Talk about being subtle:
the left wing parties, led by Labour, treated 16 years olds as electoral
chattel by pushing for them to have a vote in order to improve the number of seats
their party has in the House of Commons (people of that age tend to vote for more
left wing parties).
Unsurprisingly, as it
would disadvantage their own political standing, the Tories filibustered the
debate, meaning that there was no time for a Parliament vote on whether to
lower the voting age to 16.
It was a squalidly transparent
claim of Labour to want to 'empower' young people - no one was falling for it. But
this does bring to bear another important factor in how young people embracing
left wing economics and the promise of free sweets are going to one day pick up
the bill for all the fiscal irresponsibility they demanded in their youth.
The young
people who are trusting Jeremy Corbyn's ludicrous magic money forest economic
policies do not seem to realise that the government must raise taxes in the
future on the very people they are trying to help now. It's a bit like buying
your son a games console on his 14th birthday but then telling him he only gets
to play on it if he pays for it on his 21st birthday. At no point along the way
can this boy think of the games console as a free gift.
At the moment
Corbyn wants to defer increases in taxation (for anyone earning up to £80,000
pa) by borrowing. The economics behind what I'm now going to tell you is more
complex than my simple illustration, but not in any way that alters the
efficacy of the generalised arithmetic. Suppose Corbyn wants to tax you £100 to
help wipe out student debt. Here are some possible scenarios (figures rounded
for simplicity):
Scenario 1: Corbyn taxes you a £100, which you remove
from your £1000 savings account, leaving £900. A year from now, your bank
account has grown (at 10% interest - again for simplicity) to £990.
Scenario 2: Instead of taxing you, Corbyn borrows the
£100. This leaves £1000 in your savings account, which grows to £1100 a year
from now. At that point, Corbyn taxes you £110, leaving £990 in your bank
account.
Scenario 3: Corbyn taxes you £100, reducing your bank
account to £990. Then he lends you the £100 back at 10% interest, raising your
bank balance to £1000, which grows to £1100 a year from now. At that point Corbyn
demands repayment of his loan, so you fork over £110, leaving £990 in your bank
account.
Note that despite
some complex tweaking of the knobs to adjust for real values over a lenthier
execution time, all three scenarios bear out on the taxpayer no differently -
the only major factor at play is the time that it is recouped. In other words,
Helen the student who wants all her free sweets now is going to pay for them
later in life anyway in ways that will esacape her naked eye.
The government
is merely a representative agent of the taxpayers, and politicians are a bit like magpies - they steal from
the shiny objects of enterprise to line their nests (magpies don't really do
that - but it's part of popular mythology) - in that any good things that
politicians can do for citizens are done as the result of extrapolating from
the fruits of other people's labour.
Raising taxes depletes
our present day assets, and increasing borrowing to pay for Corbyn's
short-sighted policies depletes our future assets and only defers its main
damage to a few decades' time when Jezza is a distant memory. No wonder Corbyn
loves these policies - he'll be long gone when the voters that love them most
end up feeling the costs.
