What will the next raft of cuts be?

[PeteMorris]

I just wonder why the Conservatives are so afraid to tell us where they propose to find all the billions they seem to be able to pull out of their posterior, with no clue where it's coming from. Or at least not give Joe Public any clue.

 

I guess if they come clean, then they know they won't have a cat in hells chance of getting in government. But if they keep us guessing and 'do' get back in, we'll have the mantra about being democratically elected to slash spending on this that and the other. It's the will of the people....blah blah.

 

I don't trust Cameron as far as I could throw him, and that's definitely not as far as I'd like to.

 

As for the tories making a law not to increase VAT or income tax..et-al.....Who do they think they are kidding?....It's complete nonsense....They'll either repeal the law when and if they need to, or simply not do it anyway....I never heard such waffle

Edited April 30, 2015 by PeteMorris

[Detetcive]

Seeing as the Conservative party won't deign to tell us, what do you think the next round of cuts will be?

 

They want to save £12 billion so the cuts are going to be harsh. That's why they daren't tell us what they're going to do.

 

Personally, I think child benefit will cop it, and once again the poor and unemployed will be screwed until the pips squeak, (is there really any more they can squeeze out of them?) Carers allowance will probably be means tested, and pensioners perks will go.

 

What you can bet on, is they will be hidden in the small print or somehow be spun as 'helping us.'

 

Yes. Child benefit will be cut and, because Tories are ideologically opposed to the existence of socialised health care and other public services, you can bet that those will be high on the list as well.

 

The Tories have got to go and I think they will . There is no combination of parties that can realisticially get Cameron back into number 10.

[max]

How do you make cuts without hurting the people who recieve the vast majority of public spending? Child spending is well overdue to be abolished. There should be no incentive for feckless breeding in an already vastly overpopulated country like the United Kingdom.

 

The people who receive the vast majority of public spending via benefits are the landlords who receive billions in benefits payments via housing credits and the employers who save billions by the public purse, in the form of working tax credits, picking up the tab for their low wages.

 

Then there are all the private companies who are receiving billions from the public purse in the form of government contracts.

 

But no, the Tories will target their cuts against the people least likely to be able to replace their income in any other way.

[hyper]

But who caused the economic boom that preceded it?

I reckon a combination of

- Banks - greedy selling products that generated bonuses for all their staff

- FSA - for saying nothing, no warnings of might ensue

- Bank of England, again for saying nothing

- Brown's treasury, again for saying nothing, but maybe more for encouraging the boom and courting public approval

- Us, with our new cars, multi-year Caribbean holidays and 4 bedroom detached houses, mortgaged to the top to fund everything else

[Anna B]

But who caused the economic boom that preceded it?

 

There never was a real economic boom before the crash, that's the point. It was all 'funny money' and credit, figures on a computer screen etc. simply to allow the bankers to get huge bonuses. They couldn't push money out fast enough. The politicians knew it, but it made them and their econmy look good so they allowed it to continue, hoping the bubble would never burst (at least not on their watch.)

 

Then it did. And the blame was passed around. And onto us poor saps who really had no idea about the complex machinations of the banking system, so had no option but to believe what they said.

 

And so it continues. Quantative easing has taken over and kept us afloat. We still manufacture very little, we celebrate because the economy has grown by tiny decimal points and could reverse any time. The debt has doubled during the Conservative's tenure and is now at £1.5 Trillion. Interest rates are still at rock bottom and have to stay there or everything will go bang. This affects pensions, etc, but even that is blamed on us for 'living longer.'

 

Hope that helps. Stop believing what you're fed and do some research and you'll be amazed at what you find out.

[PeteMorris]

I reckon a combination of

- Banks - greedy selling products that generated bonuses for all their staff

- FSA - for saying nothing, no warnings of might ensue

- Bank of England, again for saying nothing

- Brown's treasury, again for saying nothing, but maybe more for encouraging the boom and courting public approval

- Us, with our new cars, multi-year Caribbean holidays and 4 bedroom detached houses, mortgaged to the top to fund everything else

 

What's this 'us' thing? I don't have a single one of those, and never have!

[hyper]

What's this 'us' thing? I don't have a single one of those, and never have!

the general populous. I have no intention of making 2 columns of 60 million people saying who did and didn't max their credit to the limit. Sorry if it disappoints

[Anna B]

That's been ongoing for a while now, Anna. Whilever the banks and the City do well (-again), so does the Treasury.

 

But beware the Laffer Cruve (to which banks and large-scale financiers of all ilks will be more immediately-sensitive than most), it risks producing more casualties than just HSBC (which, as casualties go, would be prove a fair bit more than 'sizeable' to the Treasury).

 

Yes, that's worked really well for Hollande and is working similarly really well for Tsipras. The super rich don't care much for politics and/or the hoi-poloi, Anna...they just move assets (and/or taxable liabilities) once taxation becomes too heavy/burdensome.

 

Unless you were thinking of confiscatory measures? In which case you might as well kiss good-bye to the £bns' worth of tax revenue from the said banks, City and Brit-based 'super rich', turning the UK into a financial pariah overnight. Like any Gvt (of any colour, coalition'd up or not) would ever let that happen.

 

Next bright idea, please?

 

So basically you're saying that the bankers and the super-rich are unrouchable, while the poorest are hounded out of existence?

 

You are probably right. But what does that say about the world we live in?

 

I hope they remember what happened to Marie Antoinette.

[L00b]

What's this 'us' thing? I don't have a single one of those, and never have!

You're not a statistically-representative sample

 

I have several of these things, and am far from being 'mortgaged to the top': equity in our house at 60+% by now, no other loan, credit or liability of any sort.

 

Many bankers have long kept asking me (one even dared to propose me an interest-only mortgage at 12x salary multiple back in the day...I kid you not!) and still regularly do. I have equally long told them all to go jump.

 

So I'm as statistically-representative a sample as you, i.e. not

So basically you're saying that the bankers and the super-rich are unrouchable, while the poorest are hounded out of existence?

No.

 

I'm reminding you that the Gvt is currently extracting its stipend from these sorts, with an uplift since 2010, and reminding you also that the capacity to increase that stipend is finite because, like it or not, we in the UK don't live in an international vacuum: the UK has no choice but to compete with the rest of the world to keep these revenue-generating and tax-paying sorts here. And the rest of the world has been wanting them bad since end 2007, and worse since.

 

It says nothing about the world we live in, because the Laffer Curve is an elementary principle (as elementary as greed is a human trait) that has existed ever since man invented taxes.

Edited April 30, 2015 by L00b

[Glennis]

How do you make cuts without hurting the people who recieve the vast majority of public spending? Child spending is well overdue to be abolished. There should be no incentive for feckless breeding in an already vastly overpopulated country like the United Kingdom.

 

I think its the bankers that have done the worst of the feckless spending, we are all having the pay the price of their greed.

 

---------- Post added 30-04-2015 at 14:11 ----------

 

But who caused the economic boom that preceded it?

 

Was there one? If so when did it happen? I must have missed it!