Balls asks the correct question in the face of the United Kingdom having the highest tax burden in its history.
So what? when only the little people pay tax. So what? when work is not so much a productive activity, but increasingly a therapeutic, life-style accessory provided as a pastime for the unemployed and unemployable clients of the New Labour regime. So what? when a system of the poor servicing the poor within a closed system of low-level regime-provision has been cemented into place, and any wealth produced serendipitously is siphoned off by consumption tax farming.
Children are unhappier and worse educated than any of their European peers, hospital treatment is delayed and often offered in filthy and dangerous conditions, the elderly must beg for 'allowances' and 'special payments' (and the fuel allowance increase is for one year only) with their taxes doubled from 10 to 20%, and their pensions stolen over the last 11 years of New Labour; and in the name of 'battling' climate change, everyone's cheap holidays are moved out of reach or blighted by inflicted chaos in travel arrangements in the name of yet another 'war'; while on the real battlefronts of the regime's illegal wars, troops are maimed and die for New Labour's refusal to fund their equipment.
So What? when the permanent, managed democracy is yielding power and wealth to its monopolists, living their dream in a separate fiscal world of life-costs paid as expenses, and privatised riches created by the sale and exchange of state power.
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'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free'
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- Axel Leijonhufvud
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2008
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March
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- Basra
- Who Rules England?
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- New Labour Old Enemies
- Someone, Anyone, Teach Him Some Manners
- Why Are British Troops at Basra Airport?
- Nuclear Expansion Offers Mutant Production Efficie...
- Acts of Union to be Disturbed
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- In Heart and Conscience Free
- Jubilate
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- Bought But Not Paid For
- The Clinton Rush on the Ultimate
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- The Aristocracy of Labour
- Merit and Choice
- Do They Have to Have GCSE English?
- Managing Local Democracy
- Another Day, Another Run
- Two for the Price of One.
- Are We Nearly There Yet?
- Freedom of Conscience
- So What?
- Laffable
- All Things Bright and Beautiful
- A Tissue of Lies
- What Governance Is This?
- Angels Slightly Foxed
- Golden Slumbers
- Bestialising Humanity
- Just for England
- Then As Now
- Scotland may prefer not to be dragged into the Eu...
- Slithy Toves
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March
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Fallen Angels
- David Cameron (for risking the disorderly dissolution of the Euro)
- Giorgio Napolitano (for stance on Budapest 1956: Prague 1968: Italy 2013)
- Mervyn King (for bailing-out Northern Rock)
- Nicholas Kaldor (for inventing VAT)
10 comments:
Your prose style is on a roll. I was particularly struck by "...any wealth produced serendipitously is siphoned off by consumption tax farming."
I am confined to the building with a big bad cold, S, so watching the disgraceful 2008 budget speech was inflammatory.
Looking from time to time - just looking - doesn't give a real taste of how far the Project has come. So blatant is the misrepresentation and so low-grade its practitioners, and so scary what might happen, I am quite frightened, rather than merely dismayed.
In the late 80's Russia's state almost failed; life expectancy fell by some 10 years. What is going to happen to the undefended, the old, the very young (I have very little sympathy for adults making lives out of morally hazardous qualification for benefits), and for the social peace we have lived in all or lives, (though damaged by the drug grey-governance), when there can be no more benefit-living because that regime has collapsed, as it did in the East?
Head down, store-cupboards full, wealth in cash and a fall back plan seem quite reasonable now. Being caught in an authoritarian time warp has the amelioration that coping strategies are known and tested.
Your view that there is more than one kind of retreat appealed too; the inside of one's head, furnished over the years, is a delightful and defended place.
Must take temperature and aspirin, not make list of all offensive policies being perpetrated by the junta.
HG,
You wrote
"Looking from time to time - just looking - doesn't give a real taste of how far the Project has come. So blatant is the misrepresentation and so low-grade its practitioners, and so scary what might happen, I am quite frightened, rather than merely dismayed."
This is what I was thinking of when talking about blizzard of legislation being pushed through at the moment, much of it very scary and none of it being opposed. Parliament is now no more than a rubber stamp.
Big hairy bollocks to the junta, may they rot in their Calvinist hell. And why not treat yourself to a hot whisky (or preferably, in this case, whiskey), lemon and honey. A good one of those, and however cold-ridden, I find, I fall mildly cross-eyed into bed.
At a later date, I will present Port and Brandy as a medicine, and when to use it.
They have enabling acts, not highly specified but conferring immense potential powers, and then they just have Orders for running the country without the inconvenience of asking us.
The anti EU feeling is all very well founded, but looking closer to home for authoritarian practice and no redress might be a better undertaking.
I have put in a request for the whiskey and honey, Elby, and it's on its way. Should I start on the brandy tonight?
Also looking at data on what happened when the state defaulted, which can happen more easily than is thought; what feels like a lot of fat in England could be whisked away in an electronic blink.
We are in the hands of naive and ignorant incompetents, much worse than being in the hands of Evil.
Camerons's argument is definitely weak regardless of what Balls said - tax was higher as % of GDP under Mrs Thatcher - look at the fiscal aggregates table on the Institute of Fiscal Studies website if you don't believe me.
http://www.ifs.org.uk/ff/indexagg.php
HG, Think I may have posted Ed Balls website address to your Freedom Of Conscience post (and quite so, New Labour would seem to be entirely without conscience). If so, here it is again, and he wants to hear from us all
http://www.edballs.com/index.jsp?c=/p/feedback/
Brandy WITH Port only if you get a tummy upset. Another medicinal use of hard liquor from my father, an expert in the subject :-)
Thank you for the abuse address, E.
I'm having a g&t (it being after 6 and feeling better after your whiskey and honey remedy), while I gloat over the contents of my jewellery box.
Fancy selling off all that gold at $276 an ounce. Every woman in England knew he had it wrong.
Hats,
That is a marvellous summing up of a crisis. I'm always at a loss as to how to denigrate the awful 'political' people who sponge off us - most of them are Ed Balls at the moment...
Sorry to hear you have that cold. It really is a bugger this one, and Mrs S and I sniffed buckets a while back, and she still has a very sexy voice from the chesty bit...
Hope you feel better soon eh?
Colds are unbearable, Scroblene, no-one wants to know you, you know you're going to die, and no-one believes you.
Better than yesterday though, and I have Elby's father's patent knock out drops (large glass) to look forward to.
'look at the fiscal aggregates table on the Institute of Fiscal Studies website if you don't believe me.'
Fact Checker, this is not the first time you have offered comments, under various names.
We do not impute an unwillingness to give credence to what we say to our interlocutor. Not unless we are Gordon Brown who has problems with pragmatic grasp.
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