We Should Vote The Lib/cons Out After The 2011Budget

[crash2006]

They just seen to be hurting the population rather than helping them, they seem set on pushing more people into benefits pushing more people to not work to see that landlords are getting because there tax will be lower and the population having to pay more tax out of their wages, fiscal drag and pay cuts.

Think we need to start a campaign to get them out of wesminster.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ianmcowie/100009899/hidden-boost-for-house-prices-in-the-budget/

[The Knimbies who say No]

They just seen to be hurting the population rather than helping them, they seem set on pushing more people into benefits pushing more people to not work to see that landlords are getting because there tax will be lower and the population having to pay more tax out of their wages, fiscal drag and pay cuts.

Think we need to start a campaign to get them out of wesminster.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ianmcowie/100009899/hidden-boost-for-house-prices-in-the-budget/

and replace them with...?

[Dorkins]

and replace them with...?

Let's do a Belgium, 9 months without a government and counting.

[Driver]

How about we pay some of the debt back first before letting Labour loose with the credit cards again?

[Cozza]

They just seen to be hurting the population rather than helping them, they seem set on pushing more people into benefits pushing more people to not work to see that landlords are getting because there tax will be lower and the population having to pay more tax out of their wages, fiscal drag and pay cuts.

Think we need to start a campaign to get them out of wesminster.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ianmcowie/100009899/hidden-boost-for-house-prices-in-the-budget/

[Pent Up]

and replace them with...?

+1

Lesser of two evils unfortunatly.

[Pent Up]

How about we pay some of the debt back first before letting Labour loose with the credit cards again?

+2

[Guest]

How about we pay some of the debt back first before letting Labour loose with the credit cards again?

+931,000,000,000

[Chuffy Chuffnell]

They just seen to be hurting the population rather than helping them, they seem set on pushing more people into benefits pushing more people to not work to see that landlords are getting because there tax will be lower and the population having to pay more tax out of their wages, fiscal drag and pay cuts.

Think we need to start a campaign to get them out of wesminster.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ianmcowie/100009899/hidden-boost-for-house-prices-in-the-budget/

And have Milliband and Balls in charge.

Erm, you are joking right?

(If not, you need help.)

[neon tetra]

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ianmcowie/100009899/hidden-boost-for-house-prices-in-the-budget/' rel="external nofollow">

They just seen to be hurting the population rather than helping them, they seem set on pushing more people into benefits pushing more people to not work to see that landlords are getting because there tax will be lower and the population having to pay more tax out of their wages, fiscal drag and pay cuts.

Think we need to start a campaign to get them out of wesminster.

Aren't you pushing the boundaries of the forum rules here...?

(Edit: I just checked and couldn't find anything about it in the forum rules.... Was the bar on overtly political postings just over the last election period? ....or was it just in my mind?)

Edited March 25, 2011 by neon tetra

[888]

They just seen to be hurting the population rather than helping them, they seem set on pushing more people into benefits pushing more people to not work to see that landlords are getting because there tax will be lower and the population having to pay more tax out of their wages, fiscal drag and pay cuts.

Think we need to start a campaign to get them out of wesminster.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ianmcowie/100009899/hidden-boost-for-house-prices-in-the-budget/

YOU FORGET WHO PUT US IN THIS POSITION IN THE FIRST PLACE.

PR*T.

[Timak]

Some questions for those wanting to pay down the national debt.

What do you think would actually happen to make our lives better if the national debt were lower?

What would you be prepared to sacrifice, or ask others to sacrifice more accurately, to achieve this goal of lower national debt?

I'm very much for balanced budgets I just don't see that paying back the national debt should be a particular priority when we have a soverign currency and can just reduce it over time through gradual inflation.

[Timak]

YOU FORGET WHO PUT US IN THIS POSITION IN THE FIRST PLACE.

PR*T.

Gordon Brown grrrr.

The man also stoked housing booms in Australia, New Zealand, USA, Ireland, most of Eastern Europe etc etc too - was their no end to his evil?

Good thing we had a strong opposition standing against his spending plans at every opportunity and not calling for more deregulation or copying Ireland......

[plummet expert]

They just seen to be hurting the population rather than helping them, they seem set on pushing more people into benefits pushing more people to not work to see that landlords are getting because there tax will be lower and the population having to pay more tax out of their wages, fiscal drag and pay cuts.

Think we need to start a campaign to get them out of wesminster.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ianmcowie/100009899/hidden-boost-for-house-prices-in-the-budget/

They have made some stupid errors of judgement, such as the child benefit change and the pathetic budget subsidy to FTB which is actually dangerous. Some cuts look as though only some of us' are in it together'. But, before you dismiss this Coalition, what would another govt have to do? Where will future jobs and growth come from? It cannot be the public sector since Brown allowed it to balloon beyond affordability anyway. You can't have a public sector bigger than the private sector - recipe for disaster. 600,000 MORE PEOPLE were working in the public sector after 13 years of Labour than in 1997. EG 10,000 more police, but actually arrests the same number or a little less. Hospitals and schools were there in 1997 (albeit with more shoddy buildings).

Just saying we'll 'cut spending but more slowly' is no answer atall when the national debt is growing rapidly month on month. Soon it will not be serviceable, with slow growth and IR rises and higher Govt borrowing costs. We are in a vice like grip. The overspend before the crisis was far too high, so when a crisis appears you cannot afford it. Living standards will have to fall back to levels of 20 years ago, then we will recover from there. INFLATION/ THE NATIONAL DEBT/ THE ANNUAL DEFICIT/ THE CUTS / SLOW GROWTH/ FALLING CURRENCY - All these will ensure that whoever is in power cannot currently preserve our standard of living. The bill for this crisis will be paid whether we like it or not.

[fadeaway]

You can't spend your way out of debt.

Cuts are good.

Edited March 25, 2011 by fadeaway

[winkie]

You can't spend your way out of debt.

Cuts are good.

[Dorkins]

Gordon Brown grrrr.

The man also stoked housing booms in Australia, New Zealand, USA, Ireland, most of Eastern Europe etc etc too - was their no end to his evil?

Good thing we had a strong opposition standing against his spending plans at every opportunity and not calling for more deregulation or copying Ireland......

Indeed, the Conservatives shouted long and hard about the dangers of inappropriately low interest rates leading to a bubble in the property market, if only somebody had listened. Thankfully, now that they are in power they are doing everything they can to restore assets to market-clearing prices and ensure that the costs of risk taking are borne by those who chose to take the risks.

[scrappycocco]

To say you want labour back must mean either you've just been born and you can speak already or your just a complete moron. I've lived through bliar's and bs brown's governments and the amount of mistakes in those periods were more than all the mistakes made by all governments that have ever ruled in this country previously. The only genius is they got away with it.

Here is a list of some of brown's gaffs to help and please do try to keep these in mind when you vote again:

Times

June 24, 2009

Gordon Brown's 10 worst financial gaffes

Brown-385_568861a

In 2006, an eloquent Gordon Brown, then Chancellor of the Exchequer said that he was "ready to make the decisions for people and to work with other people to make this country the great country it is at all times." A year later he became Prime Minister, and the rest is history. Here is a list of Gordon's worst financial blunders, the screw-ups which have cost us all dearly and left economists, accountants and the rest of us scratching our heads in disbelief. Vote for Gordon's worst gaffe in the e-Poll below or make your own suggestions in the comment box.

1. Taxing dividend payments

Before 1997, dividends issued by UK companies and paid to pension funds were tax-free - that is, the tax could be claimed back via a system of tax credits. Not any more, decided Brown. Tax relief was scrapped, reducing the amount collected by pension funds by around £5 billion a year. Pension funds holding the cash that you, me and almost everyone else in the country plan to use for our retirement have lost around £100 billion over the last 12 years. That's one hell of a stealth tax.

2. Selling our gold

In May 1999 Gordon Brown had a plan to sell some gold. There were two problems with this, which concerned his economic advisers deeply. The price of gold had slumped after a decade of stagnation, but was likely to increase in the proceeding years. Added to this, the announcement of a major sell-off would drive the price down further. Little of this worried Gordon. Experts believe that the poorly timed decision to flog our national treasure has cost us all around £3 billion. Granted, that doesn't seem much nowadays, but more of that later.

3. Tripartite financial regulation

The system of financial regulation dividing powers between the Treasury, the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority, established by Brown as Chancellor in 2000, missed what amounted to the biggest financial crisis of our lifetime. Whoops. This has led some glass-half-empty commentators to conclude that the system set up by Brown failed and should be replaced. The Commons Treasury Select Committee’s report on the collapse of Northern Rock said that the Financial Services Authority had “systematically failed in its duty” to oversee the troubled bank’s activities. Little did it realise at the time that Northern Rock was the over-leveraged tip of the securitised iceberg.

4. Tax credits

“Gordon Brown claims the tax credits system lifts children out of poverty,” says Simon Blackmore, 38, who was pursued for £6,057 in over-paid tax credits. “Maybe it does, but only to plunge them and their families into debt two years later.” Millions of low-income families have had to pay back the Treasury after receiving too much money in tax credits, putting them under huge financial and emotional strain. Meanwhile, 40 per cent of workers and families who deserved tax credits left billions of pounds unclaimed in the 2008-09 tax year for fear of being chased for the cash later on. Introduced in 1999, reformed in 2000, tax credits have been "a complete disaster zone", according to tax experts.

5. The £10,000 corporation tax threshold

In 2002, Gordon Brown introduced a new tax regime to help small businesses. He announced a new zero per cent rate of corporation tax on profits below £10,000. It was designed to boost the ability of small businesses to grow and prosper. It didn't quite work out this way. It became advantageous for sole traders such as taxi drivers or plumbers to turn themselves into limited companies to take advantage of the new rules. A Treasury Minister later commented that "the Government did not realise how many people would engage in abusive tax avoidance", despite the fact that it was "blindingly obvious" to tax experts "within 5 seconds" of the budget announcement that this would happen. Gordon scrapped the rules a few years later, raising the rate from 0 per cent to 19 per cent when he released how much money was being lost.

6. Abolition of the 10p tax rate

Mr Brown rarely apologises. In fact, he never apologises. But occasionally he acknowledges "mistakes", albeit begrudgingly. Over the abolition of the 10p tax rate in 2007, Mr Brown told Radio 4's Today programme that "we made two mistakes. We didn't cover as well as we should that group of low-paid workers who don't get the working tax credits and we weren't able to help the 60 to 64-year-olds who didn't get the pensioner's tax allowance." Experts use stronger language to describe the Budget of 2007, which was designed to produce positive headlines for the 2p cut in income tax. Accountants calculated that the scrapping of the 10 per cent tax rate, coupled with the increase in the proportion of tax credits withdrawn from higher earners, would leave 1.8 million workers earning between £6,500 and £15,000 paying an effective tax rate of up to 70 per cent.

7. Failing to spot the housing bubble

Gordon Brown said he ended boom and bust, and in those innocent days before the collapse of the global finance system we believed him. In 1997, he outlined his plans. "Stability is necessary for our future economic success", he wisely informed an audience at the CBI. "The British economy of the future must be built not on the shifting sands of boom and bust, but on the bedrock of prudent and wise economic management." The other components of that bedrock including a trillion-pound debt mountain and a decade of unchecked and unparalleled house price inflation presumably slipped his mind. In 2003 a mild-mannered Liberal Democrat MP by the name of Vince Cable dared to question the mantra of "the end of boom and bust". He asked Gordon Brown: "Is it not true that...the growth of the British economy is sustained by consumer spending pinned against record levels of personal debt, which is secured, if at all, against house prices that the Bank of England describes as well above equilibrium level?" Gordon replied: "The Honourable Gentleman has been writing articles in the newspapers, as reflected in his contribution, that spread alarm, without substance, about the state of the economy..." We all know what happened next.

8. 50 per cent tax rate

Robert Chote, director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies, has said the tax hike which heralded the end the new Labour may actually end up losing the Government money. "If you look at what happened when higher rates were last changed in the 1980s, that might lead you to suggest that such a move might actually lose you revenue, rather than gain it, as people actually declare less income for tax," he said.

9. Cutting VAT

"It would be funny if it wasn’t so serious," said a tax accountant when asked about the Brown-Darling brainwave to cut VAT by 2.5 percentage points. As a nation of shoppers, rather than shopkeepers, a chopped down sales tax sounds like a good idea, providing a vital boost to hard-pressed families at a time of financial hardship. There were two problems. It costs £12.5 billion a year and it has made little discernable difference to those hard-pressed families because it is shopkeepers, rather than shoppers, who have pocketed much of the benefit.

10. Public-sector borrowing

If Gordon had only saved a little more in the good times, we might have had a little more to fall back on in the bad, economists sigh. Last month saw public-sector net borrowing hit £19.9 billion, the highest on record, according to the Office for National Statistics. The chancellor of the exchequer, Alistair Darling, has forecast that Government borrowing will reach £175 billion this year. It is forecast that total government debt will double to 79 per cent of GDP by 2013, the highest level since World War 2. Mr Chote recently warned that "the scale of the underlying problem that the Treasury’s detailed forecasts identify will require two full parliaments of mounting austerity to repair.”

[profitofdoom]

Indeed, the Conservatives shouted long and hard about the dangers of inappropriately low interest rates leading to a bubble in the property market, if only somebody had listened. Thankfully, now that they are in power they are doing everything they can to restore assets to market-clearing prices and ensure that the costs of risk taking are borne by those who chose to take the risks.

What like the bankers?

[Democorruptcy]

I think we should vote to have a democracy.

The current system only allows us to have which of the two parties that has won most financing from the financial elites, for promising to let them steal more of our money.

Edited March 25, 2011 by Redhat Sly

[CrashConnoisseur]

600,000 MORE PEOPLE were working in the public sector after 13 years of Labour than in 1997. EG 10,000 more police, but actually arrests the same number or a little less.

The primary objective of good policing should be to deter and prevent crime. So the fewer people who need to be arrested the better. Using the number of arrests made as a measure of police productivity is the same sort of mad managerialism that got us into this mess in the first place (i.e. using the price of a basket of groceries, EasyJet flights, and a pair of Chinese pants to set monetary policy).

Edit: typo.

Edited March 25, 2011 by CrashConnoisseur

[headmelter]

They just seen to be hurting the population rather than helping them, they seem set on pushing more people into benefits pushing more people to not work to see that landlords are getting because there tax will be lower and the population having to pay more tax out of their wages, fiscal drag and pay cuts.

Think we need to start a campaign to get them out of wesminster.

http://blogs.telegra...-in-the-budget/

A daring post on what has become a Tory 'heartland' forum. . . . . .

[Democorruptcy]

A daring post on what has become a Tory 'heartland' forum. . . . . .

Well it is HPC and we did have the bubble under Labour.

Don't worry though, they will soon realise that any government in our kleptocracy is no better than another.

[Guest UK Debt Slave]

and replace them with...?

You took the words right out of my mouth.

[Timak]

You can't spend your way out of debt.

Cuts are good.

You can't cut corporation tax if you are serious about defecit reduction.

The £5b handout to already massively profitable businesses is clearly a sign that defecit reduction is not really the aim.