Feeling poor? WHO took all your money? NOT capitalist bastards?

So Much Assumption

There is so much assumption here. The public sector and the private sector are not two walled gardens but changes in both make such comparisons very dubious. Low paid public sector jobs have been extensively privatised in the last 20 years meaning that people cleaning hospital floors, doing home care or many other things are now private sector workers. This transfer of low pay into the private sector has been substantial.

If you look at pensions the collapse of private sector schemes and saving in general means that public sector schemes are bound to be "better". Should we be celebrating a race to reduce wages, pensions and provision.

However for the purposes of an argument lets assume it's all true and the big conspirators of the crash are public sector workers. People being made redundant by the score to save bust banks - banks who were theoretically private sector!

The analysis seems to be that if you were in the public sector with strong trade unions, rights at work, a strong culture of negotiating collectively on wages and conditions you have done well. If you work in the private sector with little or no trade union representation you do badly. So the message to all workers is surely to join trade unions and negotiate collectively with your employer.

Oh yes, lies

This "article" should be removed from The Reg due to (a), gross inaccuracies and (b) political bias on an IT site.

The public sector took all of (our) money? REALLY??! Just ONE WEEK after this "article" was posted, here is the TRUTH:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/27/us-tax-britain-bigfirms-idUSBRE8BQ02V20121227

"Big companies in Britain now pay less tax than they did 12 years ago despite a big jump in profitability, a Reuters analysis of official data shows. Tax campaigners say the trend is the clearest signal yet that tax avoidance has blossomed under a more business-friendly strategy at the UK tax authority Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC)."

*Less* money is going to (public) tax coffers from large corporations. That means that the only "money" coming out of (our) pockets is *personal* - that is, more burden is being put on the individual while the corporations, who have been granted the status and rights of an individual in our societies, gain access to the benefits of the system while not paying their share of the burden.

And the co-politically/economically connected people - the same people who either are gaining the benefits now or (naively) think they will benefit later ("trickle down economics"), support the imbalance.

A large percentage of the population has been...well, brainwashed...into believing that such an imbalance, in the long term, will benefit their personal needs. 30 years later...we are in debt, in a recession that came *this close* to becoming a massive depression, crumbling infrastructure, etc. And the solution? Lower taxes on Big Business and the wealthy, of course.

I find it INCREDIBLY naive for people to believe that what did not work in the 30 years prior...will begin to work NOW. They still keep believing in the Kool Aid, yet they never bother to look behind themselves to see the history that they themselves lived through. Income that has not kept up with inflation indexes, gross national debt, recessions, white collar crimes with slap-on-the-wrist penalties, massive upper management remuneration contracts...and more of the same will save us, the masses believe. And told so by ridiculous "articles" such as this with no factual proof and adequate "statistical" spin without telling you the *entire* truth.

Feeling Rather Sick...

Your point (last paragraphs) about those who know a subject well to speak up against those who don't but pontificate about it, is well judged. For years my late wife and I would comment incredulously about stories in the press, or other media, that were twisted or downright wrong in our respective areas of speciality.

Our conclusion was that if so many "facts" that we knew to be wrong were being published we could not trust the "facts" in other subject areas.

I was surprised, though, that as many as 25% of MPs knew the odds on getting two consectutive heads in a coin toss. Although perhaps this figure is also wrong......

Greedy bastards will always be greedy bastards.

Like it or not, the measure of a man is not in pounds/pence, dollars/cents.

The richest "people" can be the scummiest lowlives out there. They are usually psycopaths.

Others, can be normal human beings with a sense of responsibility, but usully they are power hungry psyco's who think that being rich allows them to manipulate others for their own gain.

No amount of money could buy me! I'm worth more than money, regardless of how much I earn.

Past Party Politics

I haven't seen any comments here pointing out errors in Tim Worstall's figures and/or charts. I assume it is therefore safe to rely on the content, that they tell a true story and give a reliable picture of the real world.

In which case it is truly worrying. For the TUC to spin a story is one thing but to tell outright falsehoods aware of the impact such dishonesty will have is not just shameful, it is dangerous.

The charts reflect some fundamentals about the UK economy that are way beyond party politics.

Firstly while the numbers in the workforce have grown considerably - vastly more women, immigration, longer living etc - allowing for inflation, the national GDP hasn't grown very much.

If you divide a constant sum by a growing number you get an increasingly smaller result so that yes more people are getting a wage packet but the packet itself is smaller.

If the amount is topped off - by taxation and other government costs - then the total amount available is getting smaller even more quickly and the resulting wage packets reduced even more so.

It would be to everyone's benefit if the Office of Budget Responsibility (I notice they didn't call it the Office of Responsible Budgets - I wonder why that was?) could publish this sort of analysis on a regular basis.

The electorate is pretty much head in the sand pretty much most of the time but we do need to move these unarguables out of the political arena into the world most of us live in where 2 + 2 always equals 4.

Basically this is a “we can’t go on like this” message I suppose.