Hi,
Not being in the UK, I couldn’t answer this really neat question the
way it deserves to be answered, but I can tell you what would happen
in the U.S. if there were no government intervention, which should
give you some food for thought.
1) You’d probably be out of business...unless you were a greedy,
cutthroat robber baron. Removal of government intervention would mean
that monopolies would flourish...as they did before government
intervention in business. Unless you are the monopoly holder, you’re
screwed.
2) You’d probably be working for someone else at poverty level wages
in unsafe conditions every day of the week for 16 hours...as happened
before government intervention in business
3) If you did get to drive the roads, you would pay a toll quite
regularly as roads would be maintained by private companies - this is
what happened in the US and the government intervened for the
development of interstate commerce and making the United States
united.
4) Truck and car insurance would no longer be required...which means
that you’d be financially liable for each and every accident that you
were involved it, regardless of whether or not you were at fault
5) You would have no safety regulations. Sure, there are truckers who
think that would be a good idea. They don’t stop to think that no
tail lights on the truck in front of them means that they might not be
able to see that truck when it slams on its brakes in front of them
until it’s too late. Or they think that “I can drive for 3 days
straight, just give me some pills, I’m not gonna get killed, I can
handle it”...until they can’t and kill someone else.
6) The price of gasoline probably wouldn’t go down at all. Oh, sure,
no taxes...but the monopoly holders would price gouge you (no
government intevention about price gouging anymore) and you might even
have to pay more for gas, not less.
Other notes more related to the UK:
7) You say that you are not dependent on government contracts but that
you provide an important service to British industry. Then, trust me,
you ARE dependent on government contracts. Not directly, but
definitely indirectly. Without those contracts, you wouldn’t be
hauling.
8) You would have no health coverage
9) You would have no pension or other retirement option
10) No unemployment insurance
11) Your children would not go to school, so they would have no better
future than you...working for 16 hours a day at poverty level wages in
unsafe conditions
12) There would be no increased expenditures for roads - unless you
paid those private companies even more in tolls to pay for it.
As far as cutting interest rates and taxes and how that would affect
your business, theorectically it would be good for you, but
realistically it can be either positive and negative depending on the
general economic climate.
To quote directly from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York:
“Lower interest rates make it easier for people to borrow in order to
buy cars and homes. Purchases of homes, in turn, increase the demand
for other items, such as furniture and appliances, thus providing an
additional boost to the economy.
Lower interest rates mean that consumers spend less on interest costs,
leaving them with more of their income to spend on goods and services.
Lower interest rates make it easier for farmers, manufacturers, and
other businesses to borrow to invest in equipment, inventories, and
buildings. Also, the returns that investments will produce in future
years are worth more today when rates are low than when rates are
high. That gives business more of an incentive to invest when rates
are low. Increased business investment, in turn, makes the economy
grow faster, as productivity, or output per worker, increases faster.”
< http://www.ny.frb.org/pihome/educator/economy.html >
Tax cuts are also intended to spur the economy. However, in the US we
have had major tax cuts, and the economy stinks. Obviously other
things besides tax cuts have factored into the current economic
situation. Currently the unemployment rate is the highest it’s been
in a very long time...without taxes, there would be no unemployment
payments to unemployed workers so the economy would be in even worse
shape.
The conservative philosophy is ‘less taxes, particularly on the part
of the rich because that will benefit everyone’. The liberal
philosophy is more that ‘the worth of a society is judged by how it
takes care of its weakest members. The private sector, for all its
philanthropic talk, is not real good at that’. I don’t know what it’s
like in the UK, but there is so much corporate greed in America it’s
killing us.
[The latest baloney is that CEOs must be paid zillions of dollars to
get or keep them (even as they ruin their companies) so the boards of
directors (made up of other CEOs) give them giant pensions and fund
them as if the person had been there forever, instead of months...at
the same time they are pushing for the federal government to allow
changes in how the pensions of the rank-and-file are treated, which
would allow big business to cut pensions by as much as 50% for people
who have REALLY worked for the company all those years.]
It may very well be that what is needed is not tax cuts per se, but
tax change. If the UK is anything like the US, the tax code is
horribly complicated and the rich, with their accounting firms, can
find and take advantage of loopholes and grey areas that simply don’t
apply to everyone else, so they pay less (sometimes nothing) while we
pay more and more and more.
All of us would like to see lower taxes. But it depends on what we
want to give up in exchange.
acorn-ga |
