Yes, Polly’s in the paper again today:
‘Hammer the rich!’ At last a political leader has the nerve to say what pollsters find most people think.
Jealousy is just so unseemly, isn’t it? Not, one would think, a great basis for public policy, either.
Alas, Adam Applegarth, Northern Rock’s chief executive, is no James
Stewart. He did not hurry to give hard-hit shareholders back any of his
pay: if he took 10 times less, he’d still be left with £140,000 – and
that’s not counting his pension.
He’s very likely not to have a job soon enough: but much more interesting is this:
Despite promises, there is far too little money to help more people buy
their own home, and this cheap mortgage collapse will make it worse.
Now what Applegarth has been making his money from is offering "cheap mortgages". Mortgages to those who had low incomes, offering high multiples and high valuations. That might be a good or a bad business idea (we don’t know yet: all we know so far is that funding such loans from the commercial paper markets wasn’t). But it was a business idea which offered aid to those other’s would not lend to.
So Polly is both condemning the collapse of this aid to the poor in getting their foot on the ladder and condemning the person who made it possible.
Is Doublethink now actually a requirement to write for The Guardian?
There is, as ever, at least one true line in her piece:
All these the chancellor of the exchequer should steal wholesale for
his next budget: think what he could do with £13.5bn in a very tight
spending round.
Taxation as theft? Who would ever thought to have heard Polly say that? And, as ever, there’s one thing in her article which is batshit insane:
We are a low-tax nation.
According to the OECD (in 2004) our tax to GDP ratio was pretty much right on the average for OECD nations. As the tax share of the economy has risen since then I think it’s fair to say that we are in fact a high tax nation.
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