Weep for France …..

One can see a horrendous mess in every direction, but we should be looking more at France just at the moment.  They may be our favourite enemy but they don’t deserve the shambles their elite has landed them in, and besides, hundreds of thousands of Brits live there and our relations are very important.

If Hollande wins, he will surely bankrupt the country. There are comments below about the folly of govt spending being over 50% of GDP. Well, France’s is already 56%, and that tends to RISE in a recession as govt income falls and benefits go up. Despite this, Holland is promising to “create” tens of thousands more jobs and there is little sign of any commitment to freeing up business from the horrendous bureaucracy and “job-protection” which actually DESTROYS jobs.

He will also renegotiate the fiscal pact leading to a crisis with Germany AND one of confidence on the part of the loan sharks who (BY OUR OWN FAULT, NOT THEIRS) we are in hock to. This would surely lead to a collapse of the euro but Germany would leave the euro first rather than be sucked down by the moribund – oder?

If Sarko wins, he is so detested by the left and lots of others there will surely be civil strife as he has to either impose even harsher austerity OR see the French economy in freefall – given their high debt and govt spending. Cutting back France’s govt spending is going to be extremely painful as it involves sacking loads of civil servants.

The lunacy of nearly FORTY YEARS of living beyond their means thanks to German EU dosh is coming round to hit them. I really can’t see any way out except post-war austerity and misery plus a large dose of civil disorder. Can anyone else?

The elephant in the corner is extremism rising out of all this; it’s not as if we haven’t seen this phenomenon before …….

 

Nightmare on Euro Street (Act IV)

Well, here we go again ….. now we have George Soros telling us that only a political union will save the euro.

PILLOCK!!!

NOBODY ASKED US OR INDEED ANYONE IN ANY OTHER COUNTRY WHETHER WE OR THEY WANT A FULL FISCAL OR POLITICAL UNION.

If they HAD asked us, we would have said “NO”. Soros seems to think that just because a load of elite pampered and quasi-fascist EU political cronies and tossers are obsessed by this then A) it is right and B) it is inevitable.

OVER OUR DEAD BODIES MATEY – and no doubt it will come to that.

As for the next crisis, everything has its cracking point.  As governments are usually inept and corrupt and unable to act except in their own interests the cracking point usually comes eventually from enough of the plebs rioting to provoke a revolution or a coup.

How long the Spanish plebs will accept 50% youth unemployment forced on them by the EU is hard to predict, but Spanish riots could at any moment bust the whole soggy bag of sheit asunder.

PS

WHY IS THE EURO STILL RIDING HIGH??

A) Long-term players believe that Germany will survive and prosper.

B) …. and that eventually the feckless south will have to leave the euro leaving the Northern countries alone in Euroland.

C) … at which point the euro will soar

The ONLY alternative to this scenario is full fiscal union, which I do not believe Germany will accept, and nor should it, as it would be lunacy, for which the Germans are not famous.

As for “German selfishness”, the country was PROMISED all this would not happen; it was the ONLY way to get them to give up their beloved Deutschmark. EVERYONE has been shafted by the insane, reckless EU elite’s obsessions.

AND of course their LIES about Greece’s qualifications for the euro.

 

UK TAXATION

This is taken from “The Daily Mail”,
because it is so good – as is
often the case with the Mail of course.

500 million reasons why they can’t afford NOT to cut our taxes.

UK Government Tax Policy

• The Government takes £460 billion a year in taxes – two-fifths of everything we earn, which is twice as much as communist China.
• We each work five months of the year solely to pay taxes. Only then do we start earning for ourselves.
• Britain’s tax code is the biggest in the world. The current edition of Tolley’s, the accountants’ tax guide, runs to 14,500 pages – twice as big as when Gordon Brown became Chancellor in 1997. There are plenty of hiding places in that jungle.
• And people resent tax because so much is wasted. Bhs boss Sir Philip Green’s 2010 spending review found Whitehall could save £600 million on phone bills alone. ‘No business could survive that level of waste,’ he concluded.

How do we compare?

• Our high taxes make avoidance more profitable. Britain’s top rate is 50 per cent; America’s is just 35 per cent. Our capital gains tax is 28 per cent; theirs is just 15 per cent. In the EU, only Scandinavia has higher top rates; outside the EU, nobody does.
• Worldwide evidence shows plainly: set taxes too high and people will avoid them. They set up avoidance schemes, take themselves or their money abroad or simply retire.

The 50% tax rate

• Although the Treasury has yet to release its formal study on the impact of a 50 per cent tax rate on growth, the early indicators are worrying; latest tax receipts from self-assessment forms – those used by the country’s richest – are down by half a billion pounds.
• It is an example of what economists call the Laffer Curve, after the American economist Arthur Laffer, who discovered this simple truth: high tax rates actually bring in less money for the Treasury than lower ones, because they result in greater tax avoidance.
• The reason why tax avoidance is rife among our highest earners is because our taxes are too high and too complex.

The Effect of Reducing Tax

• In April 2008, Chancellor Alistair Darling imposed a £30,000 tax on ‘non-doms’ – high-flyers who work in the UK but are domiciled abroad. More than 16,000 of them simply moved their affairs overseas, resulting in a net loss for the Treasury.
• You see the same in America. A 2008 study found that 80,000 people migrated to the nine US states with no local income taxes, while the ten states with the highest taxes lost 129,000 residents and $10 billion (£6.31 billion) of income.
• And if you want the rich to pay more, cut taxes! In 1979, Chancellor Geoffrey Howe chopped the top tax rate from 83 per cent (yes, really) to 60 per cent. Before the cut, the top one per cent of taxpayers paid only 11 per cent of the total tax revenue. By 1988, the same 250,000 people were paying 14 per cent of it.
• When Nigel Lawson sliced the rate further to 40 per cent, receipts from the top earners rose to 21 per cent of the total. By halving the top rate, Howe and Lawson doubled the share paid by the highest earners.
• In America, after George W. Bush’s 2003 tax cuts, the taxes paid by $1 million-plus earners more than doubled in just three years. It is the same everywhere. When India cut taxes in 1997, ‘experts’ predicted a loss of revenue but they were proved wrong. When Canada cut top tax rates in 1981, receipts from high earners went up. When Russia replaced its complex system with a flat-rate tax of 13 per cent in 2001, receipts rose by a quarter.

The Contribution of the UK Rich

• The highest-earning one per cent of Britons pay £47 billion in income tax – almost 30 per cent of the total and an amount equivalent to half the annual running costs of the NHS.Si
• Since 2000, the share contributed by this top-earning group has increased from 22.2 to 27.7 per cent, largely because there are now so many more millionaires.

The Flatrate Tax System

• The World Economic Forum reckons tax is the key factor in doing business with a country, but a 2010 study by accountants KPMG ranked Britain only 83rd out of 86 countries for tax competitiveness.
• A 2004 survey showed that the 20 fastest-growing countries all had low marginal tax rates. And the dozen or more of those countries (including several ex-Soviet bloc nations) that have adopted low, flat taxes have no plans to change.
• The flat tax, which is gaining traction across the world, makes tax both low and simple. There are no top rates, just a single tax rate for everyone. The poorest – on less than about £12,000 a year – pay nothing. Loopholes are scrapped.
• Because there is only one rate – it would be about 22 per cent in the UK – a flat tax is easy to calculate and difficult to avoid. The tax form can fit on to a single side of paper. There are fewer distortions and disincentives. And more transparency about what people – senior civil servants, say – should pay.

Some people say that a government running huge deficits cannot afford to cut taxes. In reality, it cannot afford not to.

 

IDIOCYWATCH

What is going on in the world of the Idiots?

• At a time of hand-wringing about the danger of fossil fuels and the rocketing price of oil Britain’s nuclear power industry is being run down - from 10 reactors now there will remain just one in 2022. So, whereas nuclear energy has safely supplemented Britain’s traditional power supplies for decades NOW when the technology is presumably much safer it is being ended so that we can depend more on imported shale gas.
• Two Rumanians stole 50,000 GNP worth of lead from a church roof but have been given a “community service” order instead of being sent to jail. As they have “no means” (God only knows where the 50,000 has gone) they do not have to pay a penny compensation. So much for deterrent.
• The protection being given to this fundamentalist idiot who wants to blow us all up is costing the taxpayer 10,000 GBP per week.
• The very day after the majority of the EU signs up to the Franco-German “Fiscal stability pact” Diktat (remembering that France and Germany were the FIRST to break the original eurozone agreement on debt) Spain announces that it will not obey it. We await the next action of the EU-Inquisition.
• Draghi is turning out to be  major disaster, printing money as if there were no tomorrow and flooding the banking system with it. European banks are dumping their toxic assets onto the ECB (Germany), loans to small businesses continue to stagnate and massive problems are being built up for later on ….. nothing new there, then. Germans and others are being taken for a ride as they will have to pay for all this sometime down the road. As the ECB actions are being done with sophisticated, complicated and fraudulent cunning the average pleb has not yet realized the reckless folly being dumped on him by this criminal political elite.
• The vicious, theocratic, fascist and regional trouble-stirring regime in Iran (greatest supporter of the mass-murdering Assad family despot dynasty now apparently intent on “reform” – a great contender for “Joke of the Century”) continues to have supporters among the British unintelligentsia for no good reason other than that it is all the fault of the USA.
• Witchcraft, torture and murder in the UK – another immigrant import. Thanks for that.
• Chelsea’s Villas-Boas is a bit of an idiot, no? Constantly blabbing off to the press about not being married to Lampard, being about to get the sack, washing his club’s dirty linen in public. Still, he seems to understand something about finance. “We can’t compete with City who can buy all the best players.” REALLY! What a surprise!! But it’s “Sport” old boy – as long as you remember that. And will Abramo be pleased to be reminded that even his billions aren’t enough ……. perhaps they’ll get into a bidding war like Rangers and Glasgow and ALL go bust …. then I can get back to supporting Hull and Wigan with some chance of success for my team.

Some good news among the idiocy. Francois Hollande is doing OK in the French election as Sarko has to take refuge in a bar to avoid being beaten up. “It could only happen in France.” Yes, Mr Boring should win the election, will rip up the fiscal-stability pack and thrust it up a German orifice. Then he will “create” (I so love this word of socialists) n thousands of new jobs, France will go bankrupt and the whole shoddy EU edifice will collapse in a pile of puterfying detritus-ridden corruption – no doubt with Mrs Thatcher and the USA getting the blame somewhere along the line.

And van Rompo will lose his 300,000 € per annum plus vast expenses job and 300,000,000€ Brussels palace. Perhaps they can turn it into a hostel for unemployed bankers to prevent them chucking themselves out of skyscraper windows and messing up the streets.

 

WORKFARE

WORKFARE

The NET result of the foaming,  hysteria against this workfare project is that:

A) thousands of people on benefits who might have got out of the house to do something useful won’t, but will remain at home or kicking around the streets picking up their benefits ad infinitum for doing nothing.

B) a proportion of those thousands will not be offered a job at the end of their placements as their might have had a chance of being had the companies involved not caved in to the baying, self-righteous “leftist” “human rights – we hate ‘capitalists’ brigade.

BRILIANT.

But it all reveals a deeper malaise, all this idiotic public v private lunacy.

The fact of the matter is:

A) All those in the public sector are (unless employed by councils as “Diversity Officers”, hands-off “managers” and similar bollocks) doing something to fulfil a public NEED. They are working FOR the public directly.

B) All those in the prvate sector are working because someone is trying to make money by fulfilling OTHER kinds of need. By so doing, they pay TAX which finances all those working in the public sector. In other words, the nasty, greedy, capitalist urge to employ people to make money both provides goods and services that people THEMSELVES decide they want and/or need AND pays all the money for those PUBLIC services that some government or council DECIDES on their behalf they need or want, whether they REALLY need or want it at all.

Ergo, the eternal lunatic leftist foaming of “private bad – public good” is ludicrous. We really ARE “all in this together”. No doubt some would like the economy to be run entirely by and for the “public.” Well, it’s been tried in various places. IT DOES NOT WORK. Not only does it not work; it leads to poverty and misery – and of course in the case of Cuba – happiness, but Cuba is a special case as we know. The point is, that a private company providing goods and/or services that people REALLY want is ALSO WORKING “FOR THE PUBLIC”. Why there are some who simply cannot grasp this bleedin’ obvious fact is a mystery.

As for ABUSE, it happens in both public AND private sectors. The only difference is that in the private sector it tends to get exposed and corrected more often than in the public sector, where waste, corrruption and inefficiency often become endemic and institutionalised.

The great problem in the world is greed, both for money and for power over other people, and in many cases over other people’s minds (see Iran, NK etc). US society is disintegrating because of it. ANY government’s prime duties is to root it out. Brown not only did not root it out; he encouraged it – some of course would say just as Thatcher did.

However, a certain amount of “greed” is desirable. It produces the ambition to work hard to improve one’s lot, without which THERE ARE NO PROFITS TO PAY FOR YOUR BELOVED PUBLIC SERVICES. As ever, it is when things are taken to EXCESS that there are problems.

 

The Conversion of Ed Balls

Ed Balls, shadow Chancellor, has rejected the idea of another Labour tax-and-spend bonanza:

No way. Not in a million years. Absolutely not, because that is a totally irresponsible way to get into government. You’ve got to show that you can make the tough decisions [and] be tough with public spending. There will be no splurge giveaways.

Ed Balls is an interest case for the application of logic.

A) Gordon Brown indulged in a brainless credit binge both private and public that has left Britain among the most indebted countries IN THE WORLD. I think that all but the most intellectual of comfortable middle-class cognoscenti agree on this. This magnificent feat was accompanied by two unforgettable quotes:

- “I have abolished boom and bust.” and

- “I do know how to run an economy.”  (He meant “ruin”, but let’s move on.)

B) Balls was Brown’s right-hand man for a long time while all this was going on and as far as I recall neither said nor did anything to rein in the rampaging bull smashing up all the China.

C) NOW he says Labour would never go on a spending spree and must be financially responsible etc etc.

NOW,

1) EITHER he believed in Brown’s policies for so many years, but has suddenly had a miraculous conversion

2) OR he didn’t believe in them but went along with the whole farrago of lunacy for some reason.

This reason could have been either that he was scared of Brown and gutlessly failed at any time to stand up to him, OR

He thought it would serve his own best interests in his Labour Party career and might help him to the leadership. (Sod the good of the country of course …… – that would NEVER enter into any of these people’s considerations.)

If 1) applies (the sudden conversion thinggy), the question this raises is: “Would anyone but a moron vote for someone who takes about a decade to work out the bleedin’ obvious?”

B) If B) applies, then: “Why would anyone but a moron vote for an obvious cynic and indeed LIAR?”

The inescapable end conclusion is that anyone prepared to vote for or indeed support Balls in any way is a moron. This is of course a bit harsh on morons. Still, as far as I know one can’t yet be arrested for calling someone a moron – but give it time.

 

What exactly is “Money”?

“Where does all this money come from?”

It all comes from a printing press. Some of it is then given to people who’ve actually worked to earn it, some even to people who have generated it through creating some of the former type of work for others to do and a lot more to people who just play around moving it from one place to another – except that in this case nothing actually moves at all except a flow of electrons down a cable.

The key point to grasp is that it’s not actually “money” as the Romans would have known it. It’s virtual, theoretical, and infinite in quantity once inflation takes a grip.

And it just goes round and round. The latest gyration is that countries with no money – in fact, thanks to Gordon Brown and his ilk, MUCH LESS than no money – are lending this non-existent “money” to a ludicrous international Quango led by a French crony and political failure rewarded with perhaps the biggest financial job in the world who is going to lend it back to some of the countries who lent it in the first place, which – having built up even more debt through lending themselves money via a third agent rather than directly – now have to borrow even more money to help pay off the money they’ve just borrowed to help pay off the debt previously incurred by their moronic leaders, who frequently quoted the phrase “borrowing requirement” as if some ogre was standing over them with a vast bludgeon forcing them to borrow money even though NONE of them was elected on a policy of “Vote for me and I will borrow so much money (to make it appear I am clever and generous) that the country will go bankrupt and make your money worthless.” Or if that was in Labour’s manifesto it must have been in very tiny print.

Anyway, at each stage of this movement numerous people who don’t do any real “work” take their cut and in the case of the political and financial elite become very rich even though no wealth-creating “work” is done whatsoever. Thus the sum of “money” involved diminishes constantly and more has to be printed to fill the gap. The vast debt built up is reduced through inflation, which of course stiffs the plebs – and especially anyone idiotic enough to save this increasingly-worthless paper – while leaving the political class largely intact.

Simple really.

 

BILL GATES DOESN’T GET IT

The Microsoft founder, Bill Gates, urged G20 leaders yesterday to support a financial transaction tax. The French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who supports the levy, alongside other countries, such as Brazil and Argentina, said such a tax “was possible”.

Let’s see Bill. It goes like this I think:

A) “We have wildly, recklessly and with utter contempt for our electors overspent and overborrowed to the point of bringing down the entire world economy.

B) You know this, I know this, everyone knows this, but we can’t actually say it since we will lose face and even worse most likely our jobs.

C) ERGO, we will do the following:

1) Thrash about looking for scapegoats. So far, the markets, the ratings agencies, the banks, the hedge funds, the Anglo-Saxons, the Yanks in particular and of course the Greeks and Italians have all been possible candidates. We hate the ratings agencies in particular, so the EU will set up its OWN agency at vast expense with taxpayers’ money so that we can give ourselves permanently good ratings.

2) We’ll do what all governments do when they IDIOTICALLY run out of money, we’ll impose another tax.

3) We’ll find a SPIV to leverage yet more money we haven’t got to try to fool the markets that we are in control and while we’re at it we’ll destroy democracy by imposing our will on Greece and in particular go apoplectic if they dare to actually ask their own people what to do.

4) We’ll run around begging to the Chinese, Russians, Arabs and of course the IMF for much more of other people’s hard-earned money to bail us out of this shambles, even though IT WON’T SOLVE THE UNDERLYING PROBLEMS the euro faces.”

Have I got it about right?

PLEASE Bill, get your head round this simple point. THIS CRISIS IS ENTIRELY THE FAULT OF CRETINOUS, COWARDLY GOVERNMENTS WHO HAVE RECKLESSLY OVERBORROWED.

You are just giving succour to the guilty who are trying to weasel out of their responsibility, including the pathetic Sarkozy.

A) “Greece should never have entered the euro.” Really, you’re only TEN YEARS TOO LATE, Sarko.

B) “Greece must understand that being in the euro means abiding by the rules.”

HILARIOUS!! Do you mean the way when France went over the euroland rule about debt not exceeding 3% of GDP said: “That rule was designed for little countries, not those like France.”

And where were YOU, Sarko, and the EU elite during these years of reckless overborrowing? What did YOU do to stop it? What did FRANCE do to reduce its OWN vast debt? What did France do to prevent its idiotic banks lending FIFTY-SIX BILLION EUROS to Greece?

I’ll answer for you: “absent and silent, nothing, nothing and nothing.”

Sorry Bill – stick to BASIC; in this area you are out of your depth. The average pleb is sick to death of the venal anti-democratic incompetence of the cretins running Europe. The last thing we need right now is a tax to destroy the City of London, even if the top bankers are morally repugnant. If you are given air-time to spout about Europe, hammer home this message: “STOP BORROWING” and drop the silly mantra “MORE TAX”

 

IT’S GERMANY’S FAULT

Sorry – it’s idiotic.

A) You cannot blame the Germans for ANYTHING AT ALL. When the euro was launched, they were PROMISED they would NEVER have to bail any country out; this was the ONLY way to get them to give up the Deutschmark.

B) Every other country has saddled itself with debt it CANNOT PAY. Why the HELL should Germany put itself into the SAME position to bail out the idle and useless, lying and fraudulent countries that are responsible for this shambles?

C) France hasn’t had a balanced budget since 1994 I believe. How the HELL can you run a country like that? Do they think money grows on trees? Apparently, yes. Germany DOESN’T and until this lunatic Franco-Greek-Portuguese-Irish-Italian mindset is totally exorcised this fiasco will go on for ever and bring Germany down, too if it agrees to play this idiotic game.

Countries such as Italy, Greece et al where cheating, lying and corruption including an absence of proper tax-collecting are endemic and indeed culturally-embedded will NEVER put their behaviour right until they are FORCED TO. A bailout simply keeps this shambolic roundabout spinning. NOTE, THEY CAN DO WHAT THEY WANT – lie, cheat, allow their rich to put their money in Switzerland and so on if they like – but NOT at someone ELSE’S expense.

D) Germany has its OWN debt problems. After paying TRILLIONS to bring East Germany up to speed and HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS of development aid to the feckless, idle shysters of Greece, Portugal et al through being “good Europeans”, THEY HAVE DONE THEIR BIT.

This slagging off of Germany is CRETINOUS.

 

WHY THE CRISIS?

Few disagree about the euro being a great idea in principle. But you can’t avoid the facts:

1. The EU’s OWN economists told them before the eurolaunch that it wouldn’t work with Greece et al in it as their economies are TOO DIVERSE from those of Northern Europe.
2. Various criteria were set for entry, and these were based on economists’ assessment of what was needed for it all to work. However,

•   Greece LIED blatantly about its entry qualifications and EVERYONE KNEW IT.
• Almost EVERY COUNTRY completely ignored the “rules”, in particular the one about debt not    exceeding 3% of GDP.
• Not ONE PEEP of warning was heard from the so-clever EU elite when the wheels started to fall off several years ago. If vastly-borrowing states had BELIEVED they would be slung out if they racked up vast debts then they WOULDN’T HAVE DONE IT. Once again, lack of discipline, accountability and YES, PUNISHMENT are to blame. This is why the Germans are now seeking to take over the finances of the feckless. It is the ONLY way to get “discipline”. Whether in the end the idle and feckless (including France) will accept the abandonment of their financial independence is the most interesting aspect of all this. France thinks it should be like Germany – able to what it wants and bend the rules willy-nilly while telling everyone else (especially the Anglo-Saxons) where to go. But France is ever-weaker and in very bad shape, though nobody is talking much about it. AAA rating, HA, HA ……

CONCLUSION: The euro COULD HAVE WORKED but not on the basis of LIES and IDIOTIC non-compliance with the “rules”, including by the eternally-whinging and German-dosh-grabbing France. When they early after the eurolaunch went over the 3% of GDP debt limit, a government spokesman said: “That rule was designed for little countries, not those like France.”

That just about says it all.

In ANY case, this fiasco is not really a failure of the EURO per se but of INDIVIDUAL STATES who cannot pay their debts.