Supermarket self service checkouts.

[snow hope]

God you talk bollocks sometimes DominicJ.

People are not a scarce resource in reality. There are 7 billion of them. We can't get them all jobs and the problem is growing worse....

If ASDA make more profits, they may well pay a bit more tax, but I sincerely doubt we would have more nurses as a result. We are deep in debt and need a hell of a lot more tax just to pay the interest on the debts.

Your problem seems to be how you define wasteful and what you define as more productive. You have to understand that the way you define it may not be the way others define it. If it is all defined in entirely monetary terms as seems to be the way you do, then it is clear to see the problems we now encounter.

I think you need to take a wider view of things to see the error of your ways.

The words hole and digging spring to mind!

[careful_eugene]

My point was more, people are a scarce resource, like oil, or timber, or Fiat Pandas, there is a finite amount, resources used wastefully cannot be used for more productive purposes

Really? Don't we have lots of unemployed people, and others risking their lives to get into this country in order to work?

[PS_RalphW]

DomJ,

The last time I checked, employed till staff pay taxes, but unemployed till staff consume taxes in the form of a wide range of welfare payments, and in extreme cases prison stays after they are caught shoplifting for food to feed their kids. But then, that makes more profits for those privatised prisons, and profits means taxes....

There are some shortages of skilled, educated and trained staff in this country, but very few of them would be freed up by sacking till staff. Far more likely to need to pay a highly trained Indian IT immigrant to support the extra IT infrastructure.

Very nice for me as an IT guy looking for a new job, but not a sustainable system.

It occurs to me that the one event that drove the Tory government to negotiate peace with the IRA in the 80s was the city of London bomb in financial district which killed one person but cost the government £500,000,000 in compensation to the city corporations.

Perhaps OWS should learn something from that....


[edit]

my memory filed me again

July 20, 1990: The IRA bombs the London Stock Exchange. Nobody is injured in the blast.

April 10, 1992: The IRA bombs the Baltic Exchange in London, killing three people.

April 24, 1993: A massive truck bomb parked in Bishopsgate tears through London, killing one person and injuring more than 40. Most of the wounded are security guards and maintenance staff. The blast shakes buildings and shatters windows, destroying a medieval church and the Liverpool Street Underground station, and causing hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. In response, the British government erects a "ring of steel" around the city.

Feb. 10, 1996: A truck bomb rips through the Canary Wharf office development in the Docklands area of London, killing two people and wounding 39 others, and causing more than $127 million in damage.

wikipedia

[clv101]

My point was more, people are a scarce resource...

No, whilst we have unemployed people living in poverty (or only avoiding poverty through state benefits) we have an abundance of people. The scarce resources are energy, raw materials, pollution sinks.

It's wrong to tax labour as high as we currently do whilst taxing energy, raw materials and pollution sinks as low as we currently do.

If labour taxes were reduced significantly (making it much cheaper to employ a human till operator) and the same revenue raised on energy/materials/waste, we would have a system less dependent on finite energy and materials, producing less waste and employing more people.

[frank_begbie]

Obviously the big problem is money as an incentive.

As long as we have this system we have a massive problem.

Only answer is a huge catastrophe and die off, then we just go back to surviving as nature intended.

To continually try anything to prop up the present system, is folly.

The PTB know this, but what do they do?

Tell the truth and accept the inevitable back lash, or pretend to know what they're doing and hope that "something" turns up.

If it wasn't so serious it'd be funny.

[snow hope]

It's wrong to tax labour as high as we currently do whilst taxing energy, raw materials and pollution sinks as low as we currently do.

If labour taxes were reduced significantly (making it much cheaper to employ a human till operator) and the same revenue raised on energy/materials/waste, we would have a system less dependent on finite energy and materials, producing less waste and employing more people.

This is a good argument.

But lets explore it a little deeper. Currently the personal allowance before you pay any income tax is £7,475 of income (for 2011/12 tax year), therafter you pay 20% tax. You can earn up to £7,228 a year (£139/week) before you have to pay any National Insurance contributions (NIC), therafter you pay 12% NIC and the Employer has to pay 13.8% NIC as well.

I don't know what till operators earn, but I imagine it might be minimum wage, which I think is now £6.08/hour, so for a 40-hour week, they might earn £243.20, which equates to approximately £12,600 per annum.

So the till operator will pay a fair amount of Tax and NIC - you can work it out if interested in the exact amounts.

So I would agree with Chris, if we reduced the tax and NIC that people on minimum wage rates had to pay, and put this Tax onto other resources that are hitting the limits, then it makes a lot of sense. I would also say we need to get rid of Employer NIC (ERNIC) contributions for people on minimum wages, to encourage employment and indeed we should go further in the current economic environment and say that new employees of any sensible salary level should not incure ERNIC for the first year or two to encourage companies to take on additional staff, as in my opinion we have a massive unemployment problem approaching fast.

Of course the other side of the coin is that maybe even people on minimum wage shoudl contribute something in the way of TAX and NIC to Govt coffers to cover things like Health, Education and Basic State Pension. But I am not going to get into that discussion.

[UndercoverElephant]

The PTB know this, but what do they do?

I'm not sure that many of them do know this. I think a lot of them are too busy firefighting the problems right in front on them to step back and see the bigger picture. They have spent too long being politicians and can't tell the difference between the truth and their own propaganda.

[Catweazle]

Surely this Luddite "makework" attitude is just a waste of labour ? When will it stop ? Shall we have school-leavers out counting daisies or painting coal black ?

If technology can replace a job it frees up a human to do something useful, that's what we should be looking for.

[clv101]

Surely this Luddite "makework" attitude is just a waste of labour ? When will it stop ? Shall we have school-leavers out counting daisies or painting coal black ?

If technology can replace a job it frees up a human to do something useful, that's what we should be looking for.

Yeah automation means we can generate the wealth whilst working fewer hours - in a few decades we'll only have to work 5 hours a week!

Folk have been saying this for over 100 years - it doesn't work like that.

[DominicJ]

Clv
No, we find other productive things to do.
We also work far fewer hours than we used to.

The old cottage industries worked far more than 37.5hrs a week, so did the first factories.

[clv101]

We also work far fewer hours than we used to.

This is contentious - since the 70's we're working far more hours. Pre 1970 relatively few households needed two salaries, now, despite the HUGE benefits of computers/networking, one salary often doesn't cut. This has the non-trivial effect that a lot kids these days grow up in families with two working parents, where a generation or two ago, that was almost unheard of.

[eatyourveg]

Clv
No, we find other productive things to do.
We also work far fewer hours than we used to.

The old cottage industries worked far more than 37.5hrs a week, so did the first factories.

That may be so for the employed, but I do laugh when I look at what some think is hard work. As a self employed person, during the the 6 months of the year when I actually make money (seasonal business) my working hours are 7am - 11pm every day, 7 days a week, with breaks for meals, cuppa's etc. and that is it. The other 6 months revert to more 'normal' hours.

This isn't a complaint because frankly, I would rather be doing that than be in the employment 'machine', a loathsome hideous place filled with largely jaded, unhappy people. I just cannot imagine being a cog in someone else's machine, the thought is too awful.

[DominicJ]

Clv
We're also much wealthier than we were 50 years ago.

The days of school clothes and sunday best being all a child had to wear are rather long gone now for most people.
Cars, multiple cars, holidays, mobile phones, computers, green electricity, a healthcare system that costs 4x as much.

You could argue we'd be better off with one worker families and less stuff, I happen to agree with you, if me and my partner have kids, one of us will probably go to half time hours, but a lot of other families choose "stuff"

[frank_begbie]

The PTB know this, but what do they do?

I'm not sure that many of them do know this. I think a lot of them are too busy firefighting the problems right in front on them to step back and see the bigger picture. They have spent too long being politicians and can't tell the difference between the truth and their own propaganda.

The trouble is, nobody in the media ever seems to confront them with the truth. Its as if they're all in on the conspiracy.

When was peak oil ever mentioned on News at Ten?
TPTB are frightened to death of the very words.

[Ludwig]

I don't know how anyone can think TPTB don't know about PO, when they are engaged in an all-out oil grab in the Middle East.

Apart from anything, do people think the security services never speak to politicians?