To A Far Unattainable Sky
I once wrote an essay about the role of government. It was long – possibly too long – but my basic point was that government exists to support the least amongst us – to support those who can not support themselves, and to help those who can not help themselves.
I still stand by that, but after listening to Caroline Lucas talk in The House of Commons about the government’s latest assault on the welfare state, I think I would like to add something else to my essay :-
The government should be there to raise the country up to a far unattainable sky, not to push it ever downwards to the lowest common denominator.
We should be striving ever upwards, to make the lives of everyone the best they can be. We should be trying to make this the best country it can be, if not the best in the world. And we should be making the best country it can be for everyone, not just for the elite – the select few.
In the last two years, the wealthy of this country have received pay off after pay off.
Cuts in income tax for the richest, while the poorest are left with nothing. (Raising the threshold takes some of the people out of income tax, but it barely saves them any money at all. And all those who were below the threshold to begin with are left with exactly what they had before – nothing).
Cuts in income tax for the richest, while the public sector workers are given pay cuts. (You freeze someone’s pay for two years while PPI and RPI go up 5% a year, you effectively give them 10% pay cuts).
Cuts in income tax for the richest, while benefits are capped below the cost of living increase. (Meaning that if you are on benefits, you are effectively being told that the government doesn’t believe you deserve to live like the rest of the country. That you should be punished and be forced to let your family suffer because "you don’t want to work" or "you are too lazy to get off your arse and find a job". Never mind that unemployment is going up, that businesses are closing every day and thousands of people are losing their jobs – if you don’t have a job, you don’t deserve to be happy).
Cuts in income tax for the richest, while the poor are made to suffer.
The government are pushing the bottom half of the country (in financial terms, not specifically geographical, although I suspect the majority of people who will benefit from their policies and plans will live in the home counties, while the north of the country will suffer) ever downwards until we will return to the world of Dickens ("better that they die and decrease the surplice population") or there will be a huge catastrophe and a massive backlash against whichever government is in power at the time.
Perhaps that is there plan – perhaps the Tories are setting it up so that they will not get re-elected in 2015, but that the full effects of their policies will peak right around then and Labour will take the full force of the blame.
But quite honestly, I don’t think that they are that smart.
I think that The Tory Party hates poor people, and loves rich people, and is intent on sucking up to their friends in anyway possible.
How else do you explain that – when there is apparently a deficit so big they have to cut benefits by millions of pounds – they give away thousands of millions of pounds to the richest in society?
How else do you explain that – when "we are all in this together" – the poor have been getting poorer, and The Tory Government hands most of its Senior Members a massive tax cut?
xxxxx
Time for some maths –
Imagine RPI is 5% – just as a sample figure.
If someone gets £500 a week in benefits, that means a 5% increase will give them £525 pounds a week (500 * 0.05 = 25).
If someone gets £1,500 a week, and gets only a 2.5% raise, they will be on £1,538 a week.
So even though the Benefit rise is twice as large (in percentage terms) as the private sector rise, the person in the private sector gets – in real terms – £13 more a week.
And yet the Tory Government will only tell you the percentage figures – they will say that "Benefits should not go up at twice the rate of average salaries" and they will mean the percentage raise, not the real term raise.
Time for some more maths –
If you raise the Income Tax Threshold from £7,000 a year to £8,000 a year, you take everyone who earns between £7,001 and £8,000 a year "out of tax".
But if you earn £7,001 a year, you would only pay 20% tax on £1 of your salary, which is 20p. So – basically – you have saved 20p per year.
Even at £8,000, you would only be saving £1,000 * 20% = £200 a year (which, to someone on £8,000 might be a lot – I don’t deny that – but hear me out).
If you earn £500,000 a year, then – up until you were rewarded by this government for having money – you would have been paying 50% tax on £350,000 a year, or £175,000 a year.
But then it was cut to 45%, meaning that you are now only paying £157,500 tax a year.
Meaning that you got a tax cut of £175,000 – £157,500 = £17,500 a year.
xoxox
They are forcing people who have nothing to fall in to the lowest common denominator, instead of raising them up to be the best that they can be.
But they are not doing that to those who have money, to those who are already rich. They are not limiting the salaries of the richest of the rich – in fact, they are increasing them.
xoxox
The government should exist to raise everyone up. Instead it is pushing them ever downwards.
And whatever your answer to the question "what is the role of government" might be, I am pretty sure no one would think it is that.