How the media gets bankers bonuses wrong

So today it is announced that the banks have once again decided to pay out massive bonuses, this time in the order of 40 billion (!) pounds.

Cue widespread media attacks on Labour’s windfall tax on banker’s bonuses. The papers seem to be coming from the angle that the tax has somehow failed. “The banks still paid out!”, the rather flawed argument goes.

Idiocy.

If Alastair Darling was trying to stop any of them paying out, he would have put a 100% tax on them (in other words he would ban them).

He didn’t.

The exchequer, lumbered with a big black hole representing the cost of saving the banks these people run, will now make an unexpected £2.5 billion, if the wording of the tax is taken to work at full effect. That is £2.5 billion that the largely innocent populace of the UK won’t have to pay.

How this policy can be read as a failure is therefore difficult to explain. Unless, of course, you suggest that the right-wing press have some kind of agenda against the Labour Party, and the idea of taxing the extremely rich in the banking sector. And, I mean, how foolish is that? Good thing some of us aren’t susceptible to this kind of paranoia.