Be Excellent To Each Other

Does clothing tax go straight to the Style Council?

Does MaliA George Osbourne know that John Coffey has some new knives?

It's OK though.. they were "Cut Price". Hohoho.

Money isn't like energy, which can't be created or destroyed, it can only be transformed.
Money is like cake, once you eat it, you don't have cake anymore, and when you have ingredients you can make more cake, but you can't make more cake if the eggs have run out.

Inflation and Recession is like daddy or chips...

Eggs are like fragile rugby balls for The Borrowers.

HTH

Yes, but someone still has to be paid. It doesn't cost any less or any more. World Service is expensive to broadcast. Not as bad as it used to be though since they started shutting down all the Shortwave transmitters. Those are hideously expensive to run. They make the power bill of Radio 4's Long Wave transmitter look tiny.

What's the demarcation of section '1' on that graph, out of interest?

Your Mum.

Didn't know that about the European shortwave transmitters, they switched them off in 2008.
Also "In Sydney, Australia a transmission of the service can be received at 152.025 MHz". WTF?

Sounds like a satellite radio service. Possibly. Like those Worldspace things that flopped.

Your maximum break at snooker.

Another quick diversion: we were talking about Sirius XM at the meet. I'm sure it was claimed that we could get it here now!? You can't though, right? Satellites are in the wrong place surely.

XFM, wasn't it?

If "here" is the USA, then yes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sirius_orbit_Earth.JPG

NB: Although the satellites pass over South America, they orbit in such a way that reception only works reliably over the USA.

Otherwise the only way would be the interwebnet thing.

Sorry dude, I was posting half drowned from a bus shelter after being caught in rain while trying to escape all the budget/cuts pish. I was a wee bit seriously crabbit already* and I've obviously read/taken it wrong
*Some of you can probably guess why, but that's not for here (despite its relevance).

Remember the Poll Tax? Get ready for the Stealth Poll Tax (see 6.30pm update).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010 ... l-security

Didn't shout that one from the rooftops did they? The fucking cunts.

All the severely cunt-ish stuff is all buried in the small print of the Treasury report: http://cdn.hm-treasury.gov.uk/sr2010_completereport.pdf

Why don't they just collect the proper tax from the likes of Lord Ashcroft and Philip Green? My union reckons* that there is £120bn of dodged taxes every year. If you get this money, then you don't have to make any cuts.

Ah, that's right. Ashcroft and Green give the Tories money, don't they?

_{*their figures, not mine.}

Are political donations tax deductible?

Why? Because if you do they go off overseas and you see no tax from them at all. It's pretty elementary.

Good riddance. But how much would we lose compared to how much they dodge? If the rich fucked off (and we've never been able to test the theory that they might, so it remains an empty threat) we'd replace them with new rich very quickly, but at least the millennium-old embedded culture would be usurped.

Being scared of Phillip Green leaving us to our own devices is no way to exist. I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees.

They already do fuck off (That's generally how they go about dodging tax in the first place) - it would just lower the band required to make it sufficiently attractive.

As for whether it's a good idea - It's rather telling that in 13 years of knowing what went on, Labour did nothing to stop it.

The simple answer is that if you manage to get the richest 10% or so out, you wave goodbye to over half the tax paid. That's not really good for the economy. Get rid of the richest 1%, goodbye 22% of tax. (Source: http://www.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/ ... -pay.thtml)

Also, force them to move out of the country.. and they take the jobs they provide elsewhere. Cue even more economic damage.

Basically, It's a really shit idea.

Why as a country do we care so much about other countries. Why are we cutting stuff that affects people here, whilst also increasing overseas spending by 37%?

I am actually scared by what the current government is doing. I might not have agreed with all of Labour's actions, but at least I felt financially safe.

37% of overseas spending is 37% of fuck all. Considering the amount of damage we do abroad, the fucking least we should be doing is maintaining foreign aid.

Well said Dave. The politics of envy will indeed do nothing but yet further damage as you say - we need GENUINE wealth creators, now more than ever (i.e. non-bankers). How else are we to expect the much longed for Private Sector led recovery? That's not going to come from people working for councils, schools etc., as important as many of these jobs undoubtably are. And the (very large) tax breaks and incentives required to stimulate said wealth creation and entrepreneurial activity, given that we were so highly taxed under Labour and their leaving fuck all in the pot, are simply going to have to be paid for via these huge public spending cuts that are well, well overdue.

Talking of cuts and Philip Green, let's hope that the Libcons have the good sense and courage to genuinely reform the public sector as well as cut it back, with the elimination of the type of catastrophic waste and appallingly bad business practices that Mr Green himself identified in his cursory glance at the current laughable situation, which has been given succor for so long under Labour. Who knows? If we do this, we might, at last, finally get more 'bangs per buck' and actually get decent public services for vastly less investment! (Yup, I'm an optimist, but here's hoping the Tories stick to their small state, low tax, good business mantra).

"Charity begins at home"?

I'm a wealth creator. I work all bloody week creating wealth, and earning valuable foreign currency and evening out our trade defecit with our overseas clients. Where's my bloody tax cuts and incentives?

I don't know if it still does, but wasn't a lot of that overseas aid fairly "strings attached"? "Here, have a interest free loan to buy some tools from a British company! Pay us back when you can!" kind of stuff?

We make a fucking fortune out of our overseas 'aid' loans. There's a reason why the vast majority of it goes to India.

Very true mate, I despise and loathe the banks, and bankers in general, more intensely that you could possibly imagine.

However, as we've previously discussed, what the banks did, and were allowed to do through inept/flawed regulation or the complete lack thereof (itself a product of inept, useless, unsavvy government, whose prime responsibility it was to properly regulate said banks), in fact I would argue were actively encouraged to do by the Labour government, was not Capitalism, any more that some well dodgy geezer selling cut-and-shut cars made from two welded, stolen halves is 'Capitalism' or commerce. It's fraud.

And who do we have for a PM? A blue-blooded twat from a family of bankers.

True enough, mate - let's hope he has the mental capacity to learn from very recent history and dig deep into the wisdom and political soul of his Party to get us all out of this horrific mess, even if he himself has very little of either? Like I said, I am an optimist.

Besides, I'll take him - in fact pretty much anyone - over that stammering, gurning, singularly useless moron, Broon. He just cannot fare any worse than him or his Party; we must all surely agree on that score.

(I must say, the sight of Alan Johnson as the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Commons yesterday was a simply breathtaking sight, for me at least, and not at all in a good way).

Seems to me that the countries most quickly and securely out of recession are the ones who maintained a large manufacturing base. Where did ours go?

That would be the non-domiciled Lord Ashcroft of Belize, would it not? And, IIRC, Green is based in Monaco.

We're all in this together, remember?

Maybe, but Iceland (and previously the likes of Argentina) have avoided the worst of this current crash by telling the banks and their creditors to fuck off.

Ireland (you know, that one that George Osborne et al were using as an example not four months ago) steadfastly refuse to do so, resulting in an economy that is being strangled and the obscenity that is the Irish taxpayer funding the wages of Frank Lampard and John Terry.

A: New Labour halved our manufacturing output as compared to GDP, from 1997 to 2010.

Of course, manufacturing shrank under the preceding Tory administration also - but to nowhere near the same extent, over a much, much longer timeframe, and they at least did everything they reasonably could to stimulate good manufacturing, including tax breaks for foreign investment, most notably car manufacturers. (Thatcher spoke volumes about the 'Great Car Economy' at the time).

It should be noted also that in the case of the Tories in '79, they also had to deal with 'beyond any repair or redemption', Labour Nationalised, Union-infested disasters as part of their shrinkage - unlike New Labour in 1997.

Labour's view was that we didn't need horrible, oily old manufacturing - the banking sector was our saviour, as frequently spouted by 'Boom and Bust' Broon during his various Mansion House speeches whilst Chancellor. Shit, he even used to mock Germany for their 'poor growth rates' as compared to the UK's, based on mere manufacturing as they were, so 20th Century! Who needs a diverse economy, eh?

Like I said, Labour pretty much got nothing right and everything wrong as a government, and we are where we are very much as a result of their inept stewardship of the Country, its economy and armed forces.

Does anyone else have the mental image of Cavey typing, slamming his hands down on the keyboard from a start point way in the air, foaming at the mouth, whenever a post calls for the words 'New Labour'?

Yes, me.

Me.

Harumph! Don't be so bloody ridiculous. I've never even met Ann Diamond.

No, but it's fun setting you off.

Ah, you obviously missed the joke, there.

Your mum missed the joke.

Anyway, from JMcDonladScot's twitter:



I'd live to see the actual workings behind that one.

/edit Oh, I see. Well that's pretty stright forward then.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11593370

You don't remember, old bean.

Off Ann Diamond's back? Like he'd be snorting it off her back!

Heh, my mum, eh...?

Mind you, although you missed the punchline by a country mile, I do now see what you were lamely getting at. It really is quite good fun setting you off, as you say.

Meh, I'm glad you, Kalmar and Squirt got the joke at least.

I saw what you did there, if that's what you mean, I just wouldn't have gone so far as to call it a joke