Shameless labour

TheMoneySpider

abaxas wrote: »

Or as the millions of lazy, pretending to be disabled, jobless slackers are about to find out.

You see I genuinely believe that deep down Tories will always think that unemployment is a lifestyle choice.

How quickly we forgot eh. First bump in the road and we handed the sledgehammer back to the sons of Thatcher.

IronWolf

You do all realise that Labour would have made the exact same cuts sooner or later. With a deficit of well over £100bn the cuts later would have been EVEN WORSE because you have an extra ~£20-50bn to cut for the additional interest payments, and if our credit rating also got slashed from AAA (very likely if we had made no effort to cut the deficit) you can add on another £20bn for increased interest.

The fact is the government has potential liabailiaties of around £2.5tn, almost 150% of GDP, best case scenario is that the bad loans dont get defaulted and we have just over £1tn of debt to repay.

Thats substainable, but adding £0.1tn onto that every year is not. EVERYBODY knows this, LABOUR INCLUDED, they are simply taking the typical opposition route of critising everything bad that comes from the cuts, when they know damn well that the cuts were inevitable, and they would have had to make deeper cuts over the long run.

abaxas

TheMoneySpider wrote: »

You see I genuinely believe that deep down Tories will always think that unemployment is a lifestyle choice.

How quickly we forgot eh. First bump in the road and we handed the sledgehammer back to the sons of Thatcher.

Obviously you have never been on that position or had friends who chose this as they career path.

Come back to the real world and stop reading the Guardian.

nickmason

Flyboy152 wrote: »

Well, give them the job, but pay them a decent living wage to do it. It can't be that difficult a concept to comprehend for this government.

A lot of the time, this is precisely what happens. The Big Society concept is trying to address the problem that government (and yes, there's an ideological thread to this) is hugely inefficient. A more efficient way of providing services is through allowing smaller charities to do it (and yes, they do pay people - often slightly better than the state does, in fact) and/or voluntary groups.

My parents have spent the last 20-30 years doing voluntary work; my mother taking disabled children riding, my father looking after war widows and veterans etc, as just some examples. And if that sounds all very bucolic and leafy idyll, I also give my time amongst other things to a charity that provides advocacy services to people with learning difficulties. Behind all of this voluntary work there are professionals, but as organisations they are more efficient at delivering this because they engage people to volunteer. The government, local or central, has to pay people. And manage them.

To be fair, one of the problems of the Big Society premise is that it does work better where there is some wealth - or in a more nuanced fashion, where there are fewer "physically demanding" jobs - because there are more people willing and able to give their time.

But what the government is trying to remind people of is that it's more rewarding to give your time - it's a good habit. And what's more, it - thinking of us all together - leaves more money in our pockets as we don't need to tax so much, and so supports our economy and keeps us from the sclerotic macro-economic mess that we're heading towards.

Flyboy152

abaxas wrote: »

Typical letftie response.

If in doubt insult as you beleive you are in some kind of 'intelligentsia'.

Socialism is fine, but it must come with responsibility.

Do you really want the list of insults and puerile nonsense delivered by you and your fellow Tories?

Here's one you might just remember:

abaxas wrote: »

Or as the millions of lazy, pretending to be disabled, jobless slackers are about to find out.

nickmason

abaxas wrote: »

What a great idea, actually help those who need help.

But with a caveat, dont help anybody who ever tries to use the word 'rights'.

If they mention 'rights' they get nowt.

Hang on. Baby and bathwater. Rights do exist. We've been through this before, and frankly rights are pretty much the fabric of what keeps us stable as a society without entering into a police state.

Where you might be ahem - correct - is that people who don't really think what those rights mean, or think that Sky+ is a right, could do with some more understanding.

abaxas

Flyboy152 wrote: »

Do you really want the list of insults and puerile nonsense delivered by you and your fellow Tories?

Here's one you might just remember:

If you dont know of the millions of people who have chosen not to work as a career path, I worry if you having any cognitive functions at all.

These people are not some socialist fiction, they are a fact.

Flyboy152

IronWolf wrote: »

You do all realise that Labour would have made the exact same cuts sooner or later. With a deficit of well over £100bn the cuts later would have been EVEN WORSE because you have an extra ~£20-50bn to cut for the additional interest payments, and if our credit rating also got slashed from AAA (very likely if we had made no effort to cut the deficit) you can add on another £20bn for increased interest.

The fact is the government has potential liabailiaties of around £2.5tn, almost 150% of GDP, best case scenario is that the bad loans dont get defaulted and we have just over £1tn of debt to repay.

Thats substainable, but adding £0.1tn onto that every year is not. EVERYBODY knows this, LABOUR INCLUDED, they are simply taking the typical opposition route of critising everything bad that comes from the cuts, when they know damn well that the cuts were inevitable, and they would have had to make deeper cuts over the long run.

And that is the difference between the ideologies of the Tories and the understanding of the Labour party.

nickmason

TheMoneySpider wrote: »

You see I genuinely believe that deep down Tories will always think that unemployment is a lifestyle choice.

How quickly we forgot eh. First bump in the road and we handed the sledgehammer back to the sons of Thatcher.

Almost everyone in the country thinks that unemployment is a lifestyle choice for some, and a dreadful, cancerous hell for others.

The caracaturing of Tories as thinking that this is a binary, black/white issue, helps no one; just as it doesn't help to argue that Labour didn't recognise that there was benefit fraud.

Flyboy152

abaxas wrote: »

If you dont know of the millions of people who have chosen not to work as a career path, I worry if you having any cognitive functions at all.

These people are not some socialist fiction, they are a fact.

Who are they then? Remember, you wrote:

the millions of lazy, pretending to be disabled, jobless slackers

So, where are the "millions."