It's time something gets said that I, and I think many people, have known for a long time, but which society doesn't like being shouted too loudly... Life is like poker. Not everyone wins.
**
It's not particularly difficult to look at the social strata and decide who are the clear winners, and who are the clear losers. At the top end are the attractive, intelligent, confident, 'old money' aristocrats who have the personal ability and the funding to do just about whatever they want. At the bottom are the personally brillant but struggling low-middle classers who scrimped and saved, worked 80 hour weeks, never took a hand out, and then got crushed into welfare dependancy by whatever crisis has recently reared up (Financial catastrophes, wars, plagues and revolutions all have the habit of destroying people's livelihoods).
Where the world of today has changed is a shift in personal, and national, consciousness. We (romanticised, national "we") used to be a people who dreamed of shifting up the social scale. Whether its Great Expectations, the folk songs about common soldiers becoming generals, or a thousand tales of 'self made men' the idea was consistent - you started off lower down the scale and dragged, kicked and fought your way up into the 'winners' bracker. Just like poker, you might be languishing down 2,432nd place now, but ability, courage and a little luck later, might just see you jump up into the 'them that get's paid' bracket.
But we don't want to do this anymore. As I've discussed elsewhere 'progressive' taxes, welfare dependancy, the 'prizes for all' education system, and a raft of anti-success legislation and social commentary is consipiring to bring about the end of 'winners' and 'losers'. The message now one of the grand tennants of 'happy liberalism: "Everyone is equal." It doesn't matter whether you work hard at school or just bully the kids who do, it doesn't matter if you find a job or live on welfare, it doesn't matter whether you plan you finances or just have kids and then look for a handout. It doesn't matter whether you obey the law or break it. Everyone is equal, and therefore everyone must end up with the same outcome, regardless of the choices they make.
As I learned from my Economic History lecture you should always include some statistics. So here is my statistical analysis of this issue, as usual crouched in terms of national spending. This time round I'm looking at whether people are net contributors to the state or not. What this means is do people put more in in tax, then they get back in benefits (both directly like child tax credits, and indirectly like education and the NHS).
So here are the numbers;
(A "quintile" is a 20% segement of the population).
You can draw all kinds of conclusions from these numbers (and you can poke all kinds of wholes in them with context and comparisons - though if your that bothered I suggest reading the paper this was drawn from, published by the Centre for Policy Studies).
A few of the things that jumped out at me however,
1.) Without tax driven re-distribution the gap between the top and lowest earners is approximately 16x. (I.e. a top earner earns 16 times more then a low earner). After redistribution the difference is only 4x.
Conclusion: Whether you think this is good or bad depends on various things. Egalitarians would say its a good thing, but more needs to be done. Socialists would probably also say it was positive, but again more needed to be done. I would suggest looking at this from a different viewpoint. The national minium wage for 21 year old is £6.19 an hour, thus to earn £5,089 you would have to work 15 hours a week. Allowing a bit for National Insurance and what-not, this is the equivalent of a service industry part time job. Whether its stacking shelves, pulling pints, or mopping floors, you should be able to clear £5,000 a year without qualifications, experience, ability or effort. At the reverse end of the scale to earn £80,000 (a brief Google search suggests) requires being a senior manager or 'professional' (lawyer, accountants, doctor and so on). All of these roles require extensive academic backgrounds, long hours, some basic underlying ability, and yet when the chips fall, your only four times better off then the guy stacking shelves in Tesco.
2.) Only 40% of people actually pay into the system
Conclusions: This is something most people don't actually realise. Most people are not net contributors to the system. There is some wiggle room here (for example on an income basis I'm somewhere in the middle of patch, but since I don't have kids, don't use the NHS, didn't get support in paying for my studies, don't claim any allowances or benefits, I get back a lot less then the 'average' household. Likewise I'm sure there are households on £50,000 a year who are still net beneficaries because they have four children in state funded education, someone in long term NHS-funded care, and so on). A cynical person might suggest that since a political majority of 60% would give a political party an overwhelming advantage it is in the interests of the ruling class to ensure that 60% of people benefit from the system, thereby supporting it, I'm not discussing this here but its an interesting point.
Again however the question becomes, why are the minority supporting the majority? The idea behind insurance, or collectives, or virtually any other group activity, is that risk or hardship can be spread across the group and thereby reduce it to the level where each member only carries a tiny part of the burden. In our system though the whole burden falls on the shoulders of only 2 in 5 people, the others are, literally, getting free money every year for doing nothing.
3.) The top 20% earn almost exactly 50% of the income (before re-distribution), but pay almost 80% of the effective taxation.
Conclusion: There is an argument that comes up on a fairly regular basis to do with who pays how much tax. The argument runs that the top 10% pay just over 50% of all tax, and therefore the system is unfair. A reasonable rebuttal to this is that if the top 10% also earn more then 50% of all the income then its still a fair system.
The above figures however let us re-jig the numbers to look at 'net' taxation rather then gross taxation. What we find now is that it is only the top percentiles that actually pay tax at all. 100% of effective tax is paid by people in the top 40%, and 80% of all effective tax is paid by the top 20%.
4.) For 40% of the population state support makes up half, or more, of their total household income.
Conclusion: The 'client' state is here. For over 20 million people in the UK, hand outs from the government have a bigger effect on their standard of living over than their actually jobs. If this isn't the end of 'work to succeed' than I struggle to think what would be.
..
Poker games without real risk don't work. People do stupid things, make 'wrong' decisions, and generally mess the game up for everyone else, but who loses? It's not the people who were going to lose to the good players (after all their money was gone the minute they sat down in a game they couldn't win), its the good players themselves. Much of nuiance in poker is destroyed when your playing against someone who just doesn't care. All the long hours spent studying theory, grinding out thousands of hands, considering betting patterns, its all pointless. As a friend of mine once said "If they don't know what they're doing, how are we meant to?" Every government handout, in any shape or form, does the same to life. Life without risk doesn't hurt the people who would have got themselves crushed anyway, it hurts the strong people who make good decisions, only to have then be swamped in a morass of poor-choice junkies we're expected to support.
/Z
No comments:
Post a Comment