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fluffy666

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  1. To which the correct reply is 'none, I get my meat from the corpses of people who ask me silly questions or tell me 'No''.
  2. Also means that your pension pays out more. Trebles all around!
  3. I suspect you are correct. £50k could have built a house with cash to spare.
  4. How on earth can she meet the payments? That's about £850 a month, assuming interest free.
  5. As a child of 1973, I can see this.. bought literally months before houses took off in my area.
  6. Technology should have helped. What seems to have happened is that the 'leisure time revolution' that was predicted did arrive. BUT instead of manifesting as shorter working weeks and earlier retirement for all, it has manifested as mass unemployment and vast numbers of service sector low-value jobs - which only exist because this unemployment has driven down the cost of employing people. And at the same time we've celebrated mad house price bubbles even when mass production and automation combined with low land prices should have dropped the price of a good house under £50k.
  7. Relentless business lobbying, relentless right wing press propaganda, a pro-capital, anti-worker bias in practically every bit of legislation.
  8. Indeed, it's one of these 'Westminster village' things that the Basic Rate of income tax is sacrosanct and can never rise. Scary thing is that in the 1970s, an unemployment rate around 4-6%, or over a million people was seen as a national crisis. But nowadays, even with a downgraded measure there would be celebrations at the number getting that low.. and people wonder why pay rises don't exist, retail sales keep 'disappointing' and the deficit remains so high.
  9. Yes.. Got something similar in 2000. By 2006 when we moved house it was more 'Can you fog a mirror? You get 3 attempts..'
  10. I hate to use the whole boiling-frog thing, (because it's wrong). But it seems that.. Once upon a time you left school on Friday and started work on Monday. It may have been hard, it may not have been brilliantly paid, but the jobs were there. Then it got a bit harder - you had to apply for more jobs, there were temping agencies, you actually had unemployment. Of course, if you were a graduate it was still pretty easy. Then it got even harder, you started to need to do unpaid or badly paid apprenticeships, more jobs needed graduates, pay increases were rarer. Then they added half of Poland to the entry level jobs market. Then we started to talk about zero-hours contracts, NEETS, tuition fees meaning an increasing cost for even mid level jobs. The jobs market of 2014 would have looked catastrophic from the viewpoint of the supposedly dark days of 1979..
  11. The US introduced the kind of time limited benefits you suggest. It has worse social mobility, poverty and small business formation rates than we do. The real problem with trying to allocate stuff on the basis of need is that you train people to have needs. Now, you can try to allocate stuff on an even-needier basis - in which case people will have to be even needier, or you can use something like a CI where you don't have to demonstrate a need at all. Regardiing a right to food and housing, the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights says (Article 25.) : (1) Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. (2) Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection. No wonder human rights have such a bad rap amongst the right-wingers of the world..
  12. Well, since it would presumably only apply to British Citizens (and I'd extend that to 'Resident in the UK for at least 9 months a year'), it shouldn't be a problem..
  13. Key question: Was society before the existence of the welfare state more or less meritocratic?
  14. I measure a 5-fold difference between average January and average June.. they will be doing a fair bit of export by now, I expect.
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