Sunday, November 26, 2006

[warning] radical reconstruction ahead

There has to be a purpose to blogging, to my mind. To that end, I’m going to try to draw together the recurrent threads of what many bloggers have said about the economic and social restructuring of society and paraphrase them in layman’s language, as a layman is what I am in these matters. After all, isn’t it the ordinary Joe Bloggs who’ll be affected? I imagine this will take the best part of three or four months.

First stop is L’Ombre de l”Olivier’s piece: Radical UK Financial Reform. Here is a paraphrase of the main intent, as I see it:

# As DK, Freebornjohn and Mr E note … smallish government is a desirable principle. # S&M reported over a year ago [and I’ll look at him next]the principle of a flat tax and "Citizen's Basic Income" that replaces all benefits and is given to all people regardless of income. Tim Worstall, I believe is for this and I’ll summarize his proposals separately.

# Associated huge reduction in bureaucracy in DWP and Inland Revenue.

# Remove the income tax personal allowance, the Working Tax Credit, the Child Tax Credit and Child Benefit, which since you are giving everyone £5200 including kids would seem pretty fair.

# Give the kids £100/week allowing you to remove most of the education budget too. Give £50 in voucher form up to age 16 or still in education. £2550 per child in vouchers and 12M children 16 and under is £30B There are about 2 million university students (+300k non UK ones) and I would guess another 2 million or so secondary school students aged over 16. This adds up another £10B at the same £2550/student and one could obviously increase the amount from university students.

# Make it clear that is the kid's money not the parent's by requiring the child to have a bank account for the dosh to be paid into, and then obviously, permit the parent to have access to it. Possibly after age 12 (say) the child has to be a co-signer or something so that the kids get experience managing money.

# Remove the minimum wage legislation and a bunch of similar busybody employment rules. Then by limiting the payment to UK citizens you create an interesting incentive to hire UK citizens rather than immigrants - it would allow you to remove almost every work permit requirement because the foreigners would need to have an extra £5000 from somewhere to have an equivalent income.

# The CBI ought to please the trades unions.

So that's the start of a working paper for Joe Bloggs.

4 comments:

  1. Hello James,

    you certainly are not alone. We are promoting this line of thought in Belgium for about ten years now. But things are moving, slow but steady.
    www.vivant.org

    Paul

    personal websites
    www.basicincome.be
    www.socialcurrency.be

    ReplyDelete
  2. I've done some more sums on the subject today and balanced the UK budget, including a CBI, with a flat 20% income tax rate.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I've done some more sums on the subject today and balanced the UK budget, including a CBI, with a flat 20% income tax rate.

    ReplyDelete

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