That's all this bunch of sociopaths do.

nt

Cameron's first loyalty is to his own class, and his chums in the Square Mile, or "Britain", as he likes to refer to it (eg. "a Robin Hood tax would not be in the interests of Britain".)

Doubt it.

Time to sell Big Ben et al to the highest bidder; if its not already private property

Just whats needed, more trickle down corporate welfare.

Yep, thats worked well around the world so far.

...and Bush's tax cuts for 10.

Both were suppose to stimulate economic growth by allowing the 1 percenters to "reinvest" in the USA. It didn't work as they did not uphold their part of the bargain. They took their newfound swag and went overseas.

But GOPers and conservatives still cling to that canard...

hiring directly themselves from their tax revenues.

Same as in this country. Austerity is all about keeping people in a perpetual trap of poverty and fear of going into poverty. Its time for the people of the world to Unite and work together to make sure that every human being has the right to work, the right to humane working conditions, a right to a fair and living wage, a right to organize, a right to education, a right to health care (without fear of bankruptcy or being in a poor country that doesn't have access to modern technologies, a right to religious freedom or freedom from religion....

Its time for the 99% of the 7 billion in this world to assert their rights.... The very wealthy who have perverted govts, stolen money, stolen rights, stolen peace and happiness, stolen countless lives in various manners, to lose their power and self-entitled influence over the rest of our lives because they are greedy selfish bastards.

Power does not concede willingly. We have to take it. We have to work together. We have to move out of the past and be willing to step into the future. AND we have to be nicer to one another. All in all, we need empathy, compassion, education, individual empowerment, freedom, time, healthy communities at local levels, and the ability to freely communicate with one another.

It doesn't seem to be bringing in much revenue, though.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/consumertips/tax/9097219/50p-tax-rate-failing-to-boost-revenues.html

This piece argues against it, but thinks it will raise more revenue:
http://www.moneyweek.com/blog/does-the-50p-tax-rate-work-we-wont-know-for-five-years-57622

that the wealthy are exploiting and or does it involve having unreported offshore bank accounts in other countries?

The one which nobody could deal with is if some are purposely not paying themselves over the the limit at which 50% is payable but simply either leaving in their companies to be paid at a later date as dividends , interest payments, bonuses whatever and/or increasing what they pay into pensions schemes. 50% is only payable on the marginal rate above £150000 anyway and that's after personal allowances

For our rates etc here see - Income Tax rates and allowances : http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/rates/it.htm

The significance of dividends and interest payments is that those are not subject to additional NH payments by either the company or the employee. In the associated issue of funding our NHS - more funds are needed but increasing the rates payable by companies becomes counterproductive because it acts an a disincentive for them to employ more people and increasing the rates for employees is seen as stealth tax.

and almost always businesses can structure their revenue to avoid such a rate.

One of the reasons why tax rates and revenue from tax rates tend to diverge (as tax rates go up the rate of additional revenue gained from an increase in tax rates goes down) is because it becomes economically profitable to do things that generate less total income but more of total income to taxpayer over time.

Tax shelters used to be huge business in the US when we had higher marginal personal income tax revenues.

The cabal of right-wing men that owns most of the British press are all in favour of bailouts for the super-rich and austerity for the rest of us.

The fall in collected revenues from January is not political spin, but treasury receipts.

Those who make salaries above 150,000 pounds are going to be paying that tax, but it does appear that the tax isn't going to generate as much new revenue as projected and it's a good guess that some higher earners will ask for other benefits in lieu of higher wages due to this tax.

Look, in the US most people with substantial wealth end up with a lot of money in no-AMT munis. They get less revenue, but they keep more revenue than they would otherwise.

That's just a fact of life. The argument for no-AMT municipal bonds is that it cuts the cost of funding to local governments. That's true. But it also hugely drops income tax revenues from wealthy people.

In principle, it's no different than people buying stuff from Amazon to avoid CA sales taxes. We all do this. If gas is cheaper on one side of the state line and we travel across that state line, we buy our gas on the cheap side.

As long as there are Suckers out there why not?

And all the 1% along with them, eh?

mmmm.... maybe not....

They really think we're all idiots who don't know anything about the Robber-Barons they protect, eh?

.

Ignoring the one offs I can only assume our children should aspire to be either pro footballers or chartered accountants.

AND for any war Her Majesty's Government chooses to start or join.

There will ALWAYS be money for the like of that.

I love the splendor, the pageantry, the tradition. I love the Household Cavalry and the Blues and Royals, the gallantry and all those horses. I love all of it. No other country can match what we do.

The Queen is almost 86 and still carries out her duty. Just last month she was riding a Fell Pony! I love the Queen. I admire the Queen. Prince William is right now on duty in the Falklands protecting peaceful British people from potential invaders. He flies a helicopter in very dangerous situations and has saved peoples lives.

It is money well spent and I am not alone in this thinking. Ever noticed the crowds of people enjoying and taking it all in?

The Royals are not the ones who are fit and able yet are expecting unearned benefits so they continue their questionable lifestyles.

Long live the Queen!

continue their questionable lifestyles"?

Did you manage to write that with a straight face?

Think of how much better things will be when the UK adopts the privatization of your health insurance like here in the U.S. It has worked out oh so well for our economy and the working/not working poor of the U.S.

Sarcasm, just in case someone thinks I am crazy. If you don't let people know you are being sarcastic...

And how is the private sector going to provide money and jobs, when thanks to all the cuts on top of a recession, most people don't have money to pay for private goods and services?

'The British Government has run out of money because all the money was spent in the good years'

No. Britain has financial problems, like much of the world, because of the irresponsibility of the banks and financial institutions. And Britain was more vulnerable to the recession than some countries, because Thatcher et al undermined and practically destroyed British industry and put most of our eggs in the one basket of finance, and New Labour did not reverse the policy.

which indicate that the UK banks borrow a lot of money from abroad; but they then lend it out again. This is a reflection of how big the banking sector is in the UK, which makes us vulnerable to another worldwide banking collapse, which is not good. But it doesn't actually tell us anything about UK government finances.

Either you have to tell the Arabs and South and Southeast Asians that they can't have their money back or the private bank debts become public debts.

Indeed, hasn't that happened to some extent with RBS and Lloyds?

and it seems a rather provocative way of putting it.

However, Ireland did indeed make the bank debts public ones; while Iceland did not, so the banks went bankrupt. Both have suffered, but Iceland is recovering, while Ireland is not.

RBS is majority state-owned, and there's a large state shareholding in Lloyds; if they went bankrupt, the state would lose the money it injected. It wouldn't necessarily mean all the banks' debts would have to be paid by the state; but, with finance the only significant commercial sector that has a positive balance of payments for the UK, I expect any UK government will seriously consider paying a lot, just to keep the sector going.

In the late '70s and early '80s the countries selling oil and receiving payment in dollars deposited these "petrodollars" in US banks, which then lent them out. One of the places that they lent them to was Latin America, although other developing economies were also part of this flow.

After the Latin America debt crisis (Brady bond and all that), the recycling of dollar surpluses was directed more to the "Eurodollar" market in London. This substantially increased the financial industry in the UK.

The US is running about $600 billion per year in trade deficit. Some of these are recycled back as investments in US government or sponsored bonds, securities, and foreign direct investment. But lots of them are also invested via dollar denominated accounts in off shore banks, of which London is a primary financial market.

So London's banks are in the business of gathering deposits from countries that are running trade surpluses and investing them in countries that are not.

The share of eurodollar deposits in London was increasing sharply as well as the amount. It is no doubt much larger now.

http://www.bis.org/publ/qtrpdf/r_qt0409g.pdf

that "were placed in banks in London"; which doesn't tell us anything about how much is "Arabs and South and Southeast Asians". It's also only about 20% of the roughly $8.6 trillion that the gross external debt/capita figure gives us.

Although it would help if we could offload the Olympics onto Paris.

And the government does not get paid?

more that receipts match expenditure.

He has an estimated fortune of about 4 million quid, and stands to inherit a lot more in the future.

But no, he will not apply austerity measures to himself!

It's unfortunate that the Brits were so down on the mildly right-center version of what the Labor Party had become under Blair that they ended up electing a supply-sider at precisely the moment they needed a classical Keynesian.

Labour had 13 years in power and by the end they were out of touch and out of ideas.

Same as the Tories in the 1990's really.

When you think about how unpopular Labour and Gordon Brown were in 2010 you realize that the Tories should really have won an overall majority, but they ran what was actually quite a poor campaign and only scraped in with the help of the Liberal Democrats.

I do not think that a Tory government can EVER be needed or a good thing - especially not at the time of a recession.

Or let's rephrase: I don't think that ideological anti-public-services economic-right government can EVER be needed or a good thing (it is not a 'pure' party issue, as some Labourites as well as LibDems hold such attitudes, and a few Tories, especially at the time of the 'postwar consensus, did not).

'Labour had 13 years in power and by the end they were out of touch and out of ideas'

Actually I think the problem was more from the very beginning - that Labour under Tony Blair was not really Labour! It improved a bit under Brown (I always say that Labour was in power for 3 years, not 13); but (a) the global recession struck; (b) Brown didn't really have the personality to be a popular leader.

good." It may work in isolation in specific election cycles. But in the big picture it essentially proclaims that the conservatives are right while denying the public an electable progressive alternative. And the damage to the body politic is much more longer lasting.

I don't think there is any way around the fact that by 2010 Labour had become very unpopular with a wide range of people for a wide range of reasons.

though I think the rot was in the roots the moment Blair took office.

I was debating more with the idea that 'politicians need to be changed', which implied to me that Labour's replacement by the Tories might have been a good thing. I think that politicians themselves do need to be changed - i.e. I believe in term limits, at least at the top; but I think that changing from left to right (or actually in this case from centre-right to pretty far-right) was a bloody disaster, especially at the time of a recession. I just hope the country can recover from it.

Though it's not just a party issue. Part of the problem with this country over the last few decades has been that all parties have been led to the right by their leaders at crucial times. First Thatcher moved the Tories to the right, leading to the disaster known as Thatcherism, from which we still haven't recovered. Then Blair moved Labour to the right, which was one of the main reasons why we didn't ever really recover from Thatcherism. Then Clegg and the LibDems moved to the right and sold their souls to Cameron, helping to usher in the current mess.

I sometimes think that if there were an independent single-member party, its leader would manage to drag it to the right.

And that can be changed.

His forays into public office would be interesting to say the least... I'd watch the debates for sure.

a bunch o' bloody bullshit that...wait, 'ang on a minute...where the hell am I?"

George Osborne!

The Tories have been in power for the past couple of years and it's gone downhill!

Ask her for a couple o' quid see what she says is the same as she tells ol' Phil.