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Living in the 3rd world...


Davy51

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.....is an unfortunate reality for many people in the UK ,a country that is supposed to be at the forefront of prosperity.

 

At least politicians & church leaders are recognising the glaring realities that are helping people into poverty ,high rent ,high energy costs,high travel to work costs & / or late or missed benefit payments & lack of proper jobs.It has been suggested that many households are just an unexpected bill away from financial catastrophe.

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I think what makes a change is that Frank Field & his committee of politicians & churchmen have actually identified that it is the cost of essential needs & services that is causing problems for many people & leaving families with no spare cash ,not enough for luxuries & sometimes not even enough for food.

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Interesting prog about Louis XVI of France:  seems France was bankrupt and Louis tried three successive Ministers of Finance to sort out the Nation's finances. They all recommended that he taxed the Nobles and the Clergy, who paid no tax at all, but were the richest in the land. He summoned an Estates General, consisting of a third Nobles, third Clergy representing about 500,000 of the population and a third Commons representing the other 30million. Needless to say, turkeys don't vote for Xmas, so his tax reforms were never passed. Meanwhile France was borrowing to fund the American Revolutionaries (ironically), who, when they gained independence, refused to pay back the debt.  So eventually, after fruitless appeals to the King, the Commoners revolted, stormed the Bastille and the rest is history and it has a habit of repeating itself.

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With you Davy, it's too easy to try to pass off the fact that millions of British people are going hungry by trying to pigeon hole them all as chain smoking , alcoholic, opportunists when a huge percentage of the facts in the study point to genuine hardship, want and need. Ian Duncan Smith has been about as rank a person and minister as this country has seen for a long time, and that does take some doing

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It's a no brainer Dave: if more folk have more money to spend, that creates demand, which in turn creates more jobs, with more folk earning and paying taxes. So tax the richest 10%: the trickle down nonsense of Reganomics , is merely a con, put about by the rich to dull the reaction of the poor. The rich can only live in one house at a time, eat one meal at a time or drive one car at a time; so their wealth is re-invested to make even more wealth.  Continual re-distribution is good for an economy and good for the majority of people.

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Observer, very noble but how do you square all that with ukips pandering to the richest in the country including the abolition of inheritance tax, and the latest ploy of untaxing the biggest and richest estates in the land, including those of most of their donors???

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Obs, your opinion, is based on the fact that it is ok to forcibly confisate the private assets of one person and to hand it out to other people, based solely on the fact that the first person has worked hard and prospered.  The various tax systems do this to a degree, but when they unfairly target successful people it becomes onerous.  The fallacy is that, if you taxed every millionair at 100%, it would not make a dent in the cash required to support a nanny state sytem.  All you would get, would be the soccialist dream, everybody equally poor and equally miserable. Nothing wrong with encouraging charitable donations, but legislating robbery is a slippery slope.

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A buoyant economy needs a working population which has surplus money after its weekly bills are paid with which to enrich the wider economy ,a population with enough confidence in its job security & future prosperity to happily pay into its own pension pot & to willingly tolerate payment towards a manageable welfare state.

 

At present the weight of Britain's benefit dependent anchor chain is dragging the country to Davy Jones's locker.

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.....is an unfortunate reality for many people in the UK ,a country that is supposed to be at the forefront of prosperity.

 

At least politicians & church leaders are recognising the glaring realities that are helping people into poverty ,high rent ,high energy costs,high travel to work costs & / or late or missed benefit payments & lack of proper jobs.It has been suggested that many households are just an unexpected bill away from financial catastrophe.

You've obviously never been to the Third World. It doesn't look much like Warrington. Why do you  think the Third World is trying to get on a lorry in Calais. The deficit is £1,500,000,000,000, and rising, save your bleeding heart sympathy for when it gets really bad, and it will. :cry:

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PJ, no political Party currently has any intention of taxing the rich - no choice there. One political Party is making the right noises about the EU - which ticks a box; it will never imo, see the inside of No10, and if they don't go on to address the economic apartied, they never will. One hurdle at a time. Tex: your Nation taught us that taxation is fine, as long as it includes representation; the richest 10% can by all means vote their opposition through the ballot box ! The fact is Stall, that if 80% of our wealth became available to us all through taxation of the richest; we wouldn't need to borrow or cut services, quite the opposite. The reality of all societies, is the fact that without a seriously re-distributive taxation system, more and more wealth will gravitate to fewer and fewer people; hence the growing wealth gap.  Remember the peasant who went fishing for salmon on the Laird's estate?  The Laird challenged him for trespassing on private property. So the guy asked the Laird how he came to own the property. Well, said the Laird, it's been in my family for generations, right back to the first Laird in 1066. So how did he get the land, asked the peasant?  He fought for it, said the Laird. OK says the pleb, take your coat off !  :lol:

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That's tbe spirit Boris, let's wait until we are stepping over the bodies of starved children in the street before we bother our arrogant arses

Get a grip PJ.  Staunch your bleeding heart, soft touch welfare has got us into the deficit quagmire that's impossible to pay off in your lifetime. We're all screwed but the penny hasn't dropped yet.

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Thankfully we will never really be on a par with genuine 3rd world countries ,but our society is certainly in a sorry state where certain sections are surviving on food hand outs....all this from a country that once had the largest empire in the world & is still finding foreign aid while its own citizens are struggling.

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Get a grip PJ.  Staunch your bleeding heart, soft touch welfare has got us into the deficit quagmire that's impossible to pay off in your lifetime. We're all screwed but the penny hasn't dropped yet.

Well that's the bankers off the hook then 

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If you consider that a welfare state plays a key role in the protection  and social well-being of its citizens, then you would expect any civilised country to spend heavily on it.However if you compare what the Uk spends which is 23.8% of GDP to that of other countries eg. France 33%, Germany 26.2%, Italy 28.4%, Finland 30.5% Sweden 28.6% Denmark 30.8% Norway 22.9% then it's hardly 'soft touch welfare'.

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