General Discussion
It will be interesting to see just exactly what improvements (which begs the question that there will be some) the new state pension scheme due to start in (I think) 2016 will bring. No-one will know of course until it kicks in (if you contact the state pension people now they say they cannot tell you what you as an individual will get as the old system is the one they are presently operating and ...
But this is a free market subsidised by the taxpayer in many ways let us not forget. (So not really a 'free' market then?) For example working tax/child tax credits for those in work but on pay so low that they qualify for WT and CT credits. And then of course there is our old friend Housing Benefit. How much state intervention in the form of tax payer money aka HB finds its way into private ...
Makes sense therefore to increase income, to increase spending power, which would increase demand and lead to an increase in jobs, which in turn would increase the tax take/take more people off the need to claim benefits, etc etc. Instead of which what do we have? An ever increasing gap between the salaries of them at the top and them further towards the bottom. That just cannot be sustainable, ...
an' 'ere's another gem from Georgie boy - this time with regard to the homeless. Sir George Young, the Tory MP once said the homeless were "the people you step over coming out of the Opera House",
It was Sir George Young wot said it! From an article in Inside Housing: " On 30 January 1991 the then housing minister Sir George Young was asked in parliament what the government was going to do about unaffordable rents. ‘Housing benefit will underpin market rents - we have made that absolutely clear,’ he said. ‘If people cannot afford to pay that market rent, housing benefit will take the ...
And I wonder just how much of that RTB property has now ended up in the private rented sector where rents are higher than social or affordable rents? Never mind though "Housing Benefit will take the strain" (put that in quotes as understand a minister during the Thatcher years allegedly said it - will do a search to see if I can find out who it was).
@Mcjprc - on this issue of changing voting habits. I think some voters do change, or, possibly more correctly, have and have never had any political party allegiance. They are known as floating voters aren't they? In our first past the post voting system (which is a bit of a nonsense when we now have more than two political parties) it is the floating voters in the marginal constituencies who ...
But you have had four 'agrees' to your original post.
And another thing. Capitalists always go on about competition. But........I wonder how many, in truth, would operate monopolies if they possibly could? An inherent contradiction in capitalism perhaps is that whilst competition, the market economy and the profit motive go hand in hand, competition in itself must drive down the potential profits to be made by those shopkeepers/firms etc ...
Wonder what influence Murdoch and his right wing press will have this time around?
