Our lifeblood, our hope, our need for the future....
24 May 2013
Businesses are the lifeblood of this country.
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.
- 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. - 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. - "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. - 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. - 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. - "Time after time you pour forth with statements of how the 'facts' of increased revenue through reduced tax rates speak for themselves," Tom, this phenomenon is known as the Laffer Curve, named after an American economist of the 20th Century but first documented by the great Muslim scientist, philosopher and thinker Ibn Khaldoun in the 14th century. It's not something Barry has invented to torment you with.
- Good old Ibn Khaldoun...
""In the early stages of the state, taxes are light in their incidence, but fetch in a large revenue...As time passes and kings succeed each other, they lose their tribal habits in favor of more civilized ones. Their needs and exigencies grow...owing to the luxury in which they have been brought up. Hence they impose fresh taxes on their subjects...and sharply raise the rate of old taxes to increase their yield...But the effects on business of this rise in taxation make themselves felt. For business men are soon discouraged by the comparison of their profits with the burden of their taxes...Consequently production falls off, and with it the yield of taxation.""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_economics_in_the_world#Ibn_Khaldun
But, where are we at this moment?
Are we in the dying days of a fat and corrupt dynasty or are we at the threshold of a new enlightenment?
The arguments here suggest to me that we are in both states at one and the same time. Whereas I prefer to think of us as being at the threshold of something entirely new.
Yes Barry, much water has flowed under many bridges, and words of wisdom are now but trite truisms and have greater currency among rogues.
We must take the phrase, "prosperity for all" back from the self-serving shyster that would see the future as a continuation of the corrupt dynasty and rededicate it for the new age.
P.S.
Yes Peter, good old Islam:Gharar...
"Investopedia explains 'Gharar'
There are strict rules in Islamic finance against transactions that are highly uncertain or may cause any injustice or deceit against any of the parties.
In finance, gharar is observed within derivative transactions, such as forwards, futures and options, in short selling, and in speculation. In Islamic finance, most derivative contracts are forbidden and considered invalid because of the uncertainty involved in the future delivery of the underlying asset."
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/gharar.asp?partner=forbes-hpm - Gharar is not something new or confined to modern financial markets. The original concept applied to selling something you don't have, for instance a farmer selling his crop before he has harvested it. Or a property developer selling houses before they are built. It's just one of the many haraam concepts in Islamic finance; the principal one of course is riba'a or the payment of interest. For a fee however, you will always find a Mufti willing to issue a fatwa approving of any transaction as long as the language is correct.
- Barry, many businesses have brought doom upon themselves:
By closing down factories in Britain and employing cheap labour in the Far East, and by employing cheap foreign labour in Britain, they have sent millions of Brits into unemployment, or prevented the youth finding employment in the first place.
This causes the State to spend tens of billions of pounds a year on benefits, and so the State must increase taxes to find the money.
We also pay benefits to the millions of foreign workers from the EU, such as child benefits, even when their children live in their own country.
The businesses UK have participated in creating this situation, and are mainly to blame that tax is so high and so many people live in poverty here. - Alexander. You have not read the books I recommended have you? If you had, you would realise why you are wrong. But you prefer your rather odd ideas of the economy than reality so would not read it and learn.
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?