the government has decided is the minimum.

I think it's fundamentally wrong for a government to say to a person that unless a business is willing to pay you the minimum wage, you have to remain unemployed. There are people out there who want to work, have a job and a purpose but simply can't offer the productivity to earn the minimum wage, why shouldn't they be allowed to work for less?

Has been very interesting to read all of the varying opinions on the matter though, definitely food for thought (and one of the reasons I love this place).

If employers exploit workers and don't pay them enough then who do you think is picking up the bill? (hint: Look in the mirror). People have to eat and put a roof over their heads so if their work does not pay for it then the state does. IMO, I would rather raise the minimum wage and then massively reduce the tax needed to pay for welfare. I don't see why I should have to pay for someone else's employee because they cannot be bothered paying them enough to live on. I'm not getting the benefit of their labour.

The minimum wage should really be what a single adult can comfortably live off (i.e. enough surplus that they can pay for unexpected costs and some basic recreation) independently without any kind of state support, if they are working full-time.

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Grumpy David
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PostRe: The Politics Thread 3.0
by Grumpy David » Sat Apr 15, 2017 9:18 pm

Good going JC:

twitter.com/ComResPolls/status/853292086082154496



Meanwhile, 20 years ago:

twitter.com/newdawn1997/status/853192309751590913


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PostRe: The Politics Thread 3.0
by Rocsteady » Sun Apr 16, 2017 2:49 pm

So on that basis only 13 more years to go before we might get rid of the Tories again then

..

:fp:

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PostRe: The Politics Thread 3.0
by Return_of_the_STAR » Sun Apr 16, 2017 3:34 pm

Rocsteady wrote:So on that basis only 13 more years to go before we might get rid of the Tories again then

..

:fp:


That's exactly what i was thinking :lol: i remember how hated the Tories were for years and everyone said that they wouldn't get back into power again for a long long time.

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Errkal
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PostRe: The Politics Thread 3.0
by Errkal » Sun Apr 16, 2017 3:38 pm

Return_of_the_STAR wrote:
Rocsteady wrote:So on that basis only 13 more years to go before we might get rid of the Tories again then

..

:fp:


That's exactly what i was thinking :lol: i remember how hated the Tories were for years and everyone said that they wouldn't get back into power again for a long long time.


It was the start of the age of idiots when they started getting votes because "they were different" and "labour have been in for ages so i vote conservative".

It was the start of people just looking at short snippits of information and making their entire opinions based on one liners.

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PostRe: The Politics Thread 3.0
by Lex-Man » Sun Apr 16, 2017 3:41 pm

The problem is that there are only two parties who stand a chance of getting into power. Tony Blair destroyed the credibility of the Labour party and they've failed to find a decent leader since. In fact the leader have just been getting worse.

To be honest I think it's basically impossible to not annoy large sections of the public when getting into power.

Edit: I doubt the Tories will be in power as long as they were last time. They have a far smaller majority than Thatcher did at her height.

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PostRe: The Politics Thread 3.0
by satriales » Sun Apr 16, 2017 3:59 pm

Grumpy David wrote:Good going JC:

twitter.com/ComResPolls/status/853292086082154496



Meanwhile, 20 years ago:

twitter.com/newdawn1997/status/853192309751590913



Tory voters are never going to vote Labour anyway. So as bad as Labour are doing, it doesn't explain 46% of people wanting to keep the Conservatives in power.

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PostRe: The Politics Thread 3.0
by Return_of_the_STAR » Sun Apr 16, 2017 4:01 pm

satriales wrote:
Grumpy David wrote:Good going JC:

twitter.com/ComResPolls/status/853292086082154496



Meanwhile, 20 years ago:

twitter.com/newdawn1997/status/853192309751590913



Tory voters are never going to vote Labour anyway. So as bad as Labour are doing, it doesn't explain 46% of people wanting to keep the Conservatives in power.


For hardcore voters yes, but i know loads of people who have flipped between the two parties.

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