'What should I ask George Osborne? Question suggestions wanted.' blog discussion

kara_dragsta

If the MPS are to be allowed to get away with non repayment of expenses, shouldnt everybody who has suffered overpayments of tax credits also be allowed to not repay this money, sine the hardship it has caused is far and away above what the Mps have had to deal with

chrisd9989

I am 56 and was a victim of the Equitable Life debacle.

Worse for me and everyone else with a private pension was Gordon Brown's ruinous tax raid on pension funds, which has destroyed the retirement hopes of millions of diligent savers.

Can you please ask George Osborne if he intends to cease this annual raid on these funds and whether he will ensure that the skewed pension arrangements for public sector workers is corrected so that they are not given such advantageous pension terms at the expense of the private sector.

I am sure that not everyone is aware that at least 30% of what we pay in council tax goes to fund private sector worker pensions, not services, and the percentage will increase if something radical is not done soon.

ThinkingOfLinking

I don't mean this to sound insensitive but given the crippling financial hardships many people in this country face, and then seeing how quickly the government was able to whip up £50,000,000 to help Haiti out...

Of course Haiti is in the grip of a massive disaster but what about the people over here who are in urgent need of help too?

Graham1

In Feb 2009 he announced that the Conservatives would abolish tax on savings interest income for basic rate taxpayers. This policy has been quietly dropped without any public announcement. Will he consider reinstating it as a way of partially compensating savers who have been sacrificed to fight the recession.

roger196

What are his views on the propostion that the bank bailout of £200 Billion should be paid by the bankers rather than the general body of taxpayers. This would mean reclaiming all salaries, bonuses etc in excess of £100,000 per year over the last ten years from those in the banking sector. The principle is that the polluter pays.

cliveoram

Hi Martin

Why is the personal allowance far less than anyone can exist on? I pay tax on meagre earnings and then claim back almost all of it in Benefit. I have the right tax code, my employer pays someone who deducts the correct tax and NI and my wife is in exactly the same situation. If PA was at a sensible level then we would both pay a small amount of tax but would be saved the bureaucracy of claiming benefit as well as the huge savings that would be made by both HMRC and the BA

malcolm_bannister

MSE_Penelope wrote: »

This is the discussion to link on the back of Martin's blog. Please read the blog first, as this discussion follows it.

R

Please click reply to discuss below.

The percentage method of awarding pay increases favours the better off eg:- 3% for a pensioner is worth about £2 a week and 3% for a politician, for example is worth about £20 a week, the higher your earnings the higher your increase, which compounds the gap year on year. A monetary amount would be much fairer, we all have to pay the same amount for food and commodities so we need a fairer system before we end up back in the middle ages.Will your party address this problem?

dots_thots

Retro_Bunny wrote: »

Two questions for George Osbourne.

Please ask him if he intends to scrap copper coins (1p and 2p), and round all prices off to the nearest 5p (like in Australia)?

I'd love to know how much it costs the Royal Mint to produce 1p and 2p, and how many are lost. The metal costs must be high...

Post-1990 copper coins are actually copper-plated steel, the copper value of a pre-1991 2p is about 3p.

Governments routinely re-issue cheaper currency and confiscate the old. They did it with silver shillings and florins etc. It's called seigniorage.

Anyone following Gresham's law when the silver was changed to cupro-nickel, would have old 10ps worth around £1.80 now if they melted them, which is obviously illegal - precisely why legal-tender laws were created to forcefully make you comply with your own burglary.

redux

dots_thots wrote: »

Anyone following Gresham's law when the silver was changed to cupro-nickel, would have old 10ps worth around £1.80 now if they melted them, which is obviously illegal - precisely why legal-tender laws were created to forcefully make you comply with your own burglary.

Given that the silver content dropped to 50% in the 1920s and to nil in 1947, there aren't likely to be many around, and you'd have got better returns on other investments

dots_thots

tumbo wrote: »

can you ask him why the torys have not capitalised on the gold issue ie,
if as i have read is true that brown sold our gold reserves bought them back for much than they were sold for then sold them again at an even more massive loss, even when a pleb like me researches cause and effects of recession it would appear more than prudent to keep the gold under the bed, now its at its highest and we could do with its value now.
why do the torys not raise this issue with a slogan that us normal folk would understand, like. "HOW CAN YOU VOTE FOR A BUFFOON SUCH AS BROWN AND HIS CRONIES WHO CREATED THIS MESS GAVE AWAY THE FAMILY SILVER TWICE AND NOW ATTEMPTS TO TELL US HE AND HIS ARE THE BEST OPTION TO GET US OUT"
he and his cronies should be sacked and asset stripped!

Contrary to popular belief gold is still nowhere near it's real high. $850 in todays money would be about $2300 based on the laughable CPI measures of the government which uses substitution and hedonic adjustments to make it lower. Based on how inflation used to be calculated, it would take $6500 US dollars to buy 850 1980 dollars.

Also, that old measure was before modern derivative products; it's my sincere belief that derivatives were created to soak up all the liquidity the Fed and other central banks have created instead of it going into real assets and driving prices up to phenomenal levels. I mean, estimates of derivatives range from 500 trillion to 1.5 quadrillion! Imagine that buying real stuff and taking delivery!

Calculated on the currency monetary base, I suspect gold would have to top at least $15000/toz. to cover all the dollars in circulation on the smallest measure of money supply, and well over $100,000 to take account of the broadest measure.

I think Brown was no idiot with the gold sales, he deliberately sold them to strengthen the dollar. Who repeatedly announces beforehand they're going to dump a large amount of something into the market? It's precisely the opposite of what you would do if you wanted a good price. It makes no sense unless you look at it from the opposite point of view; then it makes perfect sense.

It's all part of Gibson's paradox you see, the price of gold tends to move inversely to interest rates, so you have to hold gold down to ensure you have interest rates lower than the free-market would allow. They used to openly fix the price of gold with the London gold pool. Now they do it by short-selling gold that doesn't exist.