The 2010 Emergency Budget thread

[Guest sibon]

How about this for a 'cunning scheme scam'?

 

You send me £30 a week, every week for 40 years, pass this e-mail on to 20 other people and get them to do the same. I will pay you and them £150 a week every week after you (and they) are 65. (They should also each send the letter on to 20 other people.)

 

I will use the money for my immediate good.

 

Whatever you do DON'T BREAK THE CHAIN. If you do, the tooth fairy will come along and pull all your teeth out.

 

Try a trick like that and you'll probably do time ... unless, of course, you're the government. The chain may well break - either because people live for too long or because some people take out money early or because some people take out money without putting any in.

 

If you're the government nobody will come after you - if you're lucky, you'll be long gone before the chickens come home to roost. It will be somebody else's problem.

 

 

If you don't want to do that, simply mail the cash directly to the trousers of the nearest bank executive. Label it clearly with the word "bonus"

 

In return, you will receive a letter once a year telling you that you are skint and have no hope of retirement.

 

Do you have a better plan Rupert?

[artisan]

The jealousy being shown by people unfortunate enough to work in the private sector is astonishing.

It is blinding their eyes to the true enemy.

Your enemy gentlemen, is that man sitting in 10 Downing St.

Can you not see what he is doing?

It might be public sector now, but tomorrow it will be you.

You are worthless in his eyes.

He is not another avuncular McMillan, or even a misguided insane idealist like Thatcher.

He is a cynical opportunist, with no morals, out for the main chance.

He is about as patriotic as Abu Hamza.

[Twiglet]

I haven't seen much in the way of complaint about the two year public sector pay freeze. It seems reasonable enough to me.

 

I do wonder whether we will get to share in the spoils of the good times though.

 

None of us are complaining about the pay freeze. Being told that 25-30% of us are going to lose our jobs, however...

 

I think there is also a public naivety about exactly what the 'public sector' constitutes and how far reacing this is.

[andyofborg]

The jealousy being shown by people unfortunate enough to work in the private sector is astonishing.

It is blinding their eyes to the true enemy.

Your enemy gentlemen, is that man sitting in 10 Downing St.

Can you not see what he is doing?

It might be public sector now, but tomorrow it will be you.

You are worthless in his eyes.

He is not another avuncular McMillan, or even a misguided insane idealist like Thatcher.

He is a cynical opportunist, with no morals, out for the main chance.

He is about as patriotic as Abu Hamza.

 

who's jealous? and i'm certainly not unfortunate

 

i think i'm quite aware who my true enemy is, comrade

[artisan]

who's jealous? and i'm certainly not unfortunate

 

i think i'm quite aware who my true enemy is, comrade

 

I really dont think you are aware at all.

You are just reacting to your conditioning.

I wasnt aware that you were a comrade BTW.

[Wildcat]

the private sector coped before we had a public sector.....

 

you mean in Victorian england? Do you really want to go back to the grotty exploited existence we had then?

 

it was perhaps a poor choice of words, but the point that public sector wages are paid by private sector workers is quite valid.

 

That is only valid in the sense that there needs to be an equitable balance between public and private sectors. The public sector provides the infrastructure which nurtures a society in which private sector businesses and employees can make money and thrive. You don't get one without the other.

 

the private sector workforce has been through the downsizing/no-pay-rise machine and grinned and born it. if the public sector worker is an "average working person" then its time for them to do the same.

 

The problem with that argument is that the private sector has lost, what a million jobs? out of how many 20 million maybe? I think the loss in gdp was about 10% for a year so maybe the private sector lost 1 in 10 jobs last year at the height of the recession the average private sector pay deal was 2%. The Civil Service has lost 20% of its jobs in the last 5 years, where I work our pay deal has been average 1% for the last 3 years and across the public sector last year the average pay deal was half that of the private sector.

 

It is not time for the public sector to grin and bear austerity measures like we have somehow been insulated from them, because we have been suffering them longer and harder than anyone else.

[Wildcat]

None of us are complaining about the pay freeze.

 

I am....

 

and the break from the index linking to RPI in our pensions, not least because it is imho an obvious illegal breach of contract.

[Anna B]

Do you not realise you are being manipulated into this argument by the media?

 

It's the old 'divide and conquer' tactic.

 

First the working man versus the unemployed thanks to ridiculous propoganda stories in the tabloids, now it's public verses private sector, again stirred up by the newspapers.

How many of you have actually checked the 'facts' out for themselves?

 

All this is designed to deflect the blame from those who really deserve it. The banks, the super rich and the politicians.

 

You're also being fed the line that 'we're all in this together'

We're not.

and

'We're all to blame for the current crisis'

We're not.

But everytime these are repeated and go unchallenged it seeps into our consciousness as a fact.

[Wildcat]

You do talk tripe. Gordon Brown was nicking £5 billion a year out of private pension sector pensions not putting it in.

 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/money/pensions/article1593939.ece

 

Gordon Brown defied repeated warnings from his own officials about the potentially devastating impact of his £5 billion-a-year raid on pension funds and went ahead with it regardless, The Times can reveal.

 

Pensions campaigners described the revelations — the result of a two year battle by The Times — as an absolute disgrace, and said that it showed the Chancellor “knowingly set about destroying” Britain’s pensions system.

 

What has any of that to do with my explanation of what happens to employee contributions to public sector pension schemes? If I talk tripe, what do you think happens to them? (clue the answer will have nothing to do with Gordon Brown or pension raids).

 

On the "pension raid" the reality is again different from your view.

 

He took away some tax relief on dividends, before and after then employers were taking far bigger pension holidays than the reduction in the revenue removing the tax breaks raised. So A) he didn't nick money from your pensions he withdrew some subsidy, paid for out of general taxation and public sector pension contributions. B) the reason many private sector pensions collapsed was the pension holidays being taken by employers.

 

The Times is also wrong on Gordon Brown being warned it would be devastating, he did receive some negative advice but he was also told it would stimulate the economy and considering there was a surplus in pension funds and employers were taking holidays. There wasn't much to be concerned about, apart from a collapse in share prices which can be criticised but only with the benefit of hindsight. It is not like the pension fund managers forsaw it, otherwise one would presume they would not have been taking contribution holidays. Also, the original idea for reducing the relief on dividends was none other than David Cameron's when he worked for Norman Lamont.

[Tony]

Except that it wasn't Gordon's money to steal.