Sorted

Words of wisdom and hope from The Independent.

“It’s OK if you are one of the 13,000 millionaires in this country.”

Let’s take him at his word and do what the trade unionists and respected charity spokespeople in this report might suggest as good ideas.

The UK national debt that has to be paid back to someone or other is £1,347,000,000,000.

That “someone or other” is the banks who would otherwise be lending to employers and people who make useful stuff and who want to keep on employing people and making useful stuff and paying taxes for our existing welfare state….and the taxpayers and their children who would otherwise be spending their taxes on themselves and their children.

Just on servicing the debt.

“As of Q4 2012 the national debt amounted to £1,347.4 billion, or 88.7% of total GDP. The annual cost of servicing the public debt amounts to around £43bn, or roughly 3% of GDP

This is roughly the same size as the British defence budget.

Due to the Government's significant budget deficit, which must be financed by borrowing, the national debt is increasing by approximately £121 billion per annum, or around £2.3 billion each week.”

Just on servicing the debt.

Let’s tax the rich!

Assume there might be as many as 100 billionaires [wild guess] in the UK.

Let’s call them ‘the obscenely rich.’

That’s £100,000,000,000 they own.

Call it £100 billion.

Let's assume that the middling millionaires’ total personal assets (including those of lucky footballers and scrap merchants and car dealers and factory owners and farming combines) amount to say an average of £50 million each.

Let’s call them ‘the filthy rich.’

That’s 1,200x 50,000,000 = £60,000,000,000 they own.

Call it £60 billion.

In total let’s assume the obscenely and filthy rich between them own £160,000,000,000. 

Call it £160 billion.

Let’s think small here.

Let’s increase capital gains tax on the combined rich [a tax on how much more their assets are worth each year from investing them in businesses that produce trivia like jobs, food, medicines and medical supplies, and essentials and basic human rights such as holidays, reality TV and beer], because how much would you get if you taxed that lot at, say 100% of growth.

So the combined filthy and obscenely rich never get richer.

Even assuming an [unrealistically high] 10% per year capital growth rate that’s 100% of £160,000,000,000 per year to help with the deficit.

Which equals £16,000,000,000. Call it £16 billion.

That’s five weeks’ increase in the interest the government pays on existing debt.

Which is increasing.

Bother.

Let’s think big here

and confiscate all those assets and sell them to Gulf oil billionaires and the Chinese industrialists and Russian mafia because nobody’s left in Britain who can afford them after we’ve impoverished all our most rich.

That’s our [The People’s] £160 billion now.

That will pay off the annual increase in the deficit [the increase of the difference between the government’s annual spend and its revenues – not the debt itself,] for 1 year and 4 months.

So we nick everything the combined rich own right now, sell it abroad, and what the government owes does not increase from April 2013 to August 2014. 

The rich have stopped paying their existing taxes because they’re all on Jobseeker’s Allowance and Council Tax Benefit/Support and Housing Benefit now, because they're renting...

Which just leaves the little guy to pick up the bill for £43billion each year in existing interest charges on what the previous government officially left us.

Yey, the little guy!

We could abolish the armed forces and take a year’s holiday from debt interest repayments for a whole year.

Just on servicing the debt.

I wonder who’d be running our national defence by the end of that year?

Only asking.

What the government now owes does not increase from April 2013 to August 2015. 

Except it’s increasing.

Bother.

Now that the rich and all the squaddies and jolly jack tars and the RAF and the Marines are claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance, New Labour’s annual interest repayments amount to (assuming 60 million folk here in Albion’s sceptered isle) is 43 billion divided by 60 million, which equals £716.66 per year that each human being has to find each year just to pay interest on New Labour’s debt to stop it increasing.

New Labour’s (and the Coalition’s!) debt is increasing by approximately £121 billion per annum, however, so it won’t stay that low for long.

That’s us little guys paying government debt interest via:

public charges, tax, VAT, reduced government expenditure on benefits, education/NHS/ transport spending; not those people spending on food or fuel or luxuries or Christmas or travelling to school/relatives/hospital/the shops.

Just on servicing the debt.

Except debt is increasing. Bother.

It doesn’t buy us anything good.

And of course the UK national debt that has to be paid back to someone or other is £1,347,000,000,000.That “someone or other” is the banks who would otherwise be lending to employers and people who make useful stuff and who want to keep on employing people and making useful stuff and paying taxes for our existing welfare state, and the taxpayers and their children who would otherwise be spending their taxes on themselves and their children.

Just on servicing the debt.

Of course, quite a lot of those folk are children or sick or old or retired, so if you don’t take it from them, assume that you take it from working stiffs: including taxi drivers and farm labourers and nurses and trade union officials and teachers comprise about 50% of that.

That’s a tax bill of £1,400 per working stiff per year just to pay the interest on the previous government’s laptop for skoolkids giveaway scheme.

Just on servicing the debt.

It won’t buy them a sonnet’s worth of English tuition or a single ‘free’ school meal, or pay a penny’s worth of rent or Council Tax, or for an hour of a copper-on-the-beat’s valuable time.

Would this perhaps be a good time to ask the trade unions to refund the £20 million per year New Labour gave them to improve their IT systems?


Guess we're gonna need a bigger millionaire class.
Let's conjure some up, shall we, from nowhere? Like New Labour's 'fragile recovery...'

Let’s tax the other rich!

Let’s sell the property of everyone who owns £49,999,999 and less (including their houses and pension plans and two cars and their children’s education funds) in Britain’s increasingly quiet cities, towns and villages.

Let’s call these ‘the moderately rich.’ 
These include: some doctors, shop owners, independent pharmacists, people who set up and run pension schemes, some academics, dentists, TV producers, most celebrities, film stars, Ray Winstone (if he’s still in Britain by then) lesser Premiership footy players, best selling novelists and rap stars, web designers and IT executives, road haulage company proprietors, gym owners, travel agents, clothing shop owners, etc.

Rif raff like that.  How many of THEM are there, I wonder?

Assume 10,000 of them? – that’s £499,999,990,000 to expropriate –

 if we can find buyers for their property.

Hmmm.

Which leaves a national debt of only £847,000,000,000 for the little guy to pay the interest on.

Yey, the little guy!

Because there’s no-one else left.
And remember, the deficit is actually going up…

Britain will be increasingly quiet because the combined rich; moderate, filthy and obscene alike will all be doing…what exactly?

Picture from here.