But they don’t represent Taxpayers. They represent themselves and their super-rich friends.

I guess its a question of perspective. I found her hectoring, pompous and unpersuasive.

Brilliant! It’s about time someone layed into the anti-disabled, poor-hating, unemployed-bashing, filthy-rich worshipping frauds who are the TPA.

Almost everyone in this country pays some kind of tax, from income tax to taxes on fuel, booze, cigarettes, and VAT on a wide range of main street goods. They aint a taxpayers alliance – they’re the self-centred rapacious plunderers alliance.

Aw, poor Biffy, did the nasty woman upset you? Boo-hoo!

The TPA do not speak for taxpayers, but the Government listens to them (the 0.1%) rather than the rest:

http://zelo.tv/qfGLfp

The TUC’s March For The Alternative got 500,000 to support it, while the TPA’s Rally Against Debt got 350 including speakers, hacks and snappers. Ministers are listening to the TPA, and that has to change.

So the more leatherings that are handed out to the TPA, the better.

Well done to Polly Townbee. That guy was a jerk.

Now if we could all be earning £100,000 like her, everything would be perfect.

damon – I thought you hated class warfare? What’s your salary?

Polly was great. She’s surprised me again as she used to irritate me when I read her column. I suppose the well-fed TPA chap wasn’t that bright, but I couldn’t help but notice that Polly had a simple blue background while he had what looked like a busy office with screens and desks behind him. Some subliminal propaganda from Sky News? Perish the thought!

that was brilliant! i love it when these idiot’s have their arse handed to them!

Sunny, I hate the rich. I always have. Ever since I left school and spent years working as a London motorcycle courrier.
These days I’m not earning much. Mostly due to chopping and changing and taking time off work to travel and mess about.

The really telling point is that the issues at stake are not particular to Britain alone.

For an illuminating briefing on the situation in America, try this by Prof Laura Tyson, now of UC Berkeley and at one time the chair of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers and then the first female Dean of the London Business School:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WWn1AWG_8-w

See especially the graph showing that median earnings in America have been flat-lining since the 1970s while the 1% super-rich there have been getting richer and richer while enjoying Pres GW’s tax cuts.

As Warren Buffett – reckoned to be the third richest man in the world – keeps pointing out, he pays a lower rate of tax on his income than his cleaner and his secretary.

I don’t know that the Taxpayers Alliance is a good name for them as they appear to be more tax avoiders than payers. Middle income earners appear to pay at a much higher rate than the rich. By their industry, cleverness and tax avoidance the super rich have sucked up the vast majority of the country’s wealth until there is little loose money left. After years of governments selling off assets and borrowing we have come to the end of the line. The Irish build houses with no one left able to buy them. The Yanks create worthless mortgages. It needs the rich to pay a proper rate of tax to get the economy going and keep on going again. They will still be rich but need to be less greedy. Obama is right in saying that it is time that millionaires and billionaires paid a decent rate of tax. How many of the rich have sold their souls to the devil?

The Taxpayers Alliance representing the best interests of tax payers is like the Sheep Farmers Association representing the best interests of sheep.

@12

“See especially the graph showing that median earnings in America have been flat-lining since the 1970s while the 1% super-rich there have been getting richer and richer while enjoying Pres GW’s tax cuts.”

Nixon broke the link to gold (1971) and the Age of Inflation really kicked in. The monetary system is how they fleece us and pay for all their wars.

@14 Precisely.

I have been thinking for a while that the TPA need to be mocked and ridiculed into self-destruction.

So far, your simile is the best I’ve heard.

Maybe we should have a competition?

AFZ

@15: “Nixon broke the link to gold (1971) and the Age of Inflation really kicked in. The monetary system is how they fleece us and pay for all their wars.”

Not quite there yet, sadly. As Warren Buffett – reckoned to be the third richest man in the world – puts it:

Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/15/opinion/stop-coddling-the-super-rich.html?_r=1

haha. not always been that much of a fan of PT but that was brilliant. We need this sort of takedown on the media a lot more often.

Full of shit – I took an unemployed unqualified and fairly inexperienced friend last month and within 22 days of teaching, with no more than his mind and a net connection he”s now making £1000 a month.

No this is not an advert and no there is not going to be a link to a marketing site, there are opportunity’s Everywhere, if you are unemployed I feel for you especially if you have just left uni how ever you have to think and innovate for your self at times there’s no boss to tell you what to do and take care of your wages.

To say capitalism only works for ” the 1% ” is pathetic, no one is going to do it for you, the jobs you can find and even the job of your dreams is only there because someone else took on the personal responsibility and made it happen – take on your own its highly rewarding or…just ” hate da rich people!”

@16 Thanks. Here’s another one – thinking the Taxpayers Alliance is concerned about genuine tax payers is like thinking News Corporation is concerned about genuine news.

I’d just like to say that the mental image of greasy bankers being used to wipe the floor isn’t…er..precisely hygienic

Also, the TPA are just worried about those poor *corporate* tax payers, y’know.

19
Has no-one ever told you that one swallow does not make a summer?

@21
Would thinking of them as cloth-eared toe-rags make the mental image of wiping the floor with them any easier?

“Has no-one ever told you that one swallow does not make a summer?”

This is the exact kind of attitude that’s the problem – what so because all of these people aren’t aware of the possibility’s, aren’t intelligent enough, aren’t willing, aren’t in the market for that kind of thing, what ever there individual reason ( and there are many ) to be slamming there heads against a brick wall as far as job as concerned at the moment, this invalidates the opportunity’s that are out there and is just cause to change “the system”?

If I can take the unskilled unemployed uneducated in these conditions and teach the to make a decent wage with the basics what can the highly educated do if they put there minds to it? And just as importantly what can they do for others?

Wealth redistribution is not going to change a thing, once the money runs out its gone, wealth and job creation is what will change things.

But no,,I suppose all that is below them. A – demand a job B – demand some ones blood when its not provided- What chance on earth does this country have with this crowd…

“This is the exact kind of attitude that’s the problem ”

Not really – a single example does not establish a general principle.

But it leads to the absurd bicycling theory of the trade cycle – that getting a job just depends on getting on your bike.

It never seems to occur to those who espouse this theory that there is something extraordinarily odd about a situation where thousands in many countries all need to get on their bikes at about the same time.

Don – perhaps your encouraging people to come up with their own business ideas??. Ok pal – what do they do when your heroes in the banks don’t help them get off the ground?

@25
Well, why doesn’t the government just provide free roller skates and roller skating lessons for the unemployed? Oh I see they’ve already suggested it:
http://tompride.wordpress.com/2011/10/16/government-launch-roller-skating-plan-to-help-the-unemployed-uproot-in-search-of-work/

There is a simple solution to the unemployment problem. We should all become best-selling novelists like JK Rowling or Haruki Murakami.

Better still, if every adult resident in Britain gave me just one penny a year I should become a rich man.

I second @18.

I don’t generally care for Poly Toynbee but in this she was absolutely spot on and is the first person I’ve heard say on telly exactly what kind of an organisation the TPA really is.

“Not really – a single example does not establish a general principle”

The single example is replicated by thousands, in-fact the single example of a person creating there own source of income is the life blood of the economy – if you have a job ( in the private sector at least ) that job was created by someone who of there own initiative started a business.

“But it leads to the absurd bicycling theory of the trade cycle – that getting a job just depends on getting on your bike”

Yes, I cant find a job so using my head and creating my own, whether that be a business that employs others or a one man show that supply’s income is “absurd”- do your parents still provide pocket money?

“It never seems to occur to those who espouse this theory that there is something extraordinarily odd about a situation where thousands in many countries all need to get on their bikes at about the same time.”

Jesus Christ, have you ever witnessed rush hour?

“Don – perhaps your encouraging people to come up with their own business ideas??. Ok pal – what do they do when your heroes in the banks don’t help them get off the ground?”

Its called the real fucking world “pal” – there are no legitimate free rides that further down the road do not result in disaster, its a struggle and it always has been, while you may turn up from 9-5 daily for the last ten years the person who employed you lived in the world of full liability…

The fact that you lot revolt against the idea of there being opportunity under your noses frankly says it all.

@27 – My response to the government over that one can only be summed up as followed: Wut?

“Jesus Christ, have you ever witnessed rush hour?”

That must explain why unemployment rates have increased across G7 economies and other west European countries in the last few years? C’mon.

Why not volunteer your advisory services to Eurozone?

“That must explain why unemployment rates have increased across G7 economies and other west European countries in the last few years? C’mon.”

Why do the reasons matter other than you really need them to explain away your failures? There needs to be reform yet this does not amount to half of the problem, reform it all to perfection there will still be a shortage of jobs and a mass of people with a shortage of ideas on how to create them.

“Why not volunteer your advisory services to Eurozone?”

An A-level economic student would have acted more swiftly to deal with the Eurozone, in fact most would not have created it! It certainly beats ignoring all economic sense, placing your self deeply in denial when the out come of that shows its ugly face and then making a pratt of your self on the international stage and showing how truly inadequate you are to deal with your role..as for me I am not an advisor, just some one who helped a broke friend out on his path to self sufficiency, someone who looks for what ever opportunity’s there may be….you hate it…eh?

The twat Isaby was a former editor of Conservative Home, demonstrating the Tory links with this odious organisation.

@31 Well OK maybe not exactly roller skates but they suggested house swapping so the unemployed could be ‘more mobile’ so it’s close.

“Why do the reasons matter other than you really need them to explain away your failures?”

My failures? I’ve long since retired and out of general disgust with all the three main parties I didn’t vote in the 2005 elections. Recap: in the last Parliament, more than half the MPs had to repay expenses.

“An A-level economic student would have acted more swiftly to deal with the Eurozone, in fact most would not have created it!”

Have you told Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy?

The real silliness was years ago when they allowed Greece to join the Eurozone – despite the fact that it didn’t meet the criteria for Eurozone membership set out in the Maastricht Treaty.

There were plenty of heavyweight warnings – and associated academic and policy literature – about the risks of monetary unions without fiscal unions when the economies of the participating countries were insufficiently convergent to maintain internal stability with loss of national monetary autonomy – meaning, the option to set national interest rates to suit national conditions. Most A-level students are not up to that.

@36 – And after they’d appealed against the incompetents? Oh, right.

@35 – I wouldn’t put roller skates beyond this lot.

the likes of merkel and sarkozy seem to be looking at oneanother not knowing what to try, another sticking plaster? And here our media patronises people who have the audacity not to believe everything they here, I will not suspend my curiosity for how the world really work’s, and i do NOT want to live in a nation of bloody sharks either.

I was debating online the sense of European monetary union back in the late 1990s.

At the time it was driven by Europhile political imperatives for European integration and they didn’t want to be bothered by irksome and niggling criticism about the economic hazards at stake. After all, politics trumped economics. Critics of monetary union were pronounced “insane” – I joke not. My sanity was questioned.

That perspective still seems to prevail among those committed to the Eurozone. They don’t want to grapple with understanding the economic issues – possibly because they realise many in electorates will come to appreciate how the politicians screwed up when the Euro was launched.

Strictly, only Luxembourg met the official joining criteria in the Maastricht Treaty. Britain would also have met the criteria but for the requirement that it would have been necessary for the Pound to have been in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) for two years prior to joining the Euro – and the Pound had famously been forced out of the ERM in September 1992. In hindsight, that was a blessing. By the final quarter of 1995, Britain’s ILO standardised unemployment rate was lower than that in France, Germany or Italy and our employment rate was higher.

The TPA is a shill for the 1%.

“The real silliness was….”

We all know what the issues are and more than enough budding economists know and would act in a more mature manner than fantasist career politicians yet people continue to depend on these people and reject any notion that they them selves can address there own problems….

This is not the first time there has been employment issues right it is how ever the easiest time,with the technology’s and opportunity’s available such as the internet people really have something on there side, so don’t moan about it, don’t moan because you have to do something that’s out of the box, get on with it.

It’s fascinating to watch Polly, who is in the top 2% of earners, so indignant about the pay and lifestyles of the 1% immediately above her.

Heck, all it would take would be for her next book to be a surprise hit and Polly would herself be among the hateful 1%. What will she do then? Rant at the mirror?

42
What’s ‘out of the box’ is the growing numbers of people who are actually becoming aware that there is something wrong with the system. I’m a great believer in the words of Marx -
‘The class which is the ruling material force of society is, at the same time, its ruling intellectual force’
But the intellectualism of capitalism is now being questioned, your post @19 is a classic example of the legitmizations of our system – anyone can be president/prime-minister, anyone can make it, just a few examples of somebody ‘making it’ would suffice, never mind the probability.
The current protest movements haven’t yet intellectualised their discontent never mind put together a coherent alternative but I see this as the first flickerings of rising consciousness that the system really doesn’t work and it is the many who carry the burden of its failure.

Its rare I agree with George Potter but Polly had the Tax Payers Alliance political director Isaby bang to rights on his organisation. Also he moved from Conservative Home to be the political director of the TPA and is a Conservative Party member…

To coin a phrase:

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck then it is a duck.

“If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck then it is a duck.”

That looks very like a bigotted comment about inoffensive ducks IMO.

DON, don, don.

Do u defend bankers bonuses?

I defend performance-related pay.

Don – thats a no then.

The tiny % has proven, time and time again, that they don’t give a shit about job creation. They care only about things like owning a pin striped jet. They have fleeced us. Completely fucked us up. One is missing the point when one blindly thrashes about attacking some imaginary workshy ‘other’
Capitalism does work, but needs to be reigned in – if it takes a bunch of beatniks to jolt us in to all seeing that, then so be it. And it does. So lend them your support – cuz your not actually supporting ANyThiNg but common sense.