Upside down economics

Just a little rumination around economic belief systems fro a fine Tuesday evening in the midst of the UK Conservative Party (just a tad to the left of the Harper(tm) Government of Canada) annual conference. A few points of information:

1. The Osborne creature is as odious as always
2. Boris has the knives out for his old Etonian buddy David Cameron
3. The welfare state is fair game
4. We have to make sure and pay lip service to fairness and equality
5. Oh yeah, and hit all the normal right wing sybeloths (a fine word, no idea what it means) of canti-crime (sorry, that typo is just too cute to correct). The abortion time limit (a tired old warhorse of the Righteous Right) issue was also duly trotted out for a photo-op.
6. On the topic of which, what about this zinger from the O-man: "the top 10% earners pay much more tax than the bottom 10%". So what? Isn't that obvious (after all, the bottom 10% are at the bottom because they have no money, and the top 10% have all the money). And this one too (just to show how well balanced is the Conservatives big brains trust): "We will cut 16 billion from the budget - 10 bn from welfare and 6 bn from raising 'contributions' fromo the rich. Everybody has to shoulder their share of the burden, we are all in this together!" Cue multiferous cheers and hoots of wonderment from the assembly. But think about it for a second - 10 bn from welfare is a huge proportion of the total worth of those opn welfare, 6 bn from the top 10% is pocket change. The sound bites just float around hitting the excitable nerve ends of the faithful but nobody calls him on his inexacetudes and outright bias.

Now to the point of the piece - we should be working on 'trickle up economics'. Just as the right-wing dingbats are permitted to hold their bias that the lower echelons of society are workshy scroungers who never did a fair days work in thier lives and suck at the teat of the nanny state, those of us with brains in oour heads should not be chastened to presume that the fat cat capitalists have a grossly inflated sense of their own worth and should be told to pay up or get out. There are plenty of people who could do just as well as they do for much lower pay (or the same pay but with higher tax). Take a few factoids to heart - the poor will always spend however much money they get and the rich will try to hide any extra money they have (off-shore tax havens, multiple houses which stay empty for the bulk of the year, grouse moors in Scotland, 'art' which gathers dust in the family pile, tax-exempt trust funds to send the sprogs to Eton, etc). Which of these two 'realities' will benefit the economy the most? Right - any money in the hands of the lower 20% of the population will stay in the local economy, stimulating trade and will eventually work its way back into the government hands. Give the same amount of money to the top 20% and the economy will not see it again for a very long time. Big stimulus projects do the same thing if run properly - wages to workers get recycled, support industries blossom, the economy ticks around like a Swiss watch, everybody feels good and growth happens. Keep hammering the welfare system when unemployment is rising and the air goes out of the economy along with public confidence and everybody is miserable, waiting for the government stick to land on your head. After all, when the lowest of the low have been squeezed dry, who would the honourable Oz go for next? And, finally, which class is the most entrepreneurial? No, no, no, not the rich - they are fat, lazy, and hugely risk averse (they have their dosh and want to keep it). The most aggressive business people are the middle class - they have the drive to make a new enterprise work because that is their only way upwards, failure is not an option.

In summary, screw the rich, if they leave, wave them goodbye but gouge as much money as you can before they leave. Set up a People's Bank which lends money directly to small businesses (in competition with the big banks), initiate a big infrastructure project (eg the new East London Airport), and leave the welfare state alone. Oh, and renationalise the railways, invest in Green UK Renewable Energy plc, stop the elitisation of education, and lay off the NHS.