So where should the appropriate maximum income be set? Paul Reynolds's obscene $5 million income is close to 200 times the minimum wage. My pick would be to set the maximum income at 10 times the minimum wage. This would mean a maximum income of $250,000. The easiest way to enforce this would be setting a 100 per cent income tax rate for the combined income from all sources (including share allocations, allowances etc) above this level.
Linking the maximum salary to the minimum wage would have the added advantage of providing an incentive for the highest paid to lobby for increases in the minimum wage, unlike the present situation where the corporate sector argue for the lowest minimum wage possible.
Minto Madness
You can vote for the Mana Party next week, and John Minto is ranked number 4 on the list.
Not unless I've taken a major blow to the head....
ReplyDeleteMr Minto isn't likely to see his desired policies implemented by whatever government forms after next week. This absence of consequences to his presence in Parliament, I have to confess, fills me with a somewhat shameful urge to vote for his party solely for the prospect of the members occupying the government benches having to sit through his various proclamations and denunciations. Whichever party they belong to, I'm certain they'll deserve it.
ReplyDeleteStrangely, there are a couple of policies the Mana Party have that I quite like. However, it's the Minto madness, such as the idea above that are quite scary. The more I think about the implementation of it, the more the consequences reveal themselves to be revolutionary, in a bad way.
ReplyDeleteWell setting an upper threshold like that would punish the poor.
ReplyDeleteFor one the medical and surgical specialists would leave the country. There would be no one to train doctors or to run specialist units. In a short time we would be third world medicine in all respects. GPs would then leave. Psychiatric patients would be left untreated. There would be no one to prescribe specialist drugs. etc etc
Law and order would break down. Those who own their own homes would eventually never be able to sell them for what they paid as the upper end of the market would crash too severely and everything would be valued from that significantly lowered upper threshold.
Anyone with capabilities would leave the country....until no one actually could afford to.
Minto is a romantic who loves what Chavez did to Venezuela....robbed the rich, paid himself and is supposed to have help the poor (not likely).
Minto has brought into the communist failed dream that the problem with the world is economic and thinks everything will be okay if you take from the rich and give to the poor. But it makes everyone poor because the money runs out.
We will end up dirt farmers with $1 shops full of Chinese plastic. (Until the Chinese up their prices).
Its just dumb.
For me I think the social problems are about the loss of stability in the family which equals poverty as well as an overt capitalism which sees work in solely utilitarian terms and makes slaves of western lifestyle seekers. But it isn't easily fixed and is more a matter of the heart than of politics.
I think it is a sign of hopeless despair when the Minto's of this world think they can save us by rearranging the chairs on the Titanic. The icebergs actually are out of our control because that is the nature of the world. He's just projecting his own sense of hopelessness on everyone else.
ReplyDelete