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Kwak

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Sep 11, 2014
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Ah, was wondering when their meetings with american right-wing culture war moguls would bear fruit in policy form. This must be phase two of their crypto-fascist throttling, after making it clear teachers are now barred from presenting material critical of our present capitalist systemic trap. This fucking sordid country hiding behind smiles and politeness while pushing fascism yet again, repeating history as long as it keeps them and their unimaginably rich buddies clutching into all the power and wealth they can. The rich will always pick fascism over socialism or even minor fucking progress as long as they continue filling their purses. There isn't a single bit of hope for the future left.
There's always the hope of system-wide collapse.
 
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CM156

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There's always the hope of system-wide collapse.
Like the Bronze Age? Hope someone leaves some information behind to make it easier for archeologists of the future to decipher our writing.
 
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Agema

You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver
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Except the 26% tax rate wasn't the only tax

Increasing total taxation revenue by £80 billion amounts to 4% GDP. To put that in perspective, the government currently pulls in 37% GDP in revenue through taxation. Going up to 41% GDP would still only leave the UK around the middle of European countries, below Italy, France, Belgium, Austria, etc.

As for the publicly owned utilities, they weren't doing well before in many cases and were being run inefficiently and not actually making money but costing more money to keep running.
Not without some truth. However, in order to sell them off, the government reformed them to make them profitable, otherwise the private sector would be unwilling to shell out for them. So the government always could have run them efficiently and profitably had it wanted.

Secondly, as the joke goes, the UK was the only country to privatise its utilities and have them still owned by the state - albeit the states of Germany and France. Because the utilities were sold off to European utility companies whose governments still in large part owned them. And there we see another way we could have run our utilities efficiently and for profit. But it's not the British - well, Conservative Party - way. For all the pragmatic talk, the Tories have been intensely ideological and in thrall to the finance sector ever since Thatcher, and there is no problem they think cannot be solved by privatisation, deregulation and lower taxes.
 

Dalisclock

Making lemons combustible again
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Like the Bronze Age? Hope someone leaves some information behind to make it easier for archeologists of the future to decipher our writing.
I sure they will but it'll all be digital so until they figure out to way to decipher our data before it become inevitably corrupted.....
 

Gordon_4

The Big Engine
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I sure they will but it'll all be digital so until they figure out to way to decipher our data before it become inevitably corrupted.....
Still going to need a proverbial Rosetta Stone: half the internet communicates in meme images like they're shitty hieroglyphics as it is.
 
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Silvanus

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Except the 26% tax rate wasn't the only tax

So, a one-off windfall tax, an income tax rate increase, and a closure of the current system allowing multinational companies to hide assets overseas to avoid existing taxes.

These all seem perfectly reasonable. The income tax rate was also much higher under almost every government pre-1990.


As for the second one yes you can argue it's being abused with bonuses and shares etc instead of direct pay however it would also hit people who are / were deemed wealthy due to what they owned but in reality weren't that well off financially. E.G. the family of a friend of mine at Uni who growing up lived in a 2 bedroom house but due to the location and the architecture of the house it was valued at £1 Million. Another person I know owns a £1.5 Million 2 bedroom cottage. It's so expensive because of location and perceived desirability of living in what is almost a gated community.
....So, they're people that have exceptionally valuable assets. Yeah, that's wealth.

As for the publicly owned utilities, they weren't doing well before in many cases and were being run inefficiently and not actually making money but costing more money to keep running.
Are you aware of the current system? They're performing like dogshit. The railways continued to make a profit throughout the recession, and yet didn't reinvest that money in the service: they just increased shareholder dividends and increased the fares even further.

And they still cost the public inordinate amounts of money to keep running. The only difference is that most of the money doesn't even go to the service itself.
 

Dwarvenhobble

Is on the Gin
May 26, 2020
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....So, they're people that have exceptionally valuable assets. Yeah, that's wealth.
So do you tax the people who have a family estate home but 0 real cash who spend most of their cash stopping the home crumbling around them? Who then picks up the home and the tab for maintaining and repairing them then? How about the people who due to the passage of time happen to have a valuable family heirloom like a valuable painting or something? Are they now obliged to sell it off or face taxes because their family chose to hold onto it down the years having bought it originally for almost nothing?

That's why wealth vs wages are different things.
 

Baffle

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Oct 22, 2016
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So do you tax the people who have a family estate home but 0 real cash who spend most of their cash stopping the home crumbling around them?
Yes.

Who then picks up the home and the tab for maintaining and repairing them then?
A wealthy person who can afford it. There isn't a shortage.

How about the people who due to the passage of time happen to have a valuable family heirloom like a valuable painting or something? Are they now obliged to sell it off or face taxes because their family chose to hold onto it down the years having bought it originally for almost nothing?
Yes.
 

Agema

You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver
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So do you tax the people who have a family estate home but 0 real cash who spend most of their cash stopping the
home crumbling around them?
Yes.

Who then picks up the home and the tab for maintaining and repairing them then?
Some richer person who has got the money. If it's a historic house, the National Trust. Maybe just knock it down and build a new one.

How about the people who due to the passage of time happen to have a valuable family heirloom like a valuable painting or something? Are they now obliged to sell it off or face taxes because their family chose to hold onto it down the years having bought it originally for almost nothing?
Yes.

It is absurd to think that because some ancestor back in time was rich, the family thereafter should always be allowed to stay rich.
 

Silvanus

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So do you tax the people who have a family estate home but 0 real cash who spend most of their cash stopping the home crumbling around them? Who then picks up the home and the tab for maintaining and repairing them then? How about the people who due to the passage of time happen to have a valuable family heirloom like a valuable painting or something? Are they now obliged to sell it off or face taxes because their family chose to hold onto it down the years having bought it originally for almost nothing?

That's why wealth vs wages are different things.
How about we take multiple things into account when calculating tax rather than going 100% in one direction?