faetal on 12/5/2010 at 12:43
Quote Posted by Brian The Dog
Woah, is this right? Welfare is around £150b/yr (depends what you include, this is pensions, benefits and credits), and so you're saying we're missing out on £900b/yr - this is the more than our total tax income!
Let me see if I can find the source, but yes, if we closed loopholes on corporate tax evasion and the complete evasion of tax by people like Lord Ashcroft (who is the biggest backer of the Conservative party), then we could pretty much plug the deficit. Will never happen though, because the people doing the evasion are just too powerful and hold too much influence. It just bugs me that people still wheel out the ever popular "benefit scroungers" argument as to why the economy is fucked.
The other elephant in the room of course is outsourcing. The UK has sent millions of jobs overseas (call centres, manufacturing, IT, systems testing etc..) in order to boost the profitability of corporate interest groups (note that the savings made are NEVER passed on to the consumer and simply used to increase share value of companies) and have not replaced them, there are actually that many fewer jobs available in the UK. So if we swept the roaches out from under the benefits rug, as laudable as that it in principle; without a sudden influx of jobs, we'd see a huge increase in crime as the newly doleless job-seekers would have to survive on whatever they can imagine up. This would usually be drug-peddling & theft.
SD on 12/5/2010 at 12:49
Quote Posted by faetal
The UK has sent millions of jobs overseas (call centres, manufacturing, IT, systems testing etc..) in order to boost the profitability of corporate interest groups (note that the savings made are NEVER passed on to the consumer and simply used to increase share value of companies)
The dividends from those increasingly profitable shares go towards paying for our pensions. Take a look at who owns those companies and get back to me.
faetal on 12/5/2010 at 13:10
Quote Posted by SD
The dividends from those increasingly profitable shares go towards paying for our pensions. Take a look at who owns those companies and get back to me.
Do those dividends offset the personal wealth lost from this country due to the increase in unemployment?
Would you say we are better or worse off without the jobs over here?
Who benefits the most, the citizens of the UK, or the shareholders of said companies?
I'm professing the imbalance.
Chade on 12/5/2010 at 13:33
Ideally we don't have to be political about this: we could just look it up.
Five minutes on google suggests that
a) there's not actually a huge amount of empirical research about outsourcing production of services (as opposed to goods),
b) the job losses due to service outsourcing are small, and
c) outsourcing increases productivity.
So I guess that doesn't leave me with any firm conclusions, except that describing outsourcing as an "elephant" sized issue is a little hyperbolic.
faetal on 12/5/2010 at 13:42
Quote Posted by Chade
Ideally we don't have to be political about this: we could just look it up.
Five minutes on google suggests that
a) there's not actually a huge amount of empirical research about outsourcing production of services (as opposed to goods),
b) the job losses due to service outsourcing are small, and
c) outsourcing increases productivity.
So I guess that doesn't leave me with any firm conclusions, except that describing outsourcing as an "elephant" sized issue is a little hyperbolic.
Doesn't this depend on the sources? There are plenty of pro-outsourcing documents to be found, because there is plenty of money to be made in outsourcing. Who precisely is being funded to make a bad case for outsourcing? That said, unless I find anything to bolster what I'm claiming, I shall have to concede the point for now. That said, the manufacturing industry in the UK is arguably a fraction of what it was in the late 1970s. Call centre jobs are increasingly going overseas and IT is kind of hovering on a precipice as it doesn't seem wholly outsourceable.
This should warrant research beyond a quick look at google because I'm sure the costs disparity between paying minimum wage in the UK and miniscule wage overseas is going to factor into many businesses' bottom lines.
faetal on 12/5/2010 at 13:51
Quote Posted by Chade
So I guess that doesn't leave me with any firm conclusions, except that describing outsourcing as an "elephant" sized issue is a little hyperbolic.
P.s. I didn't mean it was an "elephant-sized" issue, elephant in the room is just a turn of phrase meaning an uncomfortable subject which is causing problems and no one wants to admit is there.
While this may be a little perspective bias, the company I worked for as a systems tester, before I made the decision to return to education, cut its entire IT department and then made them all re-apply for their jobs through the Indian offshore company it outrsourced to. Very few of them got the job and the few that did ended up doing a completely different job to the one they had before. Quite a few of them then ended up as software testers in my department at reduced pay...then they started outsourcing the software testing..
Simple economic dynamics suggests that as much work as can be outsourced cheaper for comparable quality, will be, or businesses who stick to using UK based employees will begin to lose market share.
jay pettitt on 12/5/2010 at 14:14
I think you need to consider that the job market can be measured qualitatively as well as quantitatively and that work is not purely an economic activity.
Arguing that job losses are small is meaningless if outsourcing means that jobs then aren't as secure, if opportunities for personal or social development are less in the replacement jobs or work is otherwise less fulfilling.
Neither is productivity a good measure. When Adam Smith put forward the idea of Division of Labour he described 18 processes that went into producing a pin. A single worker labouring on all parts of the pin in turn would be lucky to produce one pin a day - whereas if the task were divided and 18 workers attended but one part of the whole process repeatedly they could produce 5000 pins a day between them. Adam Smith never got around to explaining what society was going to do with so many pins - but he was at least smart enough to note that the down side was that this would make work punitive - that work would become a 'torpor of the mind'.
Given that we've effectively ceased benefiting from economic growth ~ we're working harder, getting unhealthier and becoming more miserable - then I'd argue that the Keynsian model where dogged pursuit of economic productivity is tolerated because it is useful has run its course and we now need to put much more focus on quality of jobs - not just the quantity of available mcJobs.
faetal on 12/5/2010 at 14:29
Good points. Also, the "good economy" doesn't necessarily benefit the work force as trickle down is treated in much the same way as leaky pipes by the higher echelons - the less there is, the better.
As much money as possible stays up top, regardless of how strong the economy is..
ilweran on 12/5/2010 at 20:01
Quote Posted by SD
This is why the new coalition has adopted the Lib Dem policy of the first £10,000 earned being tax free.
And I'm in favour of that decision, we'll see how long it takes to actually get there.
Quote:
And even the Tories support the minimum wage these days. They admitted they were wrong, and I can respect that.
I'll wait and see what they do with it first.
Personally I had nothing against Brown and detest Cameron. Wales didn't vote Tory and the sooner we get a referendum on more powers for the Assembly the better even though it's not much consolation for having a Tory goverment foisted on us.
