Brown says the 'C' word Prime minister Gordon Brown has said what everyone else in the country has known for months - that the government, whether Labour, Tory or LibDem, will have to cut spending in order to sort out the country's massive debt pile. The Westminster village has alive with speculation over what programmes Brown's team would put to the …
Call my cynical, but Brown knows that labour won't get elected, and so he has created the conditions that cause next administration to be so deeply unpopular that he hopes they won't last more one term, that paving the way for the triumphant return of our new labour overlords!
..... increased taxes and cuts in services to help more Americans own homes? (well they say it's all down to the bad debt from American sub-prime mortgages) Perhaps the yanks aren't as stupid as they look, I mean if they'd just come and asked for the money we'd have said 'on yer bike you fat greedy ........' but like this we do it and smile while it's being done.
Crafty beggars.
"as a result of taking action I can tell you over 200,000 businesses employing hundreds of thousands of people have been able to keep people in work".
Eh? Cite the evidence.
If he'd said "as a result of taking action I can tell you we have a deeply f+cked economy and more than a millon extra people out of work" I'd have beleived him.
Roll on 2010
Bonkers Brown said "as a result of taking action I can tell you over 200,000 businesses employing hundreds of thousands of people have been able to keep people in work"
Nice quote. Says nothing about the 10s of thousands of companies going to the wall because of the recession and banks not playing fair and the 100s of thousands of people who have lost their job or are in serious risk of losing it.
...keep saying the lie long enough and everyone believes it.
"The 'downturn' is the fault of America".
Oh...so spending *way* beyond our means for the past umpteen years would have no impact at all...and didn't Northern Rock nearly fall before Lehman Brothers? The USA could even blame us for the start of it!
Clarkson was right in his description of Brown..."One eyed Scottish idiot".
If you think that ID cards and Trident are in line for cuts - nope there'll be cuts anywhere else but that!
Is it that the UK gubmint want ID cards or another country that want it?
Will the toffs get rid of ID cards? No, I don't think so either.
We already are submitted to surveillance on a massive scale - there's an ANPR camera even on a small road into my home town. There's ANPR cameras on all the main roads in!
Re the ISA
11million adults at £64 = £704 million [Gubmint numbers]
16 million adults at £64 = £1024million [ElReg numbers]
One billion quid! and it's a gubmint IT project!
Cuts or tax increases?
Just open your wallet and let the gubmint take what they want [they'll leave the ID card there!]
AC cos they know where I live.
The PM claimed that "as a result of taking action I can tell you over 200,000 businesses employing hundreds of thousands of people have been able to keep people in work". He promised £5bn in spending on jobs.
...These five billion coming from taxation, which is money not going into investment, i.e. durable job creation.
What do you, he just PRINTS them?
"We will keep our promises."
I call bullshit on that.
"because for me every redundancy is a personal tragedy."
I call bullshit on that too - I have a letter in my posession from Pat McFadyen, telling me that my redundancy in order to offshore my previous job on the cheap was necessary for big business to remain "competitive".
He's funding spending by selling debt (i.e. selling gilts), the Bank of England is buying the debt with QE money. i.e. it's printing money to buy Government debt because nobody else wants to buy it.
That inflates the price people will pay for gilts and makes others even less likely to buy them at the inflated price. So the Bank of England has to buy more of them to take up even more of the slack. The gilts back the £ currency, so the BoE then has to prevent the collapse of the gilt price.
So TUC is living in f***ing dream land, pardon my asterisks', UK is in for some serious pain once his QE inevitably becomes unsustainable, and if the TUC don't think there needs to be cuts, they are in a fantasy world.
To blame Lehmans for this is to confuse cause and effect. Cause was a flood of money from Bush/Cheney repeated fiscal stimulus packages and borrowing from the Fed (which also increased moneys supply), Paulsons' stimulus package was just the latest of these unfunded spending sprees.
Bernanke is hiding junk in the fed balance sheet, and refuses to let Congress see the books, how long before those assets true value comes out and Bernanke is no longer hailed as the 'savior' of the US, but it's destroyer?
Tough times ahead for the UK and US and secondary shocks for everyone else.
that there's no left or right just plain short sightedness and greed. we've had the right leaning replubicans in the USA and the left leaning labour in UK for around a decade and it all means squat. the economy is fscked beyond near term recovery anyway.
if only the irrack gamble payed off and we had lots of oil to lubricate the mess we're in.
I suspect he's figured out that whatever happens he's getting a P45 next year. The US gets this with Presidents in their eighth year, when they aren't allowed to run for re-election anyway: they have nothing to lose, they're out of office anyway, so they can hand out presidential pardons, sign dodgy executive orders etc - as long as they don't do anything too extreme and hurt their party, get impeached or become really notorious for it. Brown's taking this a big step further: his whole party's out of power in a year anyway, so why not go wild squandering every piece of currency you can print, borrow or tax in that year? He's quite happy taking the pin away as a souvenir, he knows he won't be around for the loud bang!
"Labour, Tory or LibDem"
LibDem? Really?
Personally i don't care how stuffed we are. I will vote for the one that admits we are stuffed and tells people that they will nuke all public services and the welfare system unless they stop complaining about how much taxes cost or how little they get. It's impossible for everyone to take out more than they put it.
Better the one with sense than the deluded one leading the deluded people into believing everything is their personal right and that they should get "free" health care without paying anything.
BTW: Cameron isn't the one with sense. He's a rip slightly melted wax work of Tony. His only policy is "It was all labours fault!" Can't wait to see how that works in government.
It's never been about running the country for Broon, but always about staying in power just like Blair. They don't govern. They react. They're always in the news and always seen to be "doing something" and look at the shit it's got us in. Wars that people don't want (I supported it but I think I'm in a minority there), more crimes on the books than at any time in history, people persecuted for taking photographs, being in the wrong place, or the wrong colour, or the wrong height or weight, government intrusion into every aspect of our lives. Society is falling apart, but these scum just wanted to stay in power so what do they care? And now they're doing everything they can to cripple the next government because they know it won't be them. I say it again: scum.
I'd like to be able to say that Cameron will be different. I really would like to be able to say that.
Frankly I don't understand why we need this huge government apparatus any more. The EU runs the show, Westminster is just a puppet theatre. Either take back the power it used to have or get rid of the damn thing.
Inefficiencies in government spending are mostly down to employing unnecessary people or buying unnecessary goods and services from someone else who employs people. Almost any cut the government makes will cost someone their job. Brown has spent much of his tenure boosting the ranks of captive Labour voters by creating jobs for them in Quangos and other boondoggles. I hope they understand that he is promising the rest of us that he will give them the chop. Still, would it do them any good to vote for the other parties?
"will have to cut spending in order to sort out the country's massive debt pile"
Except it's not technically true, you just tax bonuses above 25k, earnings and cap gains above 2mil a year at 95%, reduce the _extra_ capex that's gone out recently to what it was before, double the NHS budget, wait 5 years and tell the yanks to shut the hell up - and problem solved. And you get 45 million votes to boot.
Beat the crap out the rob from the poor give to the uber rich tories where it hurts them - in the wallet.
"I suspect he's figured out that whatever happens he's getting a P45 next year".
And how many NORMAL redundancies end up with a very safe seat in the House of Lords, a guaranteed income for life which many would be proud to achieve just by working for a living, a gold-plated pension pot which always increases above inflation year-on-year, and a chance to winge on to the rest of society about something you know f-all about 'cos you've never had to lead that lifestyle?
I'll pass on the wingeing bit, but could I have the rest please?
I think we should give cyclops a chance. I'm sure he could improve. It might take a baseball bat mind.
And Paris because I'd like the opportunity to make her winge (uuurrggghhhh, aaaahhhh, oooohhhh, moooorrrrreeee, etc).
It's looking like 1978 again. An over-spending Labour government, having brought the country to ruin, has recognised the reality of cuts and will now fall out with various groups of public sector workers and their unions. In the years that follow their demise, they will blame the government(s) that follow them for the mess that they created.
Last time it was inflation over 20%, loan shark interest rates and an enormous loan from the IMF with numerous strings attached (sensible fiscal policy, wage restraint, etc.). This time it's the biggest deficit since WWII, despite a few decades of North Sea oil and gas revenues.
Maybe Brown hates those around him in his party so much that he wants to ensure that Labour doesn't get another crack at government for a generation (like last time).
"Bernanke is hiding junk in the fed balance sheet, and refuses to let Congress see the books, how long before those assets true value comes out and Bernanke is no longer hailed as the 'savior' of the US, but it's destroyer?"
Dunno. You could have said the same about the banks. They were hiding junk. It came out, but the free market wasn't allowed to dish out the punishment they so richly deserved and the trouble was swept under the central banks' carpets instead. Who's to say how many times they can pull this trick before Reality finally loses patience and our money is suddenly worth less than the paper it is printed on.
The one thing all the big banker and politicians seem to agree on is that last autumn's interventions were what saved us. These are the people who got us into this mess, so you can be pretty sure that they did nothing of the sort, the trillions spent are not coming back, and we (not they) will get the bill. (You can already see this in the way the big banks have started paying bonuses again. They say it is to "retain" talent, but the evidence is that there wasn't much talent to retain. The truth is that they now reckon the bail-out is irreversible so it is safe to cash the cheques.)
So McBroon told the assembled bruvvers that "Labour will cut costs, cut inefficiencies, cut unnecessary programmes..."
Where did all these extra costs, inefficiencies, and unnecessary programmes come from in the first place? (Clue: McBroon has been running this country's finances for the past 12 years).
Need I say any more ?
This government has put more laws/crimes onto the UK statute books than had been created in the 100 years previously (there are now over 3,000 more crimes than before).
Yet we're told we live in a more unruly society than ever before. Surprising, since the number of riots are currently much reduced from the mid-80's and early 90's (poll tax, miners strike(s), other strikes etc etc).
This government increased the number of people involved in PR in number 10 almost four-fold from the previous administration.
The money spent on the (vastly) increased number of quangos could have paid off the entire national debt, had this been instigated at the beginning of their term in office.
Bah, they should be loaded into a massive trebeuchet and launched from Northern Ireland towards the US. Who cares if they make it or not.
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