Scottish cycle road tax

[pete75]

21p a mile is the figure that society subsidises the motorist, if you look back at previous threads on the issue

How do you work that out? According to figures calculated by the Road Users Alliance fueld duty, excise duty etc collected from drivers amounted to £45 billion in 2005-6. £7.5 billion was spent on road construction and maintenance during the same period. Society is subsidised by the motorist.

A simplistic comparison of road tax revenue VS cost of building roads is a bit like the smoking lobby arguing that the cost of smoking is far outweighed by duty. It's a similar example- at least superficially. Tobacco duty raises about £10bn a year, and the NHS spends about £2bn a year treating smoking related diseases. Smokers are being hard-done by and 'subsidising society'.

But actually, if you think just a little deeper you can see that people with smoking-related illnesses:
- are likely to work less or stop altogether, which means they are not paying tax/NI contributions
- are then having to be supported by the state benefit system.

The cost of people with smoking related illnesses drawing benefits would only be a net loss if there was full employment and only those who couldn't work through illness were in receipt of benefits. As it is if someone has to leave their job because of illness it creates a job for someone who would otherwise be unemployed.
Smoking is certainly a net benefit to the exchequer. A sensible government would encourage it. Britian is predicted to face major problems supporting a large pension drawing population many of whom have failed to make any pension provison for themselves and expect the taxpayer to finance their retirement along with cost of care homes etc.
Any activity which makes a net contribution of £8 billion a year and which makes participants likely to die earlier shouldn't be discouraged.

[Ron]

By that reasoning any data put out by CTC is unreliable as they are a pro cycling group, any environmental data issued by greenpeace of friends of the earth is similarly suspect etc etc...

Absolutely, organisations will use data which suits their arguments, that is why we should seek out as many sources as possible before coming to a conclusion, or use data that we know to be unbiassed from a source with no axe to grind.

[EdinburghFixed]

A simplistic comparison of road tax revenue VS cost of building roads is a bit like the smoking lobby arguing that the cost of smoking is far outweighed by duty. It's a similar example- at least superficially. Tobacco duty raises about £10bn a year, and the NHS spends about £2bn a year treating smoking related diseases. Smokers are being hard-done by and 'subsidising society'.

But actually, if you think just a little deeper you can see that people with smoking-related illnesses:
- are likely to work less or stop altogether, which means they are not paying tax/NI contributions
- are then having to be supported by the state benefit system.

The cost of people with smoking related illnesses drawing benefits would only be a net loss if there was full employment and only those who couldn't work through illness were in receipt of benefits. As it is if someone has to leave their job because of illness it creates a job for someone who would otherwise be unemployed.

I don't want to get into this too much, as I don't really know much about smoking (I didn't inhale )

But, at my girlfriend's office someone went on sick leave for 6 months, managed to come back for half a week, and then took a further six months off (this was the duration of the time the company paid sick leave salary, by coincidence I'm sure!). Eventually of course the employee left, but in all the time the illness was progressing, they couldn't just find an unemployed manager to hire, so not only were they paying out for an employee who was doing nothing, the whole team of about a dozen specialists had nobody officially at the rudder.

So the idea that someone gets sick, and the state can simply swap jobseeker's allowance for the new employee for ill health benefit on the old, I'm not sure is that true to life.

The idea that we should promote early death as a cost-saving exercise is an interesting one. Like passive smokers, people run over on the road are removed as burdens on the state in a reasonably random and non-discriminatory way.

The big question is, why spend taxpayers' money treating smoking-related diseases (or indeed any illnesses at all) when the consequences of ill health are so good for society?

[pete75]

A simplistic comparison of road tax revenue VS cost of building roads is a bit like the smoking lobby arguing that the cost of smoking is far outweighed by duty. It's a similar example- at least superficially. Tobacco duty raises about £10bn a year, and the NHS spends about £2bn a year treating smoking related diseases. Smokers are being hard-done by and 'subsidising society'.

But actually, if you think just a little deeper you can see that people with smoking-related illnesses:
- are likely to work less or stop altogether, which means they are not paying tax/NI contributions
- are then having to be supported by the state benefit system.

The cost of people with smoking related illnesses drawing benefits would only be a net loss if there was full employment and only those who couldn't work through illness were in receipt of benefits. As it is if someone has to leave their job because of illness it creates a job for someone who would otherwise be unemployed.

I don't want to get into this too much, as I don't really know much about smoking (I didn't inhale )

But, at my girlfriend's office someone went on sick leave for 6 months, managed to come back for half a week, and then took a further six months off (this was the duration of the time the company paid sick leave salary, by coincidence I'm sure!). Eventually of course the employee left, but in all the time the illness was progressing, they couldn't just find an unemployed manager to hire, so not only were they paying out for an employee who was doing nothing, the whole team of about a dozen specialists had nobody officially at the rudder.

So the idea that someone gets sick, and the state can simply swap jobseeker's allowance for the new employee for ill health benefit on the old, I'm not sure is that true to life.

The idea that we should promote early death as a cost-saving exercise is an interesting one. Like passive smokers, people run over on the road are removed as burdens on the state in a reasonably random and non-discriminatory way.

The big question is, why spend taxpayers' money treating smoking-related diseases (or indeed any illnesses at all) when the consequences of ill health are so good for society?

That's a good question why indeed? Perhaps it would be better if individuals were responsible for making their own health care provision. It would have other benefits, for example what used to be called the lower orders, council house dwellers, asylum seekers and the like, either wouldn't or couldn't pay for health care so their numbers would fall with a consequent fall in the crime rate and levels of anti social behaviour.
The sort of people who would die earlier without "free" healthcare are those we would be better off without. Obviously they'd still have to be public health provision to deal with the spread of infections diseases - if there was a cholera epidemic on the local council estate we'd want it confined there wouldn't we?

[EdinburghFixed]

I don't think you're being sufficiently ambitious. Allowing private healthcare is just going to encourage theft and mugging as the underclasses struggle for treatment. Of course it also allows those with inferior genetics but a healthy bank balance to subvert natural selection!

[pete75]

In this day and age where materialistic money grubbing seems the main aim of most it could be argued that the abiity to aquire and keep money indicates superior genetics.

[EdinburghFixed]

That is an excellent question. Over sufficient generations, if wealth does improve your chances of passing on your genes, would we evolve to be better earners? (The problem is, it's all relative to other people, I suppose).

[irc]

That is an excellent question. Over sufficient generations, if wealth does improve your chances of passing on your genes, would we evolve to be better earners? (The problem is, it's all relative to other people, I suppose).

I think in todays western societies human evolution has slowed almost to a halt. Everyone has sufficient food, shelter, clean water and god health care so that most people die of diseases of middle age or old age by which time their genes are already passed on. Also idleness or stupidity are no longer barriers to housing and feeding a large family.

I remember reading somewhere about a study that showed in medieval England the upper classes were far more successful at breeding over several generations than the peasants as in hard times the wealthy and powerful didn't go hungry.

Similarly of the German army captured at Stalingrad the officers had a far higher survival rate in captivity than the men due to better living conditions.

[EdinburghFixed]

What I think is really silly is that if you have some grim disease and need treatment that might make you infertile, they let you store a sample of your naff genetic code to reproduce with later. Pity the child that inherits the same condition as a result!

[niggle]

What I think is really silly is that if you have some grim disease and need treatment that might make you infertile, they let you store a sample of your naff genetic code to reproduce with later. Pity the child that inherits the same condition as a result!

The alternative is Eugenics and look where that got us

[Kirst]

The big question is, why spend taxpayers' money treating smoking-related diseases (or indeed any illnesses at all) when the consequences of ill health are so good for society?

Because people don't live healthy productive lives contributing to the economy and making us all richer, and then suddenly drop dead out of the blue. They get iller and iller over time, deliberately taking money out of all our pockets to pay for their treatment and care, and then linger for ridiculous lengths of time before finally having the decency to cark it and stop costing us.