… goes the headline, but did they ever really go away ?
All that really happened was that last year the bankers did not get much of a bonus because their banks were losing money, and now that things are looking better the bonuses are back. This should not surprise anyone; plenty of people get bonuses. What is really happening here is that people are questioning the size of the bonuses.
In fact when you look around, you will realise that there are plenty of people who get ridiculously large amounts of money for doing their jobs. When someone questions whether someone is earning too much, the first thing that occurs to everyone is “Is this jealousy?”.
Well perhaps a bit. I would not mind earning a bit more money, but I am reasonably comfortably off. And to earn more money at my current type of work, I would have to resort to working to make rich people even richer. Which I would much rather not do.
I have no great solutions to solve the problem of income inequality, but it is something that is worth trying for. And screw those who whinge about how taking money away from people with high incomes will drive talent overseas.
The most obvious thing to start with is to start making tax avoidance an activity that brings contempt from the public so that someone at a social gathering who admits it is likely to be shunned. There is a tendency to believe that money that one has earned is solely one’s own, and that tax is somehow “theft”. Whilst the anarchist within me would agree that governments taking money off individuals by force is theft, those who usually complain about this theft are merely being selfish.
No man is an island, and the cleverest banker who earns millions in bonuses, would not be able to do that in any sensible way without public services – police to protect their property, firefighters to try and save their property (and life), and health service workers to try and fix them up when their health fails. The more tax you pay the more proud you should be.
Perhaps we should encourage people to pay more tax than they are required to.
Whatever we do, we should remember that a society that pays some arsehole more money in a week than a nurse earns in a year just for kicking a pig’s bladder around a field has something wrong with it.