That strange, shouty man on Question Time simply was in the top five per cent if he earned £80,000. That is a fact. In which bracket did he think that that kind of money put him? We know the answer to that, because he claimed in all seriousness that he was not even in the top 50 per cent, which begins at around £26,000. Mind you, I remember Laura Pidcock whining about how poor she was on £79,468 plus expenses, so there is a lot of this about.
The median household income in this country does not hit £30,000. 43 per cent of adults do not reach the income tax threshold of £12,501, effectively a thousand pounds per month. Two in five adults are on less than that. And the idea, uncorrected by the useless host, that all doctors and solicitors made 80 grand was downright laughable.
Also uncorrected, because it always is, was the repeated suggestion that Britain had been "bankrupt" 10 years ago. But it was the State that bailed out the banks, not the other way round. On the day of the 2010 General Election, this country did not have a recession, but it did have a triple A credit rating. Neither state of affairs was to last long after that Election.
By this morning, even the Today programme was having to admit that Labour's projected spending would be around the European average (in fact it would be lower than in France, Italy, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway or Sweden), that the annual increase would be equivalent only to the annual budget of NHS England, and that public spending had accounted for a higher proportion of national income during the privately made financial crisis, blowing out of the water yesterday's endless claim that nothing like this had been seen since the War.
Let's see how far the Conservative manifesto really differs from the Labour one. Let's see it rule out Margaret Thatcher's and Nigel Lawson's taxation of earned and unearned income at the same rate. Let's see it rule out putting up tax on the top five per cent. And let's see its enormous plans for public spending, several of which have already been announced.
Even in America, they talk up their economic individualism. In Britain, the only people who even bother to do that are a highly Americanised little sect that seems to be faintly hurt that nobody else has ever heard of the obscure seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century figures whom they think ought to be our national heroes and sages. That sect operates mostly within the party of which the only permanent element is, of all people, the farmers, whose sector is necessarily always the most socialised of any economy.
But both main parties have flirted with this kind of thing over the last 40 years, each secure in the knowledge that it had a large enough electoral base both to guarantee its own survival and to dampen its misdirected ardour. Neither of them is doing so today, though. For that, you now need the Liberal Democrats. And even then, again, they know that enough people will vote for them anyway, either for the sake of Remain or because they always do.
What both main parties know but for some reason neither of them will say, even though it was simply presupposed both by the bank bailout and by every war ever, is that a sovereign state with its own free floating fiat currency has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself. It literally cannot run out of money.
Both fiscal means and monetary means exist to control inflation, and to encourage certain forms of behaviour while discouraging others. What those forms of behaviour are to be, and how much inflation is to tolerated or sometimes even encouraged, are the stuff of political choice, so that both fiscal policy and monetary policy must be subject to democratic political control.
Yet most politicians in Britain today either have no understanding of any of this, or they pretend not to have. Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.
By this morning, even the Today programme was having to admit that Labour's projected spending would be around the European average (in fact it would be lower than in France, Italy, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway or Sweden), that the annual increase would be equivalent only to the annual budget of NHS England, and that public spending had accounted for a higher proportion of national income during the privately made financial crisis, blowing out of the water yesterday's endless claim that nothing like this had been seen since the War.
Let's see how far the Conservative manifesto really differs from the Labour one. Let's see it rule out Margaret Thatcher's and Nigel Lawson's taxation of earned and unearned income at the same rate. Let's see it rule out putting up tax on the top five per cent. And let's see its enormous plans for public spending, several of which have already been announced.
Even in America, they talk up their economic individualism. In Britain, the only people who even bother to do that are a highly Americanised little sect that seems to be faintly hurt that nobody else has ever heard of the obscure seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth century figures whom they think ought to be our national heroes and sages. That sect operates mostly within the party of which the only permanent element is, of all people, the farmers, whose sector is necessarily always the most socialised of any economy.
But both main parties have flirted with this kind of thing over the last 40 years, each secure in the knowledge that it had a large enough electoral base both to guarantee its own survival and to dampen its misdirected ardour. Neither of them is doing so today, though. For that, you now need the Liberal Democrats. And even then, again, they know that enough people will vote for them anyway, either for the sake of Remain or because they always do.
What both main parties know but for some reason neither of them will say, even though it was simply presupposed both by the bank bailout and by every war ever, is that a sovereign state with its own free floating fiat currency has as much of that currency as it chooses to issue to itself. It literally cannot run out of money.
Both fiscal means and monetary means exist to control inflation, and to encourage certain forms of behaviour while discouraging others. What those forms of behaviour are to be, and how much inflation is to tolerated or sometimes even encouraged, are the stuff of political choice, so that both fiscal policy and monetary policy must be subject to democratic political control.
Yet most politicians in Britain today either have no understanding of any of this, or they pretend not to have. Another hung Parliament is coming, however, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. I am standing for Parliament here at North West Durham. The crowdfunding page is here, and buy the book here. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.
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