Soldato
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So it's a bad policy because it's what the majority of people want?
Poll: Darling announces one-off shock tax to 'break bonus culture'
- Thread starter Naffa
- Start date
The banks are not "the upper classes"; they're upper middle class at the very most. Darling's proposal will affect people with huge salaries in the finance industry. It will not affect the upper classes.
If Darling wanted to attack the upper classes, he'd triple inheritance tax and make it automatically binding on anyone with a title, regardless of the value of their estate.
Its not the bankers fault, its labour its policies and rest of the MPs.
The immigration policy combined with the lack of social home building were the catalyst for this mess, increasing home values, lead people to take more risk, lead people MEW there homes, cheap chinese importing deflation to counter balance internal inflation.
The increase in in non productive public sector workers, the PFI, quangos the polictical correctness that lead to more quangos, run by buddies of each party.
The lack of power by the bank of england, the crap FSA with directors that were working for hedge funds.
Tax credits in 2003, the rise in rents because of the lack of supply and the massive influx of non british labour, to much competition between the labour force and companies, the list just goes on and on.
Banks were just another victim of this mess, MPs house flipping, the whole policy was really based around the currupt MPs, making vast amount of profits from theire own policies.
labour had 12 years to fix that, they just carried it on.
Soldato
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Grrrrrr bankers
Grrrrrrrrrrrrr profit
Grrrrrrrrrrrrr profit
How do you propose Labour would have renationalised UK industry and what not?
They saw a market created by labour and exploited it, just like the many landlords saw a market and exploited it, just like many people saw a market and exploited it. This came from labour polices on housing lack of social housing, stopping local councils from investing into building new homes.
The same way France and other euro nations have done, this government has sold 100 of billions of UK government owned assets to cover its economic shortfalls.
Soldato
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Labour created the sub-prime market in the US?
mattheman - I am anti-Labour as much as the next guy, and blame them for the magnitude of the situation we're in now (which could have been a lot better), but you fundamentally do not understand how this financial crisis started, or why the values of our assets here inflated so much.
Labour created the sub-prime market in the US?
The laws in the US were relaxed, most western governments were doing it, and dont think the US was to blame for our banking mess, because it wasnt.
While I agree with all the other reasons provided, I would hesitate to call the banks 'victims' (note that when I say 'banks' in this thread I'm referring to the people who are getting vast bonuses, not your everyday worker). Everyone else gets punished apart from them:
- Labour screwed up and as a consequence will get voted out
- Home buyers are burdened by huge debts for piddly little houses, often in negative equity
- Everyone who saw their home as a neverending source of wealth has been brought to earth with a bump
- People lose their jobs because banks have stopped lending to businesses (I'm one of these people)
So to a degree and in various ways, people are punished. The banks do what? Look contrite for a year and then continue on as before.
There seems to be a lot of people in this thread with an astounding amount of sympathy for bankers. Remember, these are the people who gambled depositor's money purely to enhance their own personal wealth. You don't need to be a financial genius to see that increasing leverage ratios (i.e. how much the bank lends compared to its deposits) from 10:1 to 25:1 is inherently risky. At the most benign you could say they acted like naughty (unsupervised) children, but they should still receive some sort of punishment, along with Joe Blogs who lost his house, or John Smith who lost his job.
yes, there is a reason why an appeal to popularity is considered a fallacy in any formal debate, why should state policy be any different...
I think the deafening silence (yet again) from the Opposition is pretty telling, I don't know whether it's Mandelson getting more influence but the Tories have been chasing shadows for a number of weeks now, though Cameron isn't doing himself any favours with his useless rants about health & safety myths cribbed straight out of the Daily Mail.
Is it possible that the Tories could actually throw away their lead? It would be hilarious if it happened tbh
Is it possible that the Tories could actually throw away their lead? It would be hilarious if it happened tbh
Not for the guy who has to mop up your final, squishy remains!
Suspended
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True.
True.
True.
What utter tosh!
Your view is flawed. It has nothing to do with scoring points. The country is broke, banker bonuses are an easy target that will set well with the public, certainly moreso than reducing the MOD or NHS budgets for example.
Man of Honour
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It doesn't seem like a particularly good idea to me, not least because it is in effect a retrospective tax since bonuses have probably already been decided. If in future the government wanted to tax any bonus over XX amount then that would be more excusable but punitive taxation is a bit of a dodgy area anyway.