http://www.channel4.com/programmes/britains-trillion-pound-horror-story/4od#3139408
And people have a go at me when I say the UK is in decline.
Britain's Trillion Pound Horror Story...
- Thread starter Spit
- Start date
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/britains-trillion-pound-horror-story/4od#3139408
And people have a go at me when I say the UK is in decline.
Its ironic that ponzi schemes are illegal yet the global financial system is one itself. Maybe Micheal Gove should introduce 'money' an 'debt' into the school cericulum as very few people seem to understand how money is created. Without growth and increasing debt levels the whole system falls apart.
Permabanned
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wow, just watched this show.
I knew it was bad, and largely caused by scrounging chavs, but I didn't know it was that bad.
I knew it was bad, and largely caused by scrounging chavs, but I didn't know it was that bad.
What is fair about the tax?
How can above inflation be described as fair to anyone?
Plenty other economies can provide cheap fuel.
I don't find the situation fair in the slightest.
The treasury is high on oil fumes however.
Soldato
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I believe this is true to an extent. This is why I see the tuition fee debacle as such a red herring. When is this (or any other) government going to tackle the real problem behind the countries finances and face up to the pension time bomb?
Yes it's political suicide but do you really think the younger generation is going to work 24/7 to pay for a bunch of 60+ to sit around on their backsides all day and play golf. It's going to end badly.
They should be cutting pensions and raising retirement ages right now. Not 2015 or 2020.when a large chunk of the money has already been spent. After all we're all in it together. Apparently that doesn’t apply if you're about to draw a public pension.
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I don't remember a "chav" ever being elected to office and spending all the money... I'm only 25 though so maybe I missed that.
While people on the social who don't need to be shouldn't be on there, they are only there because the current social system allows them to be. Its been lax and abused for decades and most people will take anything they can get from the evil government as they see it.
If the govt. will give you a huge house and loads of cash for staying at home and having 10 kids its no bleeping surprise that people do it. That makes the policy just as wrong as the people taking the money.
Associate
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Don't mean to sound too stupid here, its late and I've had my head in a book for the last 6 hours.
As I see it if they owe each other cash why not just cancel that debt off with each other?
Please read about 1920's Weimar Germany or hyperinflation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation
moving to Belgium in 2012I liked the programmes solution. Get rid of all taxes apart from income tax and set that at 20% for everyone.
I must admit that being someone who's involved in a couple of businesses, motivation levels are at an all time low for me. You just end up giving it back, just no incentive to work harder.
The rich chinese guy used a saying:
Only the people can create wealth but you need to give them the freedom to do it.
That needs to be our new mantra.
I must admit that being someone who's involved in a couple of businesses, motivation levels are at an all time low for me. You just end up giving it back, just no incentive to work harder.
The rich chinese guy used a saying:
Only the people can create wealth but you need to give them the freedom to do it.
That needs to be our new mantra.
Was this a balanced programme, heck no. All they ever showed were the success stories, what of the countries where this had not bought prosperity, what of the drawbacks. Who were the people who were heavily involved in this, Kelton Murdoch and some book writers who i have never heard of. Might have taken this seriously is it wasnt so dumbed down and evenly balanced.
As it is, it looks likes its propaganda for The Tea Party. Maybe drop the rent a star and actually produce a television series that looks at it seriously. Looking at those issues it skimmed over with a sleight of hand.
As it is, it looks likes its propaganda for The Tea Party. Maybe drop the rent a star and actually produce a television series that looks at it seriously. Looking at those issues it skimmed over with a sleight of hand.
britboy4321, this is honestly not a troll...
As an utter layman to most things politik, if you get a spare five minutes you are willing to donate to my education can you (or anyone else?) point out to me where the chap ranting at GB is actually wrong in any of his assessments, preferably with verifiable reputable sources?
I'm genuinely interested to hear an argument in opposition to what this chap just spouted.
I think it was mentioned earlier, but a lot of the debt is owed to individuals / private interests, not in fact between the countries in these lists. Hence the inability to cancel out? Just a guess... :/
Of course not; you're no longer (usually) generating income for the state. You're just a costly burden, one that will soon disappear naturally, so why invest in you?
Pardon?!
It would appear not, Britboy is the most outspoken subscriber to Brown's school of economics on this board.
One day, fairly soon, a government is going to have to stand up and be honest, and inform the nation that they're cancelling all state pensions.
Caporegime
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Why do people think that, the bailout in terms of actual cash out was sub 100mil wasn't it, I honestly forget the figure. The banks have NOTHING, not a single penny to do with the 3.5trillion in pension liability, nor the huge majority of the normal debt.
Why do people listen to Labour, or the press for that matter who also like saying it was the banks fault.
The banks got into trouble in the first place, because of the economy, which happened largely due to Labours utterly retarded policies of increasing public spending WAy beyond the countries means.
THe main problem is, pension liability won't go down, old people can't do the same jobs, maybe can't work at all, we'll always be paying for the old, its been that way for many years.
The entire system is essentially based on ONLY working with sustained large growth in the worldwide economy, its a complete joke, its impossible for continued growth.
We've still got the population rising worldwide but not fast enough here, AND, too fast. The system is pretty much setup as a pyramid scheme, 5 people work, and retire, 10 new workers paying into the retirement scheme is actually just paying for 1 of those original 5 to receive a weekly cheque and it goes on up the chain completely out of control.
The pension scheme pretty much ONLY works with a sustained growth in population, wages, economy, and number of jobs.
Conversely, the uk is losing jobs, we're making up new jobs by the day but all in the public sector, 80-90% of them unrequired, and paid for out of taxes, leading to tax increases and massive debt as we haven't raised tax even close to what was required to fund two wars and several million extra public workers, nor the benefits system growth.
What we need is no population growth, at all, to gain a few new jobs in new industrys and just sustain, but the world economy would simply fail, completely, in that model.
Complete continual growth is a pipe dream, it can happen for a couple hundred years in our type of system but eventually it will collapse, when, where, hopefully after I die. fast growing debt, out of control, the sooner it will happen, the less happy I'll be.
Britboy, shows a complete lack of understanding of what the debt means to us right now and in the future, its not about paying off the debt, we'll never do that, ever, it will continue to grow, its about making it grow a LOT slower than Labour have been growing it.
In general the system essentially works like, lets borrow £1000, its not much, we'll pay it back in 5 years, when £1000 doesn't even seem like a lot to us anymore due to inflation and growth, we can pay back £1500 easily in 10 years so £1000 is nothing to borrow.
5 years later you borrow £5000, but again assume in 10 years it will be an insignificant amount, and so on and so on.
Its worked, for many decades, because money has devalued, the rate people generate it and the amount of tax income goes up dramatically, thats life when you artificially inflate everything and the worlds economy grows.
When it stagnates, the debt you've just borrowed, you realise in 10 years, won't be close to an insignificant amount then you're in major trouble.
What was the debt before Labour got in, was it sub 100billion or something mad. The rate of growth of our debt under Labour went from "safe" and almost required level of debt, to flat out ridiculous.
Labour's last 20 years is, borrow money, buy the voters, keep going, thinking literally not one second about the future.
Tories could plunge us into 20trillion of debt, and have a Hospital built on every street corner in the country, but 5 years later, every new hospital and every old hospital would close as we couldn't get any extra funding as people stopped buying our debt.
If people EVER think we can't pay back our debt, people stop buying our debt, we LITERALLY can not afford to keep paying our services as someone put it.
The laughable complexity of our economic system, worldwide, is pretty simple, its complex so you realise at no stage has it, or will it ever add up. Its creative accounting that for any single company to do itself would be deemed as fraud.
The economy continuing to work is based on some fundamental idea's that simply aren't true, unlimited long term growth, ever increasing population and a dangerous rate of increase long term, etc, etc, etc.
The planet can not keep increasing population, growth has slowed down and can not happen for ever, like I said, hope I'm not still alive to see it come crashing down.
The biggest problem people didn't really see what, industry losing jobs, worldwide.
I always use this example but, heck 100 years ago cars were being built, it would take 100 guys several weeks to produce one car, and they sucked, and needed replacing pretty often. Now it takes 10 guys, to monitor 100 machines that can knock out 200 cars a day, of which 198 of them could easily last for 30 years before needing replacing.
We can produce more stuff more quickly than we can use it now. Hence in the recession car companies had millions of cars stored around the world no one needed anymore. INdustry is dominated by machinery, you can make 1000x as much of anything as you used to be able to, in 1/100th of the time, with 1/100th the manpower. There are less and less jobs but our economy relies on an ever increasing number of CASH GENERATING jobs, producing and selling products.
Because the £1.2bn only has to be paid back in say five years, the £0.2bn comes from the extra tax receipts from GDP growth between Year0 and Year5. This is why the banks have a lot to answer for with regards to the public spending problem, they caused the recession which means that the expected GDP growth didn't happen. GDP contracted by something like 8% after 2007, which is a huge figure - it's going to be a while before GDP gets back up to those sort of levels and meanwhile the debt is going to have to be paid back.