New poll: banks not paying fair share
According to a survey, more than three-quarters (77%) of the British public do not think the Government has done enough to ensure we are “all in this together” with a large majority saying that banks and the richest have not been asked to make a fair contribution.
The poll of more than 1,000 people carried out by Ipsos MORI for the Robin Hood Tax campaign, found that two-thirds (68%) of the public thought City funding of the Conservative Party had a significant impact on the Government’s regulation and taxation of the financial sector.
It found that 71% thought banks and the financial sector are “not being asked to pay their fair share”. The corresponding figure for high income earners was 67%.
David Hillman, Robin Hood Tax campaign spokesperson, said: “This is the clearest evidence yet that the public is tired of the Government’s failure to make banks pay their fair share to society. People are tired of seeing their schools and hospitals cut while a sector that relied on taxpayers money to survive gives lottery-sized bonuses to bankers whatever their performance.
“It is time the Government acted in the interests of the whole country not just one square mile. The City may give the Conservatives half their funds but it accounts for just 10% of the UK economy.”
The poll shows the public have clearly identified the City and high earners above other groups as not paying their fair share. Only 3% cited low and middle income earners. Public sector workers and business were cited by only 7% and 15% respectively.
Of the two-thirds of people who said the fact the Conservatives receive more than 50 per cent of funding from individuals and companies involved in the financial sector would lead to bias, 27% said it would make a great deal of difference and 41% a fair amount. Only 3% said City funding of the Conservatives would have no affect on the Government’s decisions.
Comments
#1 For a while now I have been
For a while now I have been focusing on the question of what economic policies would cure the Global Financial Crash. This is actually a trivial question with a straightforward answer. The real question I should have been asking is why hasn't a solution been proposed and debated. The shocking answer I have come up with is that those with the power to get us out of this mess have decided it is not in their interest to fix the world economy.
Consider that under austerity the relative wealth of the world richest people has increased significantly. For example, the Times Rich List of the 1000 wealthiest people in the UK has shown that their combined wealth has increased by 5% in the last 12 months to a new record high of £414 billion-
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17883101
[As an aside we might ask why these people are so desperate to earn their second and third billions. My own preconception is their greed is a product of the way they were potty trained, serous only child syndrome and sadistic bullying in certain English boarding schools. Certainly these people are dysfunctional enough that they are capable of inflicting limitless misery on everybody else in order to get exactly what they want.]
Back to the point though, which is to compare the effect of austerity on the super rich and the other 99.999% of the population.
The effects of the austerity policies propagated by the Tory led coalition have been severe and immediate on nearly all of us but the ultra wealthy.
Average incomes, for example, have dropped by over 6% in the last year in the UK (according to ONS earnings figures). Indeed austerity is likely (with only 10% of the Tories cuts actually implemented so far) to intensify and carry on for at least a decade. For example, presenting its analysis of 2011 autumn statement, the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) predicted real median household incomes would be no higher in 2015-16 than they were in 2002-3. In other words, more than a decade will have passed without any increase in living standards for those on average incomes. The same analysis estimates 1 in 4 children will also end up in poverty by 2015.
So the implications are clear. Osborne's current policies lead to rising incomes for the ultra rich but grinding poverty for everybody else.
But what would reverse this balance and result in policies that increased living standards for the 60 million UK citizens and constrain the skyrocketing growth in inequality caused by the massive income gains of the ultra wealthy?
To my mind the reason the entire right wing press, the Institute of Directors, CBI, economic think tanks, Tory donors and so forth are behind the austerity drive of the Tories is the role of wage equalisation in international trade.
It has been known for a long while (
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_price_equalisation ) that when two countries enter a free trade agreement, wages for identical jobs in both countries tend to approach each other. After the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed, for instance, unskilled labor wages gradually fell in the United States, at the same time as they gradually rose in Mexico. The same force has applied more recently to the various countries of the European Union.
The implication of this is that globalisation has begun to open up the huge workforces of China and India who are currently paid much lower wages than their US and European counterparts.
Given that we know, through Factor Price Equalisation, as long as we continue free trade, that the wages of these workers are going to equalise over the next 20 years. There are of course two ways that wages could equalise.
In the first scenario governments in Europe and the US deliberately pursue their current austerity program's and suppress workers wages. The Chinese and Indian wages gradually rise to meet EU and US levels and the converged wage for workers in a decade or twos time is modest.
This scenario of course supplies much larger profit margins to the ultra wealthy owners and managers of multinational corporations as their wage bill is low. Bankers are happy as austerity allows greater indebtedness of households to them and inflation isn't allowed to eat into the real interest paid by households on the debts owed to those that have lent the money. As a side benefit, privatising the profitable parts of the state (tuition fees, the NHS, NATs etc) under the excuses of austerity allows further tax payer backed profit opportunities for multinationals.
The other scenario for wage equalisation is sovereign debt monetization, tax reform , financial transaction taxes, Keynsian stimulus etc. These policy responses are not to be welcomed by the global elite. Although citizens would likely welcome these economic policies as they would result in rising living standards, higher employment and economic growth they would circumvent the Austerity for the hundreds of millions of citizens in the US and Europe and result in wage equalisation of EU/US workers at a higher level with workers in China and India. This is an unacceptable outcome for the worlds global elite who will lose profit margin from the higher wage bills they will need to pay their workers.
This is the reason we see the forces of business, Tories, all right wing economists and so forth lobbying so hard for austerity and the continuation of misery.
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