Wednesday 6 October 2010

Pay far more than peanuts, you still get monkeys.

I haven't said anything about child credits because they don't affect me and I'm not in the income-bracket that would be affected even if there was a child here. There are many who have had plenty to say, too many to list them all here, so I'm going to have to pick out just a few.

Devil's Knife puts it succinctly: it's a balls-up. Rather than a simple and cheap system that would just let people with children keep a bit of tax, there is now a system that favours keeping each individual parent's income (and thus their tax liability) below a threshold. Why earn more when you're going to lose more than the extra you earn? Standard Labour benefit-trap technique. I thought it was just Ozzy Osbourne who spent years off his face on drugs but it seems it's in the family.

Then there is all the admin required to determine whether each individual family qualifies. Admin isn't cheap these days. Small government? Not with this lot in charge.

Iain Dale thinks it's good but then he might need to think some more. It's not making the Tory part of the Coagulation look good at all.

Old Holborn sniffs the first scent of revolt. That 'benefit' was the only thing middle class families ever got back for all the tax they paid. It was never a real benefit, it was a bribe. Okay, Wayne and Tracy are getting their Wkd and dope at your expense but at least you're getting child benefit. If all the benefits go, that goes too, right? Well it's going - but Wayne and Tracy will still get theirs. Osbourne, you need to look at more than numbers if you're going to avoid that lamppost appointment.

As I said, it doesn't affect me monetarily. What it says to me is that this is a plan hatched by an idiot with no idea what they are doing. A Chancer almost as mad as the last one and perhaps getting close to the lunacy of the one before that. People are not numbers on a spreadsheet. It is not possible for a government to monitor and then dictate the minutiae of life, because the averages they apply will not fit anyone. Such governments always fail and it's always messy. Don't they teach history in schools any more? Sorry, daft question.

Individual circumstances fit no textbooks. You cannot set an individual limit for a tax break because people don't all live as individuals. Yet if you want to check 'household income' they can just live apart or say they do and there is no way to police them all. How often will you check? At the census? Bed-and-breakfasts will be full of 'separated' husbands for the day. It cannot be done and it is insane to try.

All those pressure groups on waistline, drinking, smoking, salt, cholesterol, all of them want the human race to be a cloned colony where everyone is the same. None of them can ever work. Computer models are as much use at modelling human physiology as they are are predicting climate. None at all. And yet we are legislated into some Aryan ideal that nobody can ever achieve, because our leading lunatics fall for every word.

So what does the debacle over child credits mean to me? It simply serves to demonstrate that once again, we have a government that has no idea what it is doing.

And that once again, we have a leader who is happy to prostrate himself and grovel for forgiveness for his lies. A weak and worthless man who acts without thought and then pleads ignorance, as if ignorace was some kind of strength. That is the calibre of politics nowadays and it is a shameful and disgusting sight. These people think themselves important but I, as a smoker, regard them as less than dirt. How far down the scale is that? Ask a paedo. He's higher up the social scale than me so maybe the government won't simply delete everything he has to say.

I'm a smoker, Cameroid. There can be no forgiveness here, not for what you have done and are doing to me. No apology will ever suffice. No pretend tears will move me. No simpering words nor sorry tales of 'it wisnae me' will crack my sneer now. You have not been in office for half a year and yet you have lied and lied and sought to cover up those lies with false contrition and deflection.

The Cleggeron Coagulation is a failure. A revolting mash of lies and deceptions that mirrors exactly the vile creatures they replaced. They cannot get a simple tax equation right and rather than hold up their hands and say 'Sorry, buggered that up, try again', they instead seek to add to the complexity with another system on top. Just like the Blur and the Gorgon. This small government gets bigger by the hour.

The entire country holds me in contempt simply because I like a smoke. I am not stealing money from you, I am not funding groups that indoctrinate your children in hatred and in parental control. I'm just the guy who likes a smoke and you feel perfectly justified in wishing death on me for that. Who is there below me that I can be contemptuous of?

Only the government.

Cameron, Clegg, take note. They hate you even more than they hate me.

And you're paying them to hate me.

8 comments:

Timdog said...

Brilliant, required reading.

"It is not possible for a government to monitor and then dictate the minutiae of life, because the averages they apply will not fit anyone."

But they will try, over and over and over again.

banned said...

Likewise family tax credits don't affect me but I do understand what an incredibly complicated system it is; requiring, as you say armies of not very talented but wrll people to administer it.
I know several people who are entitled to it but do not bother because it too complicated and intrusive or of marginal benefit.

cuffleyburgers said...

I can see your point - no doubt it has been ineptly announced and what finally happens will look different from this.

We should all earnestly hope that a comprehensive simplification of the tax code will start to emerge - this is a necessary adjunct to the worthwhile and overdue refroms being planned for education, health and welfare.


At that point probably this will be only a faint memory of a first step in the right direction

Bill said...

What banned said was true of the tax credit forms many moons ago but these days a trained chimp could fill them in, in fact I do every year!
And in my experience there hasn't been a single cock up by the drones, although I do know others who have had noting but cock ups. Guess I must have been lucky.

But LI is bang on once again.
Why does he persevere with 'shovelling infected chicken shit' for a living when he could be writing for a living and 'shovelling infected chicken shit' as a hobby?

Woodsy42 said...

Back in the day when income tax was changed from a shared husband/wife/household basis to an individual basis I believe the child tax allowance was changed into a cash payment to the closest parent.
At the time it meant that our family paid more tax and had to go to the PO to collect it back again, annoying! That's also why it was 'universal' and never a means tested benefit.
Nowadys I am well past having any personal interest either way, and I see absolutely no point in subsidising rich parents.
Even so it's worth considering that we have seen the transmutation of a tax allowance into a 'benefit' then its withdrawal from the better off. Does nobody remember the past?

Anonymous said...

It’s a sad fact that most Western economies depend heavily on their population’s indulges, pleasures and “sins” to keep going, and this move, illustrates just how much our own does so. I just wonder how long it’ll take average, non-thinking, middle-class, propaganda-swallowing members of the public to make the connection.

How I wish someone, somewhere, in politics would stand up and point out that all the loss of revenue from tobacco taxes – through people giving up, having less opportunity to smoke (and thus smoking less), switching from ready-mades to roll-ups, and of course from the burgeoning “man in a van” trade – has got to be made up somehow.

They’ve already instigated fines for pretty much anything and everything, and there isn’t much more that people can be fined for that isn’t already in the rule books; there’s only so much more they can add to the cost of tobacco before it gets to the point of cutting off their noses to spite their faces; ditto alcohol; they can’t increase income tax for fear of anti-ban groups saying (rightly) “we told you so;” they’ve upped VAT rates, but most of that goes straight into the EU’s coffers anyway; and they’ve threatened to increase tax for the very wealthy - but the super-rich are all in a position to simply move to sunnier, tax-free climes and the Government know this full well.

So, in the absence of being able to raise more funds, the only option remaining is to cut expenses. The fact that this is targeted at people with children – a vast percentage of the population – indicates how desperate things have become and how damaging our current new Puritanism is to the health of our own economy.

timbone said...

In 1944, plans were being made for a post war Britain, which included a welfare state. This was a socialist ideal, and the numerous benefits, for reasons both political and idealistic, were based on equality.

Times were different then. In a society not at war, on the whole, men worked and women kept house and raised a family. The working class male was a substantive part of the population, and was not terribly well off. Family Allowance as it was then called was benefit which ensured that the working class family had enough to feed and clothe their children adequately.

Let me jump forward to 1977 when my first child was born. For reasons beyond our control, both my wife and I were unemployed. When our second child was born in 1980, I was doing my PGCE and my wife was a Tupperware Agent. Child Benefit was both welcome and necessary. Jump forward another ten years. We were both now firmly established in the teaching profession, so our joint income was very healthy.

This is where I may not say what you want to hear. If in 1987 we had been told that because of our household income we would no longer receive child benefit, my reaction would have been, ‘that’s the end of some extra pocket money, but fair enough, we don’t need it now’.

1944 is a long time ago. There are still people who need and deserve child benefit, but there are also many who don’t. Notice that in my hypothesis, my own child benefit would have been stopped due to a comfortable household income. This is the bit Osbourne has not thought through.

Joe said...

2 grand a month for sitting on her arse popping out sprogs??? It takes me around about 2 months to earn that, give or take.

But here for me is the clincher "I don't care that it is at the taxpayers' cost", but I bet she'd care if the taxpayer turned around and said "well shove it straight up your arse, here's tuppence, now go get a job you lazy self-centered bitch "

The revolution is a-coming and this one ain't gonna be pretty, and yet the blood spillage shall be quite low.

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