Tag Archives: bonuses

The sums differ but the principle’s the same

David Davis

You have to wonder: why do bureaucrats, working in safe offices, not under any sort of stress and not bound to any “targets” (although some penny-pinching ones will probably have been invented for them) need astonishingly generous bonuses? The story’s the same here but the sums are hyperbolic.

It would be less sad if the poor bloody squaddies were actually receiving adequate modern kit, and not having to get their mums to buy what they can for them instead. While we as minimal-statists are stuck with State Armies and Forces, we might as well try to make a good job of the thing.

One would like to think these over-rewarded pen-pushers will get somethng like the right come-uppance in the End-Times, when all wrongs are righted by a Libertarian revolution, but in practice the world does not seem to work that way. The Enemy Class triumphs all the time, it gets all the money, and then everyone else dies.


If I wanted to destroy the UK’s taxation-base….

..and I was Gordon Brown, then this is how I would start off.

David Davis

I thought that Statists like taxation. I thought they liked to do it.

They not only like [other people] to pay it, but they like to raise [lots and] lots of it.

If they want to do it, then there perhaps ought to be something large and worthwhile to tax economically and profitably. Surely, it’s worth more net revenue to tax about 10,000 guys each collecting lump sums of say £200,000 each, every year year in year out, (40% of 20 billion = 8 billion for 10,000 audits) than to tax 20 million people each yielding, let us say, £4,000 each per year (80 billion for 20 million audits) and with the same volume of paperwork per unit as the big guys?

They will merely have 200 times the paperwork per billion raised, if they drive the Banks offshore, as they now will.

And I haven’t even costed in the marginal taxation-losses due to death of small-businesses who service the bonus-earners.