.......while we here are existing just about on approx £10K per year.......dropped from above £55K before the credit crunch. Couldn't even get anything while I was off sick, other than my accountant is trying to get SSP for me, but I won't see that until next April (and it will be a max of say, £1K). AL.
Absolutely spot on. There are those adicted to the receipt of welfare and equally there are those adicted to the provision of welfare. Elites looking after elites at every level of society.
This why we have tax allowances, however nobody should be paying more than 50% tax irrespective of income. Massive salaries and bonuses need to be addressed but not through taxation. Give shareholders real power to set executive pay but the institutional nature of shareholding and revolving door of exec and non-exec directorships conspires to keep executive salaries at a high level, 'because they are worth it'. Re the Dorchester bar you obviously move in more stratospheric levels than I do :wink: .
Cut non jobs, and there are plenty of them to cut. If the taxpayer is paying £45k for a middle manager to shuffle paper and count paperclips then sack him and pay him £15k benefit, that is a saving of £30k to the taxpayer. This does not take money out of the economy, it frees it up to be spent elsewhere more productively, or even frivolously by the person who earned it in the fist place. Jobs should be about adding value and not manipulating employment statistics.
Not an upper limit in absolute terms but punitive tax rates deter people from creating wealth. Simplify tax and make everyone pay it. Incidentally I would make anyone with a British passport pay British tax, irrespective of where they live . .
There is no such thing as hypothecated taxation in the UK, all tax goes into and comes out of the same pot. But I agree that there are the deserving and non deserving poor.
I don't see anything wrong with self interest, but we need laws and regulation to protect the vulnerable and society as a whole. But there is alot to be learnt from the proverb “Give a man a fish, and you’ll feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you’ve fed him for a lifetime.” The welfare system traps people in poverty whilst providing a good living for those administering it. You sound more like a social democrat than a socialist :wink:, and I agree with most of what you say.
No it is not good however again of you start giving them money in aid to support them self how likely it is they will get used to paid outs and you end up with another "welfare state"? It is already happening to some countries that been on aid for so long that if you were to cut it now it would be finito. We, me and many others, came here because standard of living on lower salary is much better not because of things you mentioned. Hence as already mentioned easier start as young person. Most do not care about benefits we come, we work, we pay all the same taxes but we also show up to work on time. Go for 30 min lunch brake when we were told it is 30min, do not go for ciggy/tea/coffee every 5. Stop blaming immigration for all issues. It was fine so no one moaned that much in uk bar sun paper. Came recession it was bankers but now it is becoming immigrants. Think most were here long before all this shit started so is it more likely we are all in the same boat of osterity or we are the problem? Finally number of times you said you worked abroad in some "under developed" countries but got paid in uk. It seems to be fine for you to steel local job. Jerry at one stage we had a South African living in my old place. He was in wheel chair. He came to uk to look for work. On first visit to job centre he was asked if he has british passport, he did. Next thing they told him is to not bother he will be better off staying on benefits!!
I love th 'scroungers get 60k pa' thing, as most get maybe 12k. The rest is the additional; no rent, council tax etc. this is where he cost builds up. If has someone else suggested we built 500k new council homes, reckon i would cost less in the medium time. As an aside, it should be made illegal to buy a council home never mind give massive discounts!
Thatcher seemed to think that if more people owned their own houses, then that means that the country is prosperous - hence the madness of the mass council house sell-offs under her years of gross mismanagement, with the discounts and all. We live under that legacy and that misguided philosophy of "home ownership at all costs", even now. I mean, what a way to measure of a country's wealth - "More than 40% of people own their own homes! We're rich!". Yeah, sure. How do you export fecking ownership of your own house as trade? Oh, and "Own", as in, owe mortgages on. Whoop-dee-fecking-do. Pathetic. Give her a state funeral and a national monument grave? Feck off. Give her body to a garden centre to be bagged up as fertiliser, more likely. Pah. Jeez, I sound angry, don't I?
