Should we pay extra tax to fund additional snow protection?

[bobbie]

OK, everyone is going to scream "NOT MORE TAX !!!!" or "tell the chancellor to shove his extra taxes up his......???? "

 

Lets look at this way

 

1p extra in the pound in tax, and so of you earn £300 per week, thats an additional £3 per week, or £156 per year. Sound expensive?

 

Well, if you are someone who does not get paid when you don't get to work, and you cannot get into work for 3 days then if you earn £300 per week (£60 per day), then you lose £180.

 

I accept that an additional 1p in tax does seem a little unacceptable, however surely an additional 1p tax raise would be less of a shock, than suddenly being without wages for a day or 3.

 

If roads were clear, schools would be less likely to shut and so would not cause massive problems for parents, again, especially the ones who do not get paid if they don't work.

 

If this is going to be a regular occurance (what happened to global warming?) then can your average working person be held to ransom by the snow? times are bad enough, I can imagine a few days or weeks without payment this winter will cause serious trouble for many familys

[taxman]

Or they could just divert some of the taxes you already pay towards combating freak weather conditions. Why should they (us) ask for more tax?

[the_rudeboy]

Personally I'd prefer it if the extra 1p you propose went to the NHS.

[User Name:]

Well the government think those who drive big 4X4s have caused these problems with global warming, and, since they pay like a ridiculous amount of road tax, why not use a portion of that road tax to fund faster clear ups etc?

[AlexAtkin]

Why is it whenever something like this comes up its always "should we pay more for x".

 

We pay road tax and yet Sheffield has some of the worst roads in the country for pot holes.

 

We pay council tax and yet now we have to take our own bins down to the road when previously they would collect them.

 

So we get less for our money and charged more, I don't see how it can be rationalised to charge even more still.

[Stormy]

Maybe some of the vast sums of money the government spend on Global Warming mitigation should be diverted to the cause?

[Strix]

OK, everyone is going to scream "NOT MORE TAX !!!!" or "tell the chancellor to shove his extra taxes up his......???? "

 

Lets look at this way

 

1p extra in the pound in tax, and so of you earn £300 per week, thats an additional £3 per week, or £156 per year. Sound expensive?

 

Well, if you are someone who does not get paid when you don't get to work, and you cannot get into work for 3 days then if you earn £300 per week (£60 per day), then you lose £180.

 

I accept that an additional 1p in tax does seem a little unacceptable, however surely an additional 1p tax raise would be less of a shock, than suddenly being without wages for a day or 3.

 

If roads were clear, schools would be less likely to shut and so would not cause massive problems for parents, again, especially the ones who do not get paid if they don't work.

 

If this is going to be a regular occurance (what happened to global warming?) then can your average working person be held to ransom by the snow? times are bad enough, I can imagine a few days or weeks without payment this winter will cause serious trouble for many familys

or you could put 2p in the pound into a savings account for such eventualities

[chem1st]

No not at all, we should just use a bit of common sense.

 

I'd say one of the most important things is to keep public transport running. For 2 days now FIRST has cancelled services then brought some of them back out, ruining peoples plans of going to work, shopping, to visit family friends etc.

 

Not to mention costing many people a lot of money in travel tickets that have not been/could have been used.

 

It can't be that hard to put a program into place perhaps for January onwards whereby an attachment to buses of a vessel to contain and release grit could be used when we have weather like this, they could be stored in the car park at olive grove, which is the location of both the main FIRST bus depot next to the main council grit store. Logistically it would be very easy to put such a program into action very quickly if we had such equipment. As the buses leave the depot they could pop on the attachment and a small crane load them with grit as it passes olive grove. The parts of the routes that haven't already been reached by gritters could be gritted and if there is continual heavy snowfall enough could be applied.

 

We have some 300 buses at that depot that could be utilised in such a manner.

 

As it stands we just have the 19 large gritters, 5 small gritters and a few others we hire.

[ricgem2002]

i dont know how much the government has lost in tax since the snow came down with lost production .imo the government should give the councils up and down the land the extra money for snow clearing programmes .if it costs say 25% of what they would have lost anyway i think 75% of something is better than 100% of nowt.

[Mick Sage]

Personnally I think the enforced three or four days of work now and again helps make up for the low number of bank holidays we have in this country. The snow helps weld families together so a lot of kids benifit from having both parents together and elderly relatives benifit from family contacting them to see if they are ok. Why is it people always concentrate on the negative?