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Sheep magazine archive 1: issues 3-9

Lefty online magazine, issue 3: October 2015 to issue 9: April 2016

Lefty online magazine, issue 3: October 2015 to issue 9: April 2016

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14<br />

What’s going on here? Part of the answer is<br />

that Osborne is perpetuating an error which<br />

the Tories – and indeed journalists – have<br />

been committing for years: he is equating the<br />

government’s finances with the nation’s. Mr<br />

Cameron did just this when he justified the cuts<br />

to tax credits by speaking of a “need to get on<br />

top of our national finance.”<br />

Of course, any fool can see that this is wrong:<br />

the country and the government are not the<br />

same thing. For a large part of the country, tax<br />

credits improve their finances.<br />

There’s a related error – what I’ve called the<br />

cost bias. The cost of tax credits is NOT the<br />

£29.5bn which the government spends on<br />

them. This is a transfer. Instead, the costs are<br />

the deadweight costs associated with them:<br />

for example, the cost of administering a<br />

complex system (which is one reason why I<br />

prefer a basic income), or the disincentive<br />

effects they create – for example, the higher<br />

taxes levied on other people to pay tax<br />

credits. The big purpose of tax credits is to<br />

raise in-work income and so incentivize work.<br />

Whether tax credits are therefore a cost at all<br />

is thus questionable.<br />

I fear, though, that what we’re seeing here<br />

isn’t just a neutral intellectual error. In defining<br />

the country and the nation to exclude the<br />

low paid, the Tories can create the illusion<br />

that the interests of the worst-off are not part<br />

of the national interest. This is an old trick<br />

of the ruling class. Here’s C.B. Macpherson<br />

describing 17th century attitudes:<br />

The Puritan doctrine of the poor, treating<br />

poverty as a mark of moral shortcoming,<br />

added moral obloquy to the political<br />

disregard in which the poor had always<br />

been held ... Objects of solicitude or<br />

pity or scorn and sometimes of fear,<br />

the poor were not full members of<br />

a moral community ... But while the<br />

poor were, in this view, less than full<br />

members, they were certainly subject to<br />

the jurisdictions of the political community.<br />

They were in but not of civil society.<br />

The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism<br />

Jeremy Hunt’s claim that tax credit recipients<br />

lack self-respect and dignity echoes this.<br />

In this way, Osborne’s rhetoric serves to create<br />

an illusion that the interests of the poor are<br />

antagonistic to the “national interest” ...<br />

SHEEP IN THE ROAD : NUMBER 4

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