Pre-Budget statement

[SS2]

What a joke.

Darling has done nothing to address the fact that this country is broke. All the extra revenue that they are going to raise is all going to be spent. HELLO, EARTH CALLING, the country is saddled with debt and you need to start paying some of it off !

We are all doomed, DOOMED I tell thee !

So, what should Alistair D and his comedy eyebrows have said instead of the "things are really not that bad, actually" nonsense that he spouted ?

 

[freddielong]

What do you expect from them (Labour) there normal routine seems to be "we got us into this mess only us can get us out" pathetic

 

[USER1999]

He should have said that the ship is sinking, there are no life boats, so lets have a party and go out with a bang. Then let the tories inherit the mess, and be unpopular when they raise taxes and sack every one, then we get voted in the time after. Weh hey. Party time! All we need to do is tax some bonuses, and we can afford some champagne to quaff while we watch it all sink.

 

[drawboy]

What a bunch of New Labour Shermans. The sooner they are out on their ears the better the country will be.Frankly I do not give a jot what any labour supporter has to say. I am well at the end of my tether with this lot of shysters.

Tories I welcome you with open arms, for better or worse I do not care as long as that false faced idiot Brown is sent to where he belongs..opposition.

 

[Tommo21]

What do you expect from them (Labour) there normal routine seems to be "we got us into this mess only us can get us out" pathetic

Can you please explain how Labour got us into this mess. Here is a little article I found and it really sums up how I feel about the last year or so.

"Since the economy is 66% consumer driven, when consumer
spending slows, the GDP begins to fall. Consumer spending slows for a multitude of reasons: when the consumer can no longer get reasonable credit rates, when he's fearful of loosing his job, when his debt load is higher than is comfortable, when he already has all the stuff he needs. The economic cycle has periods of expansion and contraction. A recession is a contraction. Its normal".


It wasnt that long ago when, on this web site, the goverment car scrapping scheme was slated before it even started. Tell me how it worked out , dont bother we all know it was a boost to the car industry, and car sales are recovering fast, house prices are recovering....for the greedy people who want to make a quick buck, intrest rates are lower than ever. There is little doubt we'll pay for it sooner or later but up till the recession started in the US I didnt hear all the doom and gloomsters like I hear now.........my mortgage is the lowest it's ever been and my investment ISA has made a small fortune in the last few months.

 

[viscount17]

Labour have given up. They know they are on the way out and that the next government doesn't have a hope in hell of fixing anything in one parliament. They are all equally too short sighted anyway - anything more than a one-year plan is fated to fail, either because they forgot what it was for or persist with fiddling with it.

and Brown - not opposition - obscurity

 

[Parmo]

What do you expect from them (Labour) there normal routine seems to be "we got us into this mess only us can get us out" pathetic

Sorry I thought the subprime market which was created in the 1980s and 1990s got us into this mess?

 

[forefortheday]

What do you expect from them (Labour) there normal routine seems to be "we got us into this mess only us can get us out" pathetic

Sorry I thought the subprime market which was created in the 1980s and 1990s got us into this mess?

I think you will find it was David Bowie

http://www.mirror.co.uk/celebs/news/2009...15875-21036649/

And I thought Tin Machine was enough to inflict upon us!

 

[RGDave]

What do you expect from them (Labour) there normal routine seems to be "we got us into this mess only us can get us out" pathetic

Sorry I thought the subprime market which was created in the 1980s and 1990s got us into this mess?

Somehow, I doubt this. Subprime lending hardly existed before the mid 1990s.

 

[Parmo]

What do you expect from them (Labour) there normal routine seems to be "we got us into this mess only us can get us out" pathetic

Sorry I thought the subprime market which was created in the 1980s and 1990s got us into this mess?

Somehow, I doubt this. Subprime lending hardly existed before the mid 1990s.

So the right to buy wasnt sub prime?

 

[RGDave]

Back to the OP.

Our national debt is somewhere around the £1,000 billion mark.
Presuming we are now calling a billion 1,000 million (as per America) then we are currently in debt around £16,000 per person.

This is recoverable but, party politics aside, it's not going to happen very quickly.

Trouble is unregulated democratic capitalism is a near total failure. Until we wake up and realise that tax needs to rise (massively) for the big earners (whether they want to go somewhere else instead) and only effective legislation stands between the way of the few controlling the masses through financial slavery.

So I'm some sort of socialist or communist? No, not at all.

The point is, we were all going along quite nicely until the folk at the top of the money pile started taking the p*** by allowing a free-for-all amongst the managers beneath them.

The trouble is the government lacks power to pull the financial puppet strings....this isn't going to change, ergo, we have to wait for the cycle of boom and bust to do it's thing time and time again.

 

[Ethan]

Th economic merits of the PBS are irrelevant. This is about whoring for votes from the last groups thought to be salvageable for Labour. Darling would sell his mother to people traffickers if he thought it would save the election.

On the subprime issue, right to buy was very different. One problem with the sub primes was that the mortgage companies widely misled buyers in order to get their commissions and bonuses. Gee, that sounds familiar!

Also, deregulation in the UK started by Thatch made the City of London an attractive place for US companies to have outposts. As Dubai is now finding out, an economy reliant on finance is going to fall over sooner or later.

 

[RGDave]

So the right to buy wasnt sub prime?

Well (point taken) r-t-b was a sort of subprime lending theory/exercise. Truth is, Thatcher took r-t-b and turned it into a money making scheme to allow councils to feel good about their balance books.
It (the scheme) created debts that represent a drop in the ocean compared to where we are now. The problems created since then (housing bubble, unsecured loans) are what have started the nails in the coffin.

Do you think r-t-b was a good or a bad thing?

 

[RGDave]

Th economic merits of the PBS are irrelevant. This is about whoring for votes from the last groups thought to be salvageable for Labour. Darling would sell his mother to people traffickers if he thought it would save the election.

On the subprime issue, right to buy was very different. One problem with the sub primes was that the mortgage companies widely misled buyers in order to get their commissions and bonuses. Gee, that sounds familiar!

Also, deregulation in the UK started by Thatch made the City of London an attractive place for US companies to have outposts. As Dubai is now finding out, an economy reliant on finance is going to fall over sooner or later.

NICE!

Some serious pub-talk going down tonight!!

 

[Ethan]

So the right to buy wasnt sub prime?

Well (point taken) r-t-b was a sort of subprime lending theory/exercise. Truth is, Thatcher took r-t-b and turned it into a money making scheme to allow councils to feel good about their balance books.
It (the scheme) created debts that represent a drop in the ocean compared to where we are now. The problems created since then (housing bubble, unsecured loans) are what have started the nails in the coffin.

Do you think r-t-b was a good or a bad thing?

RTB wasn't subprime because affordability/repayability(?) was built in through large discounts. Quite the opposite was the case with the US sub primes, many of whom were duped into large mortgages they couldn't afford through attractive lead-in rates and the bad news buried in the small print.

 

[rgs]

We just had our budget today. We are currently running a decifit of 12% of GDP or €22Billion.
So to correct the public finances our Finance Minister decided to cut public service pay between 5% and 15%, cut Social Welfare by 4%, child benefit by 10%. Those under 24 on jobseekers allowance are hit with a 50% cut.

No increases in tax for the high earners.

But best of all we reduced the excise duty on alcohol by 20% and reduce vat by 0.5% to "stop" cross border shopping.
We are going to drink ourselves out of the recession.!!!!

 

[HomerJSimpson]

I remember when I started in payroll at the Treasury back in 83 (doing Maggie and the Cabinets monthly salry's ironically) the rates of tax was 60% and there were tax bands every 5% from 35% upwards so the big cats got hit properly and the mid-salaried earners (mid-management and those on bonus plans) got hit but in a fairer and more progressive manner. Its going to have to happen again. I don't think we'll be back to the 60% days but I can see the reintroduction of more bands to get more tax in. The NI rises will only go so far but its the company's that get hit as employee NI is capped

 

[dangermouse]

What do you expect from them (Labour) there normal routine seems to be "we got us into this mess only us can get us out" pathetic

Sorry I thought the subprime market which was created in the 1980s and 1990s got us into this mess?

Somehow, I doubt this. Subprime lending hardly existed before the mid 1990s.

So the right to buy wasnt sub prime?

there has been "sub-prime" lending for as long as there has been lending. the difference since the mid-90s was the deregulation of financial markets meant that those lending the money were not reliant on its repayment to make a profit. The debt was bundled up with thousands of others and sold on around the world in CDOs, each institution believing they were making a paper profit.

This deregulation has occurred under the Blair/Brown administration and therefore yes, they do bear some responsibility.

The outrageous public spending introduced has also meant that the recession is difficult to exit, because the private (wealth generating) sector has been marginalised since 1997.

This latest pre-budget report has done nothing to rectify this problem and instead focuses on short-term headlines, and is the best reason for booting them out of office.