Our lifeblood, our hope, our need for the future....
Businesses are the lifeblood of this country.
They create all the wealth and they provide, ultimately, every penny of the tax revenues received by the government (tax paid by public sector employees originates from tax revenues in the first place - its just recycled money...).
If you pile costs on to businesses, if you tax them too highly, if you issue and keep issuing more and more rules and regulations, if you de-incentivise people from taking risks and building on success, if you make life more difficult for them then it will get more and more difficult for them to operate, produce profit, jobs and tax revenues. They have to compete in the wide world and be successful against tough competition in the Far East and the USA in particular.
It is simple really, looking after businesses, valuing them, encouraging them is essential for every man woman and child in the country.
Sadly we have seen governments forget that and this is at the core of our current economic problems. They spend money that has not been earned, while hamstringing the businesses that need to earn it. We had 13 years of this and still not enough has yet been done to change it. Taxes are still too high and there has not been enough essential supply side reform.
But it gets far worse....
A mood among some people in this country has developed that shouts 'Britain is Closed To Business'. We see attacks on success, calls for even higher penal taxation to punish the wealthy even though it is proven that this reduces tax revenues and damages growth. This mood of envy and spite is seen by foreign investors and is turning them away. Indeed even many domestic business investors now are preferring to put their money into countries where success is respected, applauded and the rewards are high. If you run a business here and are earning a comfortable £100,000 a year why should you bother to take the risks of boosting production, employing more people and working harder if the result is that 62p in the £ over £100k you earn is taken in tax. Indeed, as I know only too well, this even happens at the 40p threshold too.
Small businesses, micro businesses, aspirational businesses as well as big businesses, they all suffer in this climate but we need them all to have the best chance of success.
We need a whole mood change in this country if we want it to be successful. Time to respect businesses, time to take off the shackles that hold business back, time to encourage people to build their businesses and to allow them to benefit properly from success. This government must take the lead and stop trying to pander to the lowest common denominator among the ignorant mob. Reduce taxes specially the high marginal rates, simplify the tax system, work towards low flat taxes, make it easier to shed staff to encourage more people to take on employees and expand their businesses, repeal whole rafts of red tape. Encourage people by letting them keep more of their money and to pass it on to their children.
This is what we need....now more than ever.
Comments
You must have an account to add a comment - log in or register an account now.BarryW
That is very strange Tom Your mind works in a very weird way.
You sneer about prosperity for all, make some strange association with feudal finery and money in the hands of the few.
Let is be clear.....
having something to leave to your children is not money hidden away from the economy. It is money invested in property including businesses. There is more to it than money for a funeral at one end and billions off shore at the other end. The free enterprise system does indeed need customers and it is all about creating the wealth and growing customers too - it is about more prosperity for everyone. There is a synergy between business and demand.
Our problems stem from the State not from businesses. Businesses are the solution. They need freeing to do what they do.Today 11:38Tom Austin
What money?
If more and more is to be set aside (and such money is to grow) what money will there be to spend?
The single thing industry and commerce cannot function without is custom. How is such custom to come about, how is it to be maintained, how is it to grow? (if before all, money is to be set aside)
"putting money by as an inheritance was a good old-fashioned working-class thing to do"
This is no more than the 'Big Lie'. This equation of having sufficient funds for a decent burial with the vast idle sums that lie off-shore.
IF!!
If you wish to paint the picture of "prosperity for all" in all its feudal-finery. With all riches and power in the hands of a decreasing few, and passed along in hereditary fashion, you should not neglect the fact that the State made stern demands upon these same few:demands of fealty and wealth.
If, we are to take lessons from history;Ye Olde England, Rome or Greece, we must remember that in times of need it was those with the wealth that were called upon to yield-up the wherewithal to renew the fortunes of the State.Today 10:23Peter Garstin
"Encourage people by letting them keep more of their money and to pass it on to their children."
What's wrong with that, Tom? I thought putting money by as an inheritance was a good old-fashioned working-class thing to do. I suppose you think people should be taxed unto penury so that their grateful dependants may enjoy the munificence of the Socialist State.Today 09:08BarryW
Consistent is what you are Tom, deluded by a socialist dream world.
You talk is if governments did not spend more than it had in income, as if Brown kept the tough prudential regulation on the banks Mrs T wanted etc etc etc.
As you read my blog I would have thought that you would have learned just a little about economics and how economies work by now, but no - as always with socialists the facts of life are inconvenient.
Do try to get it into your head, all our prosperity is created by businesses, by trade and commerce - never by government. Even when governments try by nationalising businesses they totally screw up and turn them into outdated loss making liabilities. Look at history and the economic advances the world has made, all by free enterprise, by capitalist entrepreneurs. Despite the current crisis today we have a standard of life never dreamed of by the bulk of people in past centuries all thanks to business.
You are all like you are guilty of causing the economic crisis.Today 07:33Tom Austin
By all means, "allow them to benefit properly from success". This is neither the case at the moment, nor the past or in your future Barry, at least not in the future as you wish to see it.
You are stuck in a rut with the rot of Thatcher and her trickle-down freakonomics.
Time after time you pour forth with statements of how the 'facts' of increased revenue through reduced tax rates speak for themselves, how history tells us and 'statistics' make plain, that the less you require the more you obtain...how true - from the personal point of view - but hardly the case with Nation States.
We are in the mess we are in because yours is the philosophy that was already closely followed in the business and banking world, certainly since the Big Bang.
The Privatisation of all profit and the nationalisation of all debt, the long-game of the removal of regulatory authority from the elected Government, so that the lunatics shall be very much in charge of the asylum.
"Encourage people by letting them keep more of their money and to pass it on to their children. "
At last we come to it.
The only good Tory is one that takes good care of you and you own particular business interests.
You are consistent Barry...consistently wrong.Yesterday 21:13PhilipP
Agree with all that but you must realise that the government have their mind on higher things. They don't bother their little heads with such trifling issues. There's a climate war to fight:
http://news.sky.com/story/1095134/gas-uk-was-six-hours-from-running-out
I agree with all you say but imagine what the effect on confidence in the UK would have been by investors and business if the worst had happened?Yesterday 17:47