The Mandarin Windfall Tax

It's payout time again:

A CULL of senior managers at Scotland's biggest city council will result in 103 executives each receiving £128,000 in pay-offs and payments to their pension funds, it emerged yesterday.

The Council claims that these payoffs will save money in the long run. Perhaps, but the terms are outrageous:

About 80 per cent of each package will go towards reimbursing managers' pension funds for the costs of early retirement, with the remainder being spent on giving them the equivalent of 30 weeks' salary. The deal does not apply to the local authority's 5,000 teachers.

The real question is why such contracts were signed up in the first place.

And it's not just Glasgow Council that's got far too many overpaid staff. Have a look at this:

Today, The Slog begins a campaign to try and unearth why nearly half of everything Britain owes is down to public sector and civil service pension liabilities - and how this came to be presented as a difference of opinion between those calculating the liability....whereas in fact there seems to have been a deliberate attempt to hide the pension amounts being paid to civil servants....especially senior Mandarins

So what should be done?

Given that the employment contracts are probably watertight I propose that the Chancellor introduce an emergency Mandarin Windfall Tax. After all, that's what happened to bankers. And the bankers were less guilty: they acted rationally given that they operated in a fractional reserve monetary system put into place by the mandarins themselves. And in so far as one might argue that the bankers should have seen through fractional reserve banking, they were "educated" at universities controlled by those very same mandarins.