Depressed of Epsom

I was sent this cartoon the other day which I found rather depressing.

Depressing in that one infers that a large number of people in the US, maybe as many as half given the complexion of the House of Representatives, think that this is funny. Respond positively to the ideas government is morally equivalent to crime and that government is about extracting taxes out of decent citizens with which to line its own pockets/feather its own nest and in return to provide a few crummy services that the private sector would do a much better job on if only they were given the chance.

That all those decent citizens would rather pay a stonking great tax in the form of excess charges to the private sector for its health services than a rather more modest tax to the government for rather better services. Curiously blind to the fact that the US pays about twice as much per person as most of the rest of us to get a similar, and very uneven, health outcome.

And never mind the insult to all those public servants, like my own parents, who believed in and devoted their working lives to the public service, for modest remuneration.

Not that we can crow that much, as the Guardian pointed out yesterday, with our public debate cast in terms of who can cut the most waste out of public service delivery. Not in the more grown up terms that if you want Nordic levels of public service you have to pay Nordic levels of tax. No amount of fancy accounting and fancy footwork with efficiency savings and public private partnerships can get around the simple arithmetic.

Depressing also because whoever labelled the cartoon could not be bothered to get the labels to align with the cartoon. A very poor piece of layout, the correcting of which would take me rather too long for it to happen.

PS: also interested in the idea, also reported in yesterday's Guardian, that taxing companies is not the way forward, if only because it is too difficult. Much simpler to stick with taxing income (in all its cunning forms) and with taxing consumption, both of which are relatively easy to get hold of. With a little bit of adjustment of the rates so that the share owning rich continue to pay at a high enough rate to help out the deserving poor. An idea which would not be popular with the tax men, I don't suppose, as I believe that they believe in having as big a tax base as possible.