So the entirety of English society helped pay to make Rowling incredibly wealthy. That seems like a pretty massive concentration of wealth for little benefit to society as a whole aside from some nice pablum to digest.
I remember in the USA when the Harry Potter books were starting to go mainstream (and the Christian Right were still trying to get the book banned because they promoted witchcraft). There was an short piece on an NPR program that talked about the phenomenon of kids lining up in droves outside bookshops for the launch of the books - this was way before Apple copied the idea :) I would say that the net gain to humanity in the long term, purely based in terms of kids literacy, was worth many, many times Rowling's personal fortune.
I don't know what she and her creations have since paid in taxes in the UK, but I'll wager a dollar that it exceeds the monetary cost to the country. Hell, compared to some uses of the tax payers money, I'd say that a lot of value was gained.
You're absolutely right. Rowling has explicitly stated in the past that she hasn't and won't use tax avoidance structures, so she will have paid 40% income tax on most of her income from the books.
Plenty of UK bands from the 60s to the 90s have mentioned unemployment benefits as being an important factor in allowing them to exist before they got famous.
No, the entirety of English society paid to keep Rowling barely fed and sheltered for a short time, during which she wrote the first Harry Potter book. Then all the people who like her books enough to pay for them made her incredibly wealthy.
The 'the entirety of English society' didn't do squad exept keeping her and her kids from becoming homeless and living on the street. She helped herself become incredibly wealthy. Do you think it's easy to find a pubisher? Try finding one when you're an unemployed, uneducated mum.
It is quite amusing to see attempts at discounting the welfare systems impact on her ability to attain her wealth, when she herself has frequently described it as important, and one of the reasons why she has happily continued to pay substantial amount of taxes on her earnings.
Noone is to my knowledge saying she did not also have a substantial impact on it herself - after all, we're not swimming in people who have achieved the same. But there can very well be more than one contributing factor.
To grasp onto your last statement: Try writing a book when you're an unemployed, uneducated mum if she did not have a working welfare system to "break my fall" as she herself put it.
It was her effort, but the welfare system made it possible for her to put in that effort.
EDIT: Though just for the record, as rich people go she is definitively one of the most sympathetic, not least for the way she has made it exceedingly clear that she believes it is fair for her to pay her taxes in the UK without complaint, given what she believes she owes to the system in the first place - and to the extent that she explicitly hit out at the conservatives for wanting to cut taxes for the rich.
smackay|12 years ago
lostlogin|12 years ago
pjc50|12 years ago
Plenty of UK bands from the 60s to the 90s have mentioned unemployment benefits as being an important factor in allowing them to exist before they got famous.
gjm11|12 years ago
digitalengineer|12 years ago
vidarh|12 years ago
Noone is to my knowledge saying she did not also have a substantial impact on it herself - after all, we're not swimming in people who have achieved the same. But there can very well be more than one contributing factor.
To grasp onto your last statement: Try writing a book when you're an unemployed, uneducated mum if she did not have a working welfare system to "break my fall" as she herself put it.
It was her effort, but the welfare system made it possible for her to put in that effort.
EDIT: Though just for the record, as rich people go she is definitively one of the most sympathetic, not least for the way she has made it exceedingly clear that she believes it is fair for her to pay her taxes in the UK without complaint, given what she believes she owes to the system in the first place - and to the extent that she explicitly hit out at the conservatives for wanting to cut taxes for the rich.
eli_gottlieb|12 years ago