Tax This!

The real elephant in the room here is foreign aid and the IMF.

Let's turn this around and look at the UK's debt level. Let's now subtract the money the UK owes the IMF from the money the IMF owes the UK. Now let's make the IMF pay back every damned penny. And let's further take back 100% of any profits earned by any bailed-out bank until every damned penny (plus interest - currently set at 0.5% which is lucky for the banks) is back in the British Treasury.

Then there's foreign aid. Our elected representatives are supposed to look out for our best interests, not those of some other nation. It's high time the US and UK treated other nations' citizens the way they treat their own, and treat their own instead the way they treat other nations'. We have poverty, worklessness and dole-wallowers in our country that needs to be sorted before we can go around nursemaiding the world. We cut budgets massively for public sector projects, and yet our government is happy to throw even MORE money at other countries. "Oh but these countries are war-torn". Yeah, so their warlords will take all that stuff away from the people anyway, to pay for a new layer of gold-leaf on their AK-47. "Oh, but they're starving." So teach them how to farm. "But they have no water". So move.

Unemployment in the UK is about 3-4%. In some areas as high as 10%. These dole-queues are unsustainable. Many have been lounging on incapacity and disability benefits for years, and many are capable of working. The dole-queues are full of unemployed whose fault it isn't (redundancy, lack of jobs, etc). Graduate unemployment is something like 40% now. And nowhere's taking on.
The second-bitterest irony is that it's cheaper to pay someone to sign on than it is to give them a public-sector wage. The bitterest? That many full-time workers don't even earn the "living wage" - 17,000 (per person for a married couple - 21,000 for a single person!) as the government survey has dictated it. Minimum wage gives 12,000. The 'average' wage (by mean and median) is about 21,000. But what about mode (i.e., most common)? I expect it's somewhere nearer that 12,000 mark, meaning most people are earning less than the government statistics say it is possible to live on. Those who are unemployed cannot get out of this rut as they live hand-to-mouth and cannot possibly afford to do anything other than continue to live on it. £200 a week (fairly common amount of take-home pay after taxes are deducted) will not cover rent, bills, council tax (tax on the home, to you Americans). Then you have to try to find some way of eating.

I am a police officer in training. I earn just over 22,000. This goes to 25,000 when I finish training which is pretty mediocre pay (compared to the money that could potentially be earned sat behind a desk tapping on a keyboard 8 hours a day as a cog in a wheel) considering I could be stabbed or shot by some street scum. Squaddies have it even worse - 16,000 basic pay for a Private, who could find himself in Afghanistan getting his face blown off by an IED. On the other end of the scale, David Scameron gets 160,000 a year for legally-sanctioned robbery (and unfortunately it's in my remit to make sure nothing happens to this high-born cretin). Wayne Rooney and his syphillitic ilk earn upward of 300,000 a week for doing - pardon my French - FUCK ALL. The people who collect the rubbish every week, or who ensure we get our letters telling us how badly we're being screwed this month, or who keep the streets and the country safe, and who keep us looked after while we're in hospital (GPs get way too much, mostly because their practices are run by them rather than the NHS - though they should of course get a tidy wage for the work they do. Other doctors get plenty as well. Nurses should get way more for the crap they have to deal with), or those who keep the shit from overflowing onto our streets and into our houses, or those who keep our country fed and watered should all, by and large, do better than what they do. I.e., the people who actually earn the money are the ones who deserve it. Those who actually have it do not earn it, they siphon it. Insurance, stocks and shares, banking. These people do not earn their wages - they siphon them.

Contrary to popular belief, we do not live in a meritocracy. We live in a moneyocracy, where those who are best at wasting (other people's - they wouldn't be rich if they wasted their own) money tend to be given more. Us bottom-rung bastards get shafted for everything bad that happens, while at the top of the tree, people are obviously laughing at us. People say we can't blame Thatcher. Yes we can - most people had a job until she closed the pits and factories, and left the country reliant on Europe, Taiwan and India. It's a bad state of affairs when the majority of people work in call centres and offices doing non-jobs because there are no meaningful ones for them to do.

I would not begrudge this state of affairs, or the fat-cats their cream, if the stray mangy alley-cats who make up 85-90% of the population could afford to not be mangy or live in the alley.

This applies to America too, although most of my examples are British in origin - the richest country on Earth has tent-towns of homeless people who hold down 40-hour-a-week jobs and yet still cannot afford to buy or even RENT a house, while a small percentage people can afford to be massaged with diamonds and pay thousands of dollars for a steak, or buy a bag for which twice my annual wage is charged (it cannot be worth that much by any stretch of the imagination).

Tell me how this is fair.