We’re all in this together? October 20, 2010
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Economy, Irish Politics, The Left.trackback
Drivetime on RTÉ on Monday night had Camille Loftus of the Poor Can’t Pay campaign and Moore McDowell. And it was some conversation.
We were treated to Moore McDowell arguing against Child Benefit and universal entitlements more generally. Which is a step change in the discourse we’ve heard to date. So we can expect more of this, no doubt. He was arguing that he had no need of free transport because he could afford to pay for it. Why, oh why should he receive this? Why? Why? I paraphrase, but only slightly.
Of course he didn’t bother to delve into the issue of why universal benefits, and in particular child benefit are more efficient at dealing with child poverty than means tested benefits. That would bring a difficult, complex, note to the argument. One which didn’t simply use the metric of expenditure (boo-hiss, bad, bad, bad) but rather saw this in terms of outcomes as well as expense. Of course if you don’t give a rashers about outcomes…well…
As Loftus noted ‘there’s a simple way of dealing with the distributional issue… raise taxes’.
Audible sighs from McDowell. And then he was on to the 5% of the taxpayers at the top are paying 48% of the tax. This is such a specious argument. It really is. Amazing that he should continue to trot out this line.
What he neglects to note is that it is that 5% who collectively earn vastly greater sums than all else, or to use the phrase, that’s the way income distribution is skewed. If Cliff Taylor can admit this in the Sunday Business Post why not McDowell? Again though, why introduce complexity?
He argues the country ‘cannot afford to consume goods and services of the public sector’. And he argues that collectively we’ve got to reduce our standard of living and that means most people in the country and that means the super-rich and that means most people are going to suffer.
Except er… McDowell has himself noted that he can easily forgo free travel and presumably other benefits. That’s not really my definition of ‘pain’, though he waved it about as some sort of token of fiscal and societal virtue. But his final contribution was most telling.
The presenter asked Loftus what about the people like Moore McDowell who are in receipt of free travel can afford to pay an annual subvention for it.
I’m delighted to hear it and he can contribute more tax.
And the response? A near snarky…
“Thanks!”
Lèse majesté! And perceived as such.
Because perish the thought that he might, y’know, pay a little more tax to assist those who have a lot less. Or any sense of proportion that he’d spent the previous five minutes arguing for cuts in welfare and benefits. Indeed what virtue is there in parading ones willingness to jettison something one has no use for and can easily afford while proscribing increases in taxation for those who can ill afford them and simultaneously dismissing the idea one will pay increased taxation oneself for a societal benefit? At best there’s something unedifying about this.
Anyhow, exit to chuckles of disbelief from Wilson and McDowell.
We’re all in this together? I don’t think so.
Does Revenue accept donations via cheque? If Moore McDowell doesn’t need his universal entitlements, hopefully there’s nothing to stop him from handing back an equivalent cash sum, rather than just trousering them and complaining about the supposed extravagance of it.
He argues the country ‘cannot afford to consume goods and services of the public sector
You rightly call him out on the cliche about the top 5% – all it proves is that the top 5% earn a huge amount, not anything about the supposed progressiveness of our tax system.
The bit I’ve quoted shows up another ruling class myth: the notion that public sector ‘goods and services’ are a luxury – for Moore McDowell, free travel and child benefit may be such, but the complete unawareness of what these ‘perks’ might mean to the majority of people in this country is staggering.
It should be the case that a certain level of health/ education/ social welfare benefits are non-negotiable: if we have to go to Europe or the IMF, Brian Cowen puts on his MC Hammer trousers, and tells them ‘You Can’t Touch This’.
Instead of a social cohesion that binds society this way however, we have a sort of abusive family, where the likes of McDowell, the hereditary ruling class, see themselves as in loco parentis with regard to all us errant children, who certainly couldn’t be trusted to rule ourselves. And, deep in the noblesse oblige recesses of their minds, welfare is like the pocket money they give -or take away – from the rest of us: the nation has been entrusted to them by history and the dead generations, and the public purse is the housekeeping money for them to disburse as they see fit. The idea of any entitlement to anything on the part of us plebs is alien – the only entitlement that counts is them being born to rule.
‘cannot afford to consume goods and services of the public sector’
Yeah, I saw that and it made me think. He is saying that the Irish cannot afford education, social welfare, many aspects of public (and private -roads) transport, arts and culture, defence etc but presumably they can afford consumer goods etc. Bizarre, surely it is many of the products of the private sector (excluding food and clothes of course) that more logically “you cannot afford” in hard times rater than what most of us (here) would regard as essential services provided by the state? Hm, maybe that is a value judgement dteremined by one’s class/ideology?
Also, aren’t many of the products of the private sector imported (e.g. all sorts of electronic stuff) while the public sector is pretty much all home grown? Makes sense then to spend *more* on home grown public services (which will support mainly local suppliers in the private sector) when cash is scarce and the economy in recession? Has anybody looked at that i.e. whether opublic sector spending leads to more local wealth, tax revenue, employment than consumer spending on private sector products?
It is a product of class/ideology. That it’s reiterated through various media is what gives it power.
Not sure about your last point. The ESRI models indicate the level of loss in terms if growth through reduced PS spending or job cuts but how one could infer more is above my pay scale.
the likes of McDowell, the hereditary ruling class, see themselves as in loco parentis with regard to all us errant children, who certainly couldn’t be trusted to rule ourselves. And, deep in the noblesse oblige recesses of their minds, welfare is like the pocket money they give -or take away – from the rest of us
Funny you should mention McDowell and noblesse oblige in the same paragraph – his old comrade in the “Open Republic Institute” Paul McDonnell sneeringly used the very term to describe the welfare state a few years ago in a Hist debate in TCD.
On further reflection, it occurs to me that this might indicate why there is a move to replace PRSI payments with a fixed levy. With the notion of insurance embedded in the old stamp/ PRSI, there was a sense that, when you become unemployed or ill, what you are getting is your own money, as with an insurance policy. Break that link, and you weaken the sense of it being something you are automatically entitled to, replacing it with a sense of it being a ‘hand out’ – which as Conor pointed out a while ago, was always the ideological basis on which our half a welfare state operated.
That’s priceless EWI.
That’s priceless EWI.
Especially coming from such a regular of the Kildare Street Club. But what else would you expect of a lobbyist for the insurance industry?
The Hist has, alas, wiped the recordings of that particular debate off their website sometime in the recent past – but I’m certain that I have them saved somewhere. It seems a shame to let such hubris be lost to posterity…
Class consciousness-raising is coming along nicely, then?
eh?
You reckon Moore is an agent provocateur?
Agent Fitzpatrick is expensive, but he might yet be worth the money…
Nah – he’s a 100% organic product of his mileau. It’s like at some demos – there’s always some eedjit who will,say, set light a bank branch office without checking if anyone is in there.
And there’s an unending queue of these types who will offend the ears of the excluded for a fee. No APs needed.
Agent Fitzpatrick believed his own propaganda, so I paid him in Anglo shares.
Teehee.
I am a political dinosaur motivated by malice and envy, but I bet the top 5% are responsible for more than 48% of tax evasion.
WBS,
Could you get in touch with me if you get a chance? It’s kind of important.
I’m out this evening until 9 – 10, I’ll get straight back to you then or email me on the WBS email and I’ll try to access it earlier…
Can’t please we put this 5%/48% thing to bed once and for all with a few graphs of income distributions? Something that shows the net worth of the top 5% of individuals, their annual income and their tax contribution? So whoever gets presented with this kinda thing can say “the top 5% gets 40% of the total income of the country and owns 70% of the total wealth, and as far as we’re concerned they’re not paying near enough”
A job for TASC? The left really needs soundbites like this at its fingertips in the way the right has.
Completely agree, I’m sure it’s been done but broader coverage us essential.
““Can’t please we put this 5%/48% thing to bed once and for all with a few graphs of income distributions? ”
Would this do? I have the H.E.A.P. poster (generated by Prof T McDonagh of NUI Galway, and published by Tasc and Congress). The hard copy is so long I would need to spread it out on the kitchen floor to see it all. The top of the distribution on the main chart on the poster is at €134,000. And then there’s this wee note:
[Minor grumble: it would have been useful for Tasc and Congress to make a jpg or other image available in addition to the PDF file. Any techies here able to convert the PDF into a reasonably sized jpg that I could be posted for a sense of what it looks like?]
Just looking at that “wealth of the nation” report:
“… the top 1% of the population holds 20% of the wealth, the top 2% holds 30% and the top 5% holds 40%. However, if we exclude the value of housing wealth and focus primarily on financial wealth, the concentration of wealth increases. In this instance, 1% of the population accounts for around 34% of the wealth.”
Apply the same ratio to find the non-housing wealth of the top 5%, we get a figure of 68%. Just to make that clear – the top 5% of the population holds SIXTY-EIGHT PERCENT of the country’s wealth.
I think we need to be shouting this from the rooftops
(I know that I’m making assumptions here, and that the report is from 2007. But do the right pad their soundbites with qualifications and caveats? They do not. Does it hurt their case? It does not.)
Looking at my post below again, it’s apparent that although the top 5% do pay almost half of all tax, the rest of us pay half of all tax too, and the top 5% has TWICE as much money as the rest of us put together
Now there’s a soundbite for you
Those stats have never bothered me. And, no, I am not in that 5%.
What age are those 5%? I’ll bet you dollars to donuts they’re 50+. during the boom anyone who owned their property, i.e. age 40+, instantly became “wealthy”. They’ll also die in a few years and that wealth will get broken up and pass downwards.
So I think, fwiw, that it’s less important to get hung up on the numbers which, when you think about the generational thing, are not that surprising really, and more focused on how the concentration occurred, which is often if not always because of political connections.
We have no Warren Buffetts or Bill Gates’ in Ireland. Wealth accumulation seems to be a case of who you know, not what you do, but I’m open to correction here.
Tomboktu,
This should be an A4-scaled PDF of the HEAP chart:
http://issuu.com/wpi_meath/docs/heap_poster_2005_1
The usual reference for the wealth of the top 5% is the Bank of Ireland 2007 ‘Wealth of the Nation’ update/report. The top 5% hold 40% of the nation’s net worth according to that. It’s probably largely redundant however, as it factors in 2007 values for property – which would suggest that there’s been a fair degree of churn in that top 5% subsequently.
http://www.finfacts.ie/biz10/WealthNationReportJuly07.pdf
Very good, but unless I’m mistaken we’re not talking about the top 5%, in terms of wealth of the nation, but about those within the tax net. Hence McDowell’s point about 5% of taxpayers. A somewhat different thing.
The Lone Ranger and Tonto are riding along when suddenly a large group of hostile Indians appear.
Lone Ranger: ‘Tonto, we’re surrounded by Indians’
Tonto: ‘How do you mean ‘we’, Kemo Sabe?
CL,
I believe the proper line from Tonto has always been, “what’s this ‘we’ shit Kemo Sabe?”
There’s a poster in there somewhere….
http://dublinopinion.com/2010/10/21/dan-obrien-blows-it-out-his-ass-once-again/
Conor McCabe notes the lies of this clown again
What was a astounding about O’Brien’s column was how threadbare it all was. I mean suddenly, as Conor noted, he’s suggesting we can’t really know about this economic thing (I paraphrase, but y’know, only somewhat) but he’s really really sure that the course we’re taking is the right one? This week alone discredits so much of what has been implemented and the cheerleaders of deflation that it’s hard to know what else, short of a lost decade, can do more.
[...] for rhetorical evidence of this consider Moore McDowell’s ‘generous’ offer to eschew free transport which he could well [...]