morbotheterrible

Yep, and amongst those on benefits there is the polarisation of those who the Daily Mail seems to be able to sniff out, the immigrants living in a South Kensington Mansion worth £x million, and those who are largely ignored, living hopelessly desperate lives of humiliating, grinding poverty. I sometimes wonder whether there isn't a deliberate tampering with the system in order that it creates absurd results in order that certain sections of the press can seize these anomalous instances and create a false impression of those on benefits. I say this, because I know someone who is a friend of a friend who is entitled to disability vehicle allowance because he has three disabled children. (I'm not sure what these disabilities are, and that is a separate debate.) Apparently you get a sum per child, and so this person has ordered a brand new Volvo V70 business edition with sat nav, lane departure, adaptive braking etc. and these cars are insured, taxed and serviced. I suggested that this could not be right be right, it was probably an exaggeration, you probably get a lump sum to buy a vehicle and then maybe a sliding scale for the rest of the children, but apparently it is true. (this friend of a friend was originally considering a Q5 or Q3 or something.) My friend is not usually a jealous person and supports the idea of a welfare state, but thinks that a basic vehicle would suffice, and it is just wasteful to throw this sort of money about. He is so bothered by this that he was calculating what that car would cost to own. To get it on a 20k mile a year lease = £550 per month with a £5.5k deposit. (£5.5k deposit = £1.8k per year for three years). Lets say insurance £1000, tax £400, servicing £400? He reckons it's worth £10k a year, which would be £14k worth of taxed income. I imagine there is something underhanded going on with lobbyists for these lease companies, but still surely this cannot be normal? I suggested my theory to him that it was the old Malcolm X idea of getting you to side with the oppressors against the oppressed, by deliberately causing absurd results as this is not my understanding of the usual position of people on benefits. Someone on this site recently posted half a dozen links to people who had been mistreated by the ATOS administered system (including one who had set himself on fire).

I find it ironic that in seeking to drive us in a neo-liberal direction through the privatising of the social housing stock, transportation and the utilities, successive governments have necessitated wealth redistribution on an unprecedented scale. This comes primarily in the form of housing benefit, working tax credits and family tax credits. All these means of 'propping up families' are an underhanded acknowledgement that through the zero-sum policies of successive governments regarding immigration, outsourcing, employment and privatisation we now have a situation where the cost of living is so great that the majority must be placated with taxpayer subsidies to ensure that they can live. All this so the current crop of politicians can continue to ride the gravy train and because there is not the political will to see families going hungry in the streets. In my opinion, ideology now has nothing to do with it, everyone is getting paid and any attempt to genuinely cut state subsidies would result in another round of poll tax style riots. The poll tax riots happened because they negatively affected nearly everybody. Benefits in various formats are not now an exception, for people down on their luck or temporarily unemployed, they are the rule. Anecdotally very few of the people I know could survive without taxpayer assistance of one form or another. If you have a family there is very little incentive to work other than for minimum wage, 24 hour a week, 'pin money' contracts which are effectively a subsidy to big business and a means to secure working tax credit. The numbers involved are not trivial. Most of our friends with children are taking home more money for part time minimum wage jobs than my fiancée (much to her chagrin) who is full time nurse . On the bright side she is coming around to the idea of children. Speenhamland, I had to look that up: The Speenhamland system was a form of outdoor relief intended to mitigate rural poverty in England at the end of the 18th century and during the early 19th century. The law was an amendment to the Elizabethan Poor Law. It was created as an indirect result of Britain’s involvements in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815).[citation needed] The system was named after a 1795 meeting at the Pelican Inn in Speenhamland, Berkshire, where a number of loca lmagistrates devised the system as a means to alleviate the distress caused by high grain prices. The increase in the price of grain most probably occurred as a result of a poor harvest in the years 1795–96, though at the time this was subject to great debate. Many blamed middlemen and hoarders as the ultimate architects of the shortage. (Now known as BTL Landlords) That’s exactly what I’ve been talking about, it’s a top up because no-one can afford to live. La plus c’est la meme chose…

Perhaps gold cannot be fractionalised, but given that few people take physical position when they buy contracts, it is possible that there may conceivably be multiple competing claims on gold which would only come to light in the event of institutional failure. Such as this: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-09/hsbc-sues-mf-global-brokerage-over-stored-gold-silver-bars-1-.html I accept that it is an unlikely scenario, and multiple claims on stored gold do not appear to cause the 'sky to fall down'. However in the same way a bank run exposes the underlying illiquidity of a bank, a run on gold is not an impossible scenario, although I expect there would be bigger things to worry about if it did happen.

Alternative take on potential Comex default: My link

If you come up short on the family loan, message me and I'll lend you a chunk of what you need, interest free til you can give it me back. Serious offer. I'm only in Chesterfield so I can drive up and drop it off if needs be.

This is £628 on amazon, and nearly £240 including postage on ebay. Is it worth reading? The description of the initial inflationary effect in that excerpt seem to be exactly what we are going through.

Brilliant.

Possible 'honeytrap'. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=24784 While this angle risks denigrating the victim's experience, the facts don't add up. I understand that he obviously has a sense of entitlement and a sleazy attitude towards women, but this is a serious departure from that. If nothing else surely he wouldn't be as stupid as to think he could get away with that sort of behaviour?

Release date for the UK is the 18th Feb. Should be showing at most independent/arthouse cinemas after that. It is showing at my local independent cinema The Showroom in Sheffield on the 18th.

Very true, however, the above has been the case for a while. I am currently working in a temporary position, and so I went to talk to a a financial advisor about the problems I would face obtaining a mortgage. Apparently if I 'know someone' who owns a business who is prepared to say they were offering me a job at £x p.a. this would rectify the situation as no payslips or work history are necessary. Apparently he knows "a lot of people who are doing it." Edit: spelling

(This may be old news to some) Whilst browsing Zoopla I found this house: House Zoopla has functionality whereby it gives an estimate of what a house is worth, presumably based on the last sale price recorded at the land registry and then adjusted by the national average change in house prices. By using street view I can tell that this is number 4, which according to the land registry sold in 2007 for £142,000. The current vendors are prepared to take £2000 less than they paid for it. More interesting than that, is that Zoopla has current house values in this road on a link part way down the page Current Values where the current value of number 4 is stated as £128,761. I wonder if the estate agents and vendor are aware that the website they listed on is undermining their asking price.

One of the comments on the Guardian article states that to repay £1.4tn over the next 30 years will cost £125 per MONTH in extra tax for everyone in the UK. I've done a quick calculation and this sounds correct. I used the BBC mortgage calculator and entered a £1.5 million (took out a factor of 1 million) mortgage over 30 years at 5%. The repayments are £7589 per month. If you divide this by the UK population, (ignoring the factor of 1 million, as we can take the same factor out of the UK population of 60 million, giving us 60) £7589/60= £126. So if everyone in the country can find a spare £126 per month ( approximately £6K per year for a family of 4) we can sort this out in 30 years. If someone can confirm my figures are approximately correct, then it is clear that this debt is unrepayable. If you factor in a contracting economy, unfunded pension liabilities, the budget deficit, the fast approaching depletion of north sea oil, I can't see how bankruptcy is avoidable.

Unemployment to 10M is not that great a leap: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?ID=12 "The number of economically inactive people of working age fell by 29,000 over the quarter and by 48,000 over the year to reach 7.86 million." It just depends how you define unemployed.

Went outside and checked the roof hadn't fallen in! Never felt one that strong before!

I haven't been reading as much as usual as I've been busy, (and don't post often because my views are normally covered) but what is the general consensus on whether Cgnao gets the credit for his NR prediction. I agree that anyone can make a sufficiently vague generalisation or prediction that can easily be claimed to be correct in the fullness of time, but I for one am going to give him this. I'm off to buy some more gold and a tin foil hat.