back to article Feeling poor? WHO took all your money? NOT capitalist bastards?

Lies, damned lies and statistics: we all know the saying, but you'd be surprised just how many of these “facts” manage to enter the national consciousness, emerging as Guardian headlines and stories on Radio 4's Today. Allow me to tiptoe through the process as to how this happens. Let's start with this lovely little chart: A …

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  1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
    Boffin

    This is news?????

    Any organisation that does present 'the facts' showing that their particular argument is 'proved to be true' probably has something to hide.

    Slow news day methinks.

    1. Bob Vistakin
      Big Brother

      Re: This is news?????

      This is all bollocks - it's obvious where the gullible publics money has gone. Moats don't clean themselves, you know, and the last time I checked there was no such thing as a free duck houses, cable tv porn or poppies to lay at the remembrance services of those who gave their lives fighting to give our noble, honest and trustworthy MP's the freedoms they now enjoy.

      1. Bob Vistakin
        FAIL

        Re: This is news?????

        There's one for certain claiming that last one was just another a Balls up, but have no fear - we will remember. Could it be the same person admiring another mans fake buttocks whilst wearing a Nazi outfit in this photo? I think there is a worrying pattern here regarding this loathsome individual and his attitude to our fallen. Still, at least he knew how to spend our money when he had the one and only chance he'll ever get.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        WTF?

        Re: This is news?????

        I wonder, who are the sad FLICKT@RDS who down voted this comment?

  2. Nick Leaton

    http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171766_263808.pdf

    Try this paper.

    4,700 billion's worth of debt missing from the government books, and that's not the only omission.

    e.g Taxation with no services is the order of the day.

    1. dogged

      No time to read the paper but... PFI by any chance?

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    superb trolling as usual

  4. Tom 7

    Starting figures are well out

    one problem is including financial institutions imaginary gains in the GDP. This lie is what gave the impression that GDP was increasing so it was OK to borrow.

    Now we know the financial figures were out by at least £420Billion it would be interesting to go back and see how much debt would have been signed for if they knew at the time it was completely unsustainable rather than believing the cities bullish claims.

    There's an old saying about not counting your chickens before they hatch. The city was counting chickens when they hadn't even evolved legs let alone wings.

    1. Andrew Moore

      Re: Starting figures are well out

      I think the City was counting the chicken before it came out of the hen's bum

      1. Ian McNee
        Alert

        Re: Starting figures are well out

        Using this analogy I expect our thieving pals in the City would have dipped-into someone else's savings to buy half a dozen battery-farmed eggs from Tesco that they knew would not hatch, then sold 250% of the shares in each egg on the basis that on maturity each egg would become 100 plump & delicious organic free-range self-basting roasting chickens.

        The rest is smoke and mirrors, just like Tim Worstall's piece. Never mind the vast omissions, what about that old turkey: "the public sector ate my breakfast"? Who do you think does all the jobs that makes life tolerable in this country? Largely low-paid public sector workers: refuse collectors that prevent us from drowning in crap, hospital cleaners who make sure that we don't die horribly from MRSA if we're injured, transport workers who keep our cities from grinding to a halt with cars, carers who look after our parents.

        Yes we all know about the horror stories in these various lines of work but they are largely caused by lack of investment in the people doing the work: wages, training, supportive management. If Tim Worstall has his way less money will be spent of these things and it will be a short walk to hell.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Starting figures are well out

          Low paid public sector workers! That a bad joke, the average public sector worker earn's 23% more than the equivalent private sector worker. Thats excluding better holidays, better job security and much better pensions.

          1. henrydddd

            Re: Starting figures are well out

            Could that be because many private sector jobs are nothing but mcjobs? Do you propose to get police to work for minimum wage? Most of the criticism of what public sector people earn is from crazy right wing radicals who want everyone, but themselves, to be wage slaves. The upcoming battle in society is going to be between the upper 1 percent and everyone else

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Facepalm

              Re: Starting figures are well out

              Upper 1%? Pony poop. You do realize that most of the workforce IS in the top 15%. The bottom 50% is made up of the MINORITY of lower paid workforce, not the MAJORITY who are well paid.

          2. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Starting figures are well out

            Maybe so, but just because the private sector workers gave up trade union membership in exchange for a short-term bonus is no reason for the public sector to drop its trousers, bend over the desk, and spread its cheeks as well.

            1. kissingthecarpet
              Unhappy

              Re: Starting figures are well out

              "the private sector workers gave up trade union membership "

              Indeed they did, and often for no bonus at all. The clever thing was convincing a huge slice of the working class that they were middle class, rather than the reverse which is the truth.

              The question that is going to become louder & louder is "Whose benefit is the country run for?"

              We should be like the French used to be & have revolutions every so often. The ruling class in the UK are far too "intensely relaxed".

              1. Stewart McKenna
                Mushroom

                Re: Starting figures are well out

                The real irony is that States in the US where unionizing is basically undermined and the laws that

                enforce it are called 'Right to Work' States and 'Right to Work; laws....

        2. scrubber

          Re: Starting figures are well out

          How many transport workers are in the public sector? Is it all those bus drivers on Arriva, the Virgin train staff, FirstRail?

          Public sector is way too big, many of the tasks done by the local or national government should not be done by the state and those that are tend to be vastly overstaffed, targets focussed and have exceedingly perverse incentives.

        3. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Starting figures are well out

          There's something distinctly wrong when entire areas of a country have more people working for the government (national and local) than in any other job. That's nothing other than welfare payments disguised as other things.

          Even services industries can only ride along on the back of the income from "real" production.

          There's an old saying that universal democracy only lasts as long as it takes the masses to realise that they can vote themselves bread and circuses. At the moment that seems to be happening at both ends of the economic spectrum, leaving them in the middle starting to realise the best way forward is via the exit door.

          Brand me a right winger if you wish (I'm not), but there's no fundamental entitlement for anyone to have work brought to them. The UK's (and most of the world's) cities are where they are because people moved to where the work is, not the other way around and the motivation to move for a better life has a lot to do with why migrants (both from inside and outside the country) generally do better than those who stay at home.

          Perhaps there should be hard restrictions on the percentage of govt jobs as a proportion of the entire workforce in any given region.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Starting figures are well out

        Well it just shows if you are going to borrow money, borrow a lot because they you will have to support you in the hope they will get it back, borrow a small amount of you will get thrown to the wolves. Probably the only think we learn't from the Maxwell saga..

    2. Colin Millar
      Mushroom

      Re: Starting figures are well out

      "how much debt would have been signed for if they knew at the time it was completely unsustainable"

      A bit naive that.

      By "they" I take it you mean the government of the day. If they didn't know that their borrowing was completely unsustainable it was because they didn't want to know.

      Anyone see William Hurt in that sycophantic pile of dogshite "Too Big to Fail"? That was typical of the government attitude - "How could we be expected to know what the banks were doing?" Er - maybe cos you were at Goldman Sachs before you were Treasury Sec you dickhead. And then surprise, surprise a load of ex bankers regulating a load of current bankers gave the current bankers shed loads of tax money with no strings attached. And Dick Fuld portrayed as the bloke who got screwed over? Really - the CEO of Lehmans as a sympathetic character?

      As for this author suggesting that the tax burden is the fault of public sector employees is laughable. Sure there are some problems in the public sector but it isn't their employees.

      The biggest public sector problem is the way it is used these days simply to channel money and assets to crap private sector companies who couldn't make any money if their government mates didn't give it to them. PFI has already transferred billions to private interests and we are just at the start of the programme. In twenty years time we will have given them the NHS and all our schools together with paying a large chunk of our taxes to those same companies as compensation for the maintenance of those assets. PFI is like a guy nicking your car but you have to continue to pay for the petrol/tax/servicing and MOT - and if he knocks someone over you will have to cover the insurance claim. As for wanting to use the asset in future - stand in line in descending order of wallet size.

  5. John 62

    All Hail Tony Blair!

    The true champion of the noble worker is obviously Tony Blair! Why else would the wage share have risen from 95-2002? After that the evil forces of conservatism must have started to gain a hold again, smashing the proletariat with their wicked petty bourgeois ways!

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: All Hail Tony Blair!

      I think Id have the whole lot of them - thats the last lot of ruinous socialists, executed in front of their own families.

  6. Pete 2 Silver badge

    Just a bunch of wiggly lines?

    Okaaaay, so the "workers' share" dropped a bit during the Eighties: from a long-term figure in the high fifties, percentage-wise to a number a little below 55 once the hump and following dip from 1990-2000 is levelled out.

    Now pardon me, but didn't the late 70's and 1980's see a sharp rise in unemployment / jobless numbers? If you have fewer people working (for whatever reason) wouldn't that reduce wages, too?

    For all the words in this piece - some of which I could make sense of - I can't see what the author expects to be done. ISTM the point is that workers are getting less, and government is taking more. Maybe that's true, but that's just slicing up the same cake in different ways: it's not as if taxes are removed from society and the money is burned - it's still there and is still spent. If a government took less off us - to spend on public benefits like the NHS - wouldn't all t'workers have to spend a larger proportion of their increased wages on the stuff they no longer got for free? Things like saving for their old-age, meds, child benefits, putting cash aside for time "on the bench" instead of getting the dole / housing benefit, driving granny around instead of her having a free bus pass (and a free TV licence). So the same money would just be spent by different people, but on the same things. There would be some choice: does Johnny get a new pair of spectacles, or do we have a day at the seaside? but there would still only be the same amount of money in the country.

    ISTM the main reason wages are dropping is that so few people make stuff we can sell for a profit. You can't run a country on service industries: such as Taking in each others laundry. You'd have nice, clean clothes but no food to eat. Someone, somewhere has got to make / grow / invent all the stuff to earn the money we spend. Flipping burgers and selling insurance ain't going to cover it.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Just a bunch of wiggly lines?

      "If a government took less off us - to spend on public benefits like the NHS - wouldn't all t'workers have to spend a larger proportion of their increased wages on the stuff they no longer got for free?" etc...

      What about the deadweight loss of taxation?

      How about you give me £1000 and then I'll buy you £1000 pounds worth of stuff I think you need, Trust me. I have your best interests in mind - I'm a politician.

      That said, I like the NHS. I like living in a caring society that will offer bypass surgery and intensive care to a homeless drunk and a company director equally.

      1. John 62

        Re: Just a bunch of wiggly lines?

        Hopefully the company director is altruistic and pays for private medical treatment, thus his taxes (and National Insurance) pay for the homeless drunk to have better treatment.

      2. Matt Bryant Silver badge
        Boffin

        Re: Re: Just a bunch of wiggly lines?

        "..... I like the NHS. I like living in a caring society that will offer bypass surgery and intensive care to a homeless drunk and a company director equally." Sorry, not true. Due to the shortage of funds, the NHS now categorise cases based on likely success of the outcome and benefit to the patient, which means the homeless drunk will not get the equal chance as anyone else. Having said that, you also neglect to mention that the company director, who will have paid far more taxes and NI than the drunk, and therefore has full rights to the treatment, will probably pay again to go private, effectively paying twice. People that argue against private medicine are simply cutting their own nose off to spite their face due to small-thinking ideologies.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Just a bunch of wiggly lines?

        The homeless drunk does nothing to better society, the company director is creating jobs and helping society to flourish. You can save only one, which one do you pick? I choose the company director.

    2. JB
      Happy

      Re: Just a bunch of wiggly lines?

      "If a government took less off us - to spend on public benefits like the NHS - wouldn't all t'workers have to spend a larger proportion of their increased wages on the stuff they no longer got for free?"

      This is exactly what happens here in the US. Often people in the UK complain that everything is cheaper here and people pay next-to-no tax, but then we have to pay for stuff like health insurance, and our infrastructure is abysmal, where it does exist.

      Personally I'd rather pay more tax and have better public services and more reliable infrastructure, but then I'm just a damn liberal European socialist who doesn't understand how a market economy really works!

      1. This post has been deleted by its author

      2. Efros

        @JB Re: Just a bunch of wiggly lines?

        When I first arrived in the US about 12 years ago i was truly shocked at the state of the infrastructure here. Roads and bridges left to the point of collapse and beyond before being maintained, water and power supplies work most of the time, we have lost water 4 times in the last year due to lack of investment in the local supply system, power goes out if you breathe out too quickly, or at least it seems like that. Whenever infrastructure is invested in, it seems to be an excuse for corporations and the mob to screw the system for the most you can, e.g The Big Dig in Boston. The rapacious 1% have screwed this country for the last 40 years or more and I wonder how much longer the peons will take it. The next few years are going to be "Interesting Times".

    3. Sel
      FAIL

      Re: Just a bunch of wiggly lines?

      "it's not as if taxes are removed from society and the money is burned"

      Giving money to a bunch of politicians and civil servants is no better than burning it. If there ever is anything produced it will be utterly useless, unfit for its intended purpose or will be counterproductive in some other manner (will interfere with some otherwise productive process).

      I first encountered this when the government wanted to learn about successful small technology companies. Their demands for information and the time we had to spend producing it nearly folded the company. I'm sure that the reams of paper they probably printed everything out on in triplicate, are now propping the door open in some Humphrey's office, as he shamelessly plies the minister with whatever lies the big companies have paid him to fill any open ears with.

      I can see that the same is clearly true in the rail industry as could be seen in the when Virgin lost their contract for having the audacity to know what they are doing, not duke stats and to top it off, add up in the normal way when bidding for renewal.

      The civil service are either as corrupt, or possibly more corrupt that their masters who are uniformly the sort of scum anyone would make sure were kept as far away from the productive areas of business as possible.

      Yes, after that band of scum have had their merry dance of vanity projects and pocket lining there is some trickle down to real people in the form of benefits I pay for others to have but will never enjoy myself. Left to my own devices I still save for rainy days but even there I get 'Quantitive Easing' where the scum realised they can just print more money and so long as they don't do it too obviously the natives don't get too restless. But they are still making my pocket lighter.

      1. Andrew Moore

        Re: Just a bunch of wiggly lines?

        The civil service are the puppet masters- Anytime a 'new' government is voted in, all you change are the public faces- the puppet masters are still there with no change.

      2. Johan Bastiaansen
        FAIL

        Re: Just a bunch of wiggly lines?

        "Giving money to a bunch of politicians and civil servants is no better than burning it. If there ever is anything produced it will be utterly useless, unfit for its intended purpose or will be counterproductive in some other manner (will interfere with some otherwise productive process)."

        You're right, the roads don't work, we all drive to our jobs off road. The railroads don't work. Nobody ever takes the train. The airport doesn't work. Nobody ever takes a plane. The police doesn't work, criminals roam our street uncontested. Neither do the firemen, fires rage through our cities for weeks and are only put out when everybody starts passing buckets to their neighbor. The school system doesn't work, we all learned reading and writing from our parents. The hospitals don't work, when I was ill the other day my aunt the witch doctor cured me.

        1. The Axe
          FAIL

          Roads don't work ...

          Yep, all created privately and then taken over by the government.

        2. Sel

          Re: Just a bunch of wiggly lines?

          "You're right, the roads don't work, we all drive to our jobs off road. The railroads don't work. Nobody ever takes the train. The airport doesn't work. Nobody ever takes a plane. The police doesn't work, criminals roam our street uncontested. Neither do the firemen, fires rage through our cities for weeks and are only put out when everybody starts passing buckets to their neighbor. The school system doesn't work, we all learned reading and writing from our parents. The hospitals don't work, when I was ill the other day my aunt the witch doctor cured me."

          Last year I lived in south London, so for a couple of days most of what you portray was actual reality for me. Roads, schools, police the A&E department really are all in a dire state because the money is not getting to them it's being used to line the pockets of various vested interests or prop up 'political realities'.

          My beef is not with the "people on the front line" as the platitude pushers like to call them. It is with the management that they have to contend with. Ask any of the people doing those jobs you point out we all depend on (I would have no direct family without the NHS) and they know exactly how to solve most of the problems we all see, they just don't have the power or resources to do so. That's because we let politicians and bureaucrats dictate to the professionals what they have to do when. Teachers, doctors, nurses, police, even local council members all know what needs to be done and even how they could do it efficiently but they have to contend with an army parasites second guessing them.

  7. JimC

    Execuive Pay...

    I'd be interested in how the distibuion of pay has changed... Ihave a strong impression that what one might call the executive class is paying itself a rather higher share of the wage economy than it was getting thirty years ago...

    1. Nick Leaton

      Re: Execuive Pay...

      Really?

      All I see is that the tax take has risen, which means the state is getting more of people's pay.

      1. Pete 2 Silver badge

        @Nick

        > All I see is that the tax take has risen,

        Try here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2010/apr/25/tax-receipts-1963 for another view, It shows that since the 1960's the overall tax take as a proportion of GDP has always been somewhere in the thiry-percents.Even though during that half-century, the amount we have earned (our wealth?) has increased about fifty-fold.

      2. Snake Silver badge

        Re: Execuive Pay...

        False. As you'll read in my post, Reuters's recent article proves that, at least for corporate taxes, government take as gone DOWN in comparison to rising corporate profits.

        The only taxes that have gone up are *personal* taxes, which not only effects all income brackets (conveniently, the lower and middle-classes) but also has 'loopholes' for full collection from the upper classes.

        The perfect, ideal solution...at least from the perspective of the oligarchs. The wealthy and the corporate interests have gotten you in the exact position that they want you in.

    2. blueprint

      Re: Execuive Pay...

      Correct. But in the case of this author it wouldn't do to break down the statistics to disprove one's own argument.

    3. jon 68
      Flame

      Re: Executive Pay...

      http://www.epi.org/publication/ib331-ceo-pay-top-1-percent/

      it's all laid out there in plain english.

      1. Tim Worstal

        Re: Executive Pay...

        Now that's something we really shouldn't be doing.

        Comparing US statistics on the distribution of pay with UK statistics on the distribution of national income. We've got different countries, with different tax systems, different levels of inequality and we're even talking about different things.

        Not really very comparable

    4. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Execuive Pay...

      I am pretty sure this is the case.

      Also, I was reading a book about hedge funds over the Christmas period, (A Demon of our own Design by Bookstaber) and I've concluded that if anyone is even less reliable on seeing the bigger economic picture than the Government or the TUC, it's a hedge fund trader. I'd listen hard to Mr. Worsthall on lanthanides, but when it comes to take home pay, I rather suspect that the reason that public sector salaries have increased so much at the top end is because outsourcing companies are competing for those people and offering very high pay in order to deplete the public sector of expertise, so it can be claimed that only outsourcing will solve the resulting problems. Which coincidentally is a tactic of hedge funds...corner a resource and create an artificial scrcity, thus driving up prices.

    5. Tom 13

      Re: how the distibuion of pay has changed

      I'm sure you would, because that's part of the smoke and mirrors to keep you excited, and get you to the barricades where you can be used as canon fodder to advance the goals of the socialist dictators.

      But if you're really looking for some enlightenment, perhaps you should study the materials at the following link:

      http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/09/defending-the-dream-why-income-inequality-does-not-threaten-opportunity

  8. JeffUK
    Flame

    tl;dr

    sorry. Merry new year :)

    1. mhoulden

      Re: tl;dr

      Tim is a "senior fellow" at the Adam Smith Institute. Rather like Lewis Page on climate change or Andrew Orlowski on the media, you can tell what his point of view is just from the headline and summary. The Wealth of Nations is fantastic for quote mining because it rambles so much that you can get almost any point of view out of it. I can't see the ASI being too impressed about this bit:

      "It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expence, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion."

      1. The Axe
        Go

        Re: tl;dr

        The ASI are impressed with the rich paying more. That's because they, or at least Tim, believes that the low pay should not pay any tax. So if the low pay pay 0% tax and the rich pay a tax rate of over 50% then it is true that the rich contribute more in proportion. Finally there is the fact the the top 1% pay over 20% of all income tax.

      2. Tim Worstal

        Re: tl;dr

        That the rich should contribute more than in proportion is why we at the ASI suggest a progressive tax system. For we do indeed suggest one. A flat tax with a large personal allowance (£15k per adult).

        The provides, above 15k, a static marginal tax rate of 33% in our proposed system. With a rising average tax rate as incomes rise. The rising average tax rate being the definition of a progressive tax system.

        1. Colin Millar

          Re: tl;dr

          That is not the definition of progressive taxation.

          A progressive system increases the rate as the taxable base amount increases.

          As the £15k isn't in the taxable base amount (clue - it isn't taxed) your proposal is proportional - not progressive.

          Proportionate taxation as a theory certainly has its merits and many proponents - the main one for me is that it is politically more stable. Maybe you should read some stuff from the Adam Smith institute to provide you with some pretty good ammo for your position rather than trying to pass it off as something else.

  9. Will Godfrey Silver badge
    Unhappy

    None of the above explains why I haven't had a pay rise in 4 years (so effectively a pay cut), and the small company I work for had to make someone redundant just before Christmas.

    Obvious really I guess - it's an engineering company.

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