Why are savings rates on the floor?

doughnutmachine

Gadfium wrote: »

As Churchill one said, "A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject"
I do not agree with your summary and you have yet to supply a single jot of evidence to support your claims.

One point is what you asked for. One point is what I gave you. If you want more, then there are many far better qualified people than I to give them to you. But I can fill a page if you want and I can be bothered. The fact that you cannot is down to you (again, an argument from ignorance or an appeal to incredulity won't cut it. They are logical fallacies).

what evidence would you actually want? i honestly thought it was public knowledge that the UK was a net contributer to the EU? you must also have noticed the amount of foreigners in the UK?

I asked for a some reasons then when you never responded i asked for just one. No one can really say if the EU has brought peace or not.... do you have any evidence the EU has brought peace?

doughnutmachine

bowlhead99 wrote: »

Is this just hippy claptrap or should I really just shut myself off and kick the immigrants out and stop subsidizing Johnny Foreigner? Decisions Decisions. Ah wait a moment, my salary would go down if my boss has a higher bill from the office cleaners because they couldn't employ Romanians and had to pay the plucky Brits £20 an hour for the same work because they ain't gettin out of bed for minimum wage. Self interest is the way forward, that's what UKIP want - the self interest of the British Man.

One could probably articulate this better and reference it to sound economic theory. If I could be bothered, I would. I suspect it would be lost on Doughnut Machine who doesn't come across as someone with a formal education in the subject.

ahhh ok, the EU is good because it transfers money to poorer countries. if the EU is really a charitable excercise should we not just just give the money to the third world? after all surely giving money to people that cant afford to eat is morally superior to giving UK taxpayers money to countries whose citizens are infamous for tax evasion?

ex chancellor Lawson seems to be against the EU... the FT said yesterday that there was no economic argument for staying in europe... if the UK had too many jobs i might agree immigrants were good, but there seem to be too few jobs.

Gadfium

doughnutmachine wrote: »

. No one can really say if the EU has brought peace or not.... do you have any evidence the EU has brought peace?

has there been a recent war in the heart of Europe?
Really, doughnutmachine, the line that you are following is starting to become ridiculous. Let me guess, your next point will be along the lines of "Aha- prove that the EU prevented a war". Where exactly are you going with this line? What standard of proof do you require? Or are you going to continue down this, frankly silly, route until you start relying on solipsism???

doughnutmachine wrote: »

what evidence would you actually want? i honestly thought it was public knowledge that the UK was a net contributer to the EU?

So what if we are? I could say that it's similar to taxes. In the same way that I pay a shedload more taxes than services I receive. My annual tax charge is considerably more than the average gross wage in the UK. I am single, no children and in 43 years have used the NHS once. If I followed your reasoning, then I should be out on the streets protesting about my tax bill and why I am a net contributer to the system. I should also be standing for election by making my complaint a central tenant of my manifesto. "Lets get rid of the drunks, the junkies, the sick from clogging up the NHS. If no ill people used the system then the waiting times would be brilliant" Why am I not doing this? Because the deal that is struck with the citizens of a state is that the richest are net contributers. The top percentile pay more to allow the bottom percentile a certain standard of health and living conditions. Its called living in a civilised state.

doughnutmachine wrote: »

you must also have noticed the amount of foreigners in the UK?

Personally I blame the Anglo-Saxons. This place was brilliant before those bast%$rds came here, invading OUR lands, taking OUR womenfolk, enforcing THEIR taxes. I mean, what have they ever done for us, eh?

Gadfium

You-kip wrote: »

You asked if there's been War in the heart of Europe depends how you define War.

Protests are not war.

You-kip wrote: »

and I'm sure when the Euro Collapse it will take the EU with it.

A lot of assumptions in there.

You-kip wrote: »

Rising powers like Brazil, India and China don't have these burdens.

Do you really believe that China's prosperity is to do with EU membership? Honestly? Or Brazil's? if you do, then go on. make your case. We are all ears.

You-kip wrote: »

To recover, we have to make the UK competitive. We cannot do that without leaving the EU.

Please explain this? And can you also explain the German economy?

bowlhead99

doughnutmachine wrote: »

ahhh ok, the EU is good because it transfers money to poorer countries. if the EU is really a charitable excercise should we not just just give the money to the third world? after all surely giving money to people that cant afford to eat is morally superior to giving UK taxpayers money to countries whose citizens are infamous for tax evasion?

You misunderstand. The EU is not good because of the fact the it costs us money to be in it. However it is arguably good despite the fact it costs us money to be in it.

The fact it costs you money to rent a stall at a fairground does not mean you should shun it and sell your candy floss from your own home on the next bank holiday. Side effect - !!!!!! who organized the fair get some cash. Principal effect - you get to sell to everyone at the fair. The fair has 500 million visitors. We might be the wealthiest people at the fair but we can still turn a profit by turning up there, paying the entrance fee, and getting involved. If someone else from the poor side of town also shows up and takes home bigger prizes, it is not a reason to stay away.

I say "arguably" because I'm not necessarily even putting across my own point of view here. There is a great deal to consider, if we were to have a referendum. I'm confident I could make a measured and informed decision when the time came. Or if I were being paid by the powers that be to consult on this issue. What I object to, is people who have not thought it through properly (or whose mental acuity is simply not sharp enough, who knows?), whose populist arguments are easily destroyed, trying to pull the economy from under me because of their inherent selfishness with a side helping of racism towards economic migrants.

ex chancellor Lawson seems to be against the EU...

Many are, and I can't say he's a complete idiot. He is an old-school political heavyweight, and his daughter turned out pretty hot for a 53 year old. Other politicians have other views though, across the spectrum.

Just because one particular man has done something of a U-turn in his feelings on merits of the EU as it has evolved, does not mean we should all bow down and follow him and reject the EU. He feels we don't get enough out of it and are not strong enough to control it to serve our own interests satisfactorily. It's certainly a view worth considering.

I might value his input more than I value yours. He's well respected, articulate and once resigned due to his preference for fixed exchange rates while his political rivals favoured floating, and now no longer feels the same way in the current climate and is willing to admit it. Admirable, but I don't have to agree with his stance just because he is capable of forming an argument better than you are.

the FT said yesterday that there was no economic argument for staying in europe...

Well in that case, if it was in the papers, it must be true ?

if the UK had too many jobs i might agree immigrants were good, but there seem to be too few jobs.

The economy got more efficient at producing things (did you hear they have computers these days, that robots can make things in factories, and information can be exchanged instantly by internet?). Less manpower is needed to make things, calculate things, grow things. Of course there are less jobs. Oh and due to better healthcare, there are more people.

And we all got used to having flatscreen TVs so we need an income of £10-50ph, while our jobs producing or programming or accounting can be outsourced to Asia where they are very keen to do it for a bowl of rice per day. But our population would happily buy a Samsung phone made in Korea (with processes outsourced all over the world) and ordered online for $200, instead of having a UK factory make it from scratch for $2000.

Consequently, yes there are too few jobs. Shutting your eyes and ears does not solve the above problems. Preventing a Polish fellow from roofing your house or a Slovak from washing dishes in your restaurant, will not fix it.

The Polish guy will spend his wages in a supermarket which will pay someone to produce some goods and some people to work in retail and generate some profits for my neighbour's pension scheme which earns dividends from Tesco, Sainsbury, Morrisons and Marks & Spencer.

The Slovak might work cash in hand and avoid a paltry amount of income tax but he will still buy a Coke from the petrol station on the way home from a hard night's work. Not only does this provide employment and help sustain the economic case for having a petrol station open at midnight (which is useful to me, on occasion); the restaurant employing the Slovak will make more profits due to his low wages, and the petrol station franchise is also getting an income when he buys a one-off Coke for 90p there - rather than bulk-buying from the American-owned Costco where another person who could afford a car to get there would have bought at a lower unit price.

So the tax on those profits together with VAT on the things he buys will be siphoned off to the government to be spent on roads and schools and a health service. Having people in your economy is a good thing for your economy.

If you gave the roofing or dishwashing jobs to me at £5ph I might take it, and the money would continue to bounce around the economy. If there was no competition for dirty tough jobs and you instead gave it to me at £50ph, given my own personal circumstances of being quite affluent and being able to get by on a fiver, I might spend the fiver as normal and then spend £25 on some consumer electronics ordered from an overseas supplier and £20 of it in an investment fund which deploys my capital in frontier economies for the next 20 years rather than the UK. We just took £45 out of the economy. Oh and generally prices would go up for everyone because even basic cleaning jobs are paying £50ph. Is that some sort of solution?

Yeah that's much better - let's close the door to migrants and close the door to the 500m friends on our doorstep, and go and find our own way. Someone will help us out if it all goes wrong, right? Ah no, because we severed economic ties with them. But that's a problem for another generation.

SavingFish

doughnutmachine wrote: »

you must also have noticed the amount of foreigners in the UK?

How many foreigners do you think there are then?
From wikipedia...

wikipedia wrote:

United Kingdom
Total population 62,008,000
Born in other EU state 2,245,000 (3.6%)
Born in a non EU state 4,767,000 (7.7%)

So EU freedom of movement accounts for less than a third of our foreign born population.

You-kip wrote:

my question is "where does it stop? With English being a second language in many big city schools where does it stop?

Actually it becomes sort of self limiting. Again from wikipedia...

wikipedia wrote:

Migration from Poland in particular has become temporary and circular in nature. In 2009, for the first time since the enlargement, more nationals of the eight Central and Eastern European states that joined the EU in 2004 left the UK than arrived.

Also, with regards taxes and who is a "net contributor"...

wikipedia wrote:

Research published by University College London in July 2009 showed that EU migrants made a "substantial net contribution to the UK fiscal system", paying 37 per cent more in taxes than they received in welfare payments.

I'm not going to criticize anyone, everyone is entitled to an opinion, but don't be brainwashed by politicians and the media. Do your own research.

bowlhead99

You-kip wrote: »

Polish banks have reported last year alone recieved 1 billion from Polish Migrants working in Britain! Can you please explain why this happened and why this wasn't spent in our country??

Sure.

Firstly, you are taking your facts from stupid sensationalist tabloid headlines. According to that bible of level-headedness the Daily Mail, Polish Immigrants Take £1bn out of the UK Economy. If you read the small print, it says that National Bank of Poland received £1.1bn from Western European countries. More than three quarters was 'thought to be from the UK'. Thought by whom? This is not a fact. But the ratio of 75% seems reasonable, as after all, a majority of Polish migrants since widening the EU have preferred England over Greece. So maybe £825m has come from UK. Maybe a little more, the facts were not published. It is just what someone thought.

The Daily Mail round this up to £1bn (interpreting "over 75%" as "maybe 91%" of the total £1.1bn cash from everywhere) for a better headline.

Still, we'll use your "facts" as gospel and say £1bn a year.

According to the 2011 census, there were 546,000 Polish speakers in the UK. So about £1800 each. It seems reasonable that on average, they might want to put a couple of grand away in Złoty for retirement, a rainy day, to help the family, whatever. The remaining £5k, £10k, £20k, £40k, £100k that they might have earned has presumably not gone back to Poland and still circulates around the UK. How many times has it been spent now?

The Polish builder did some productive work within the UK, improving the value, safety and longevity of somebody's home or office. Out of his gross income he paid some tax, bought a year's worth of shopping and a car and someone to do his bookkeeping and sent a little home. The person receiving the cash for the car and the shopping paid employees, bought materials, and things for his own home. The employees and receivers of payments for the materials also paid some tax and spent the rest. The government spent the tax revenue improving living standards and infrastructure and paying public sector salaries to provide incomes, and so it continues on and on. The multiplier effect, applied to productive work.

At the same time, you have people moaning on this forum constantly that the interest rates they are getting on their UK deposits are inadequate. They will not take any risk on it, so it just sits there relatively unproductively. They lock it up for five years at a time seeking a better rate for doing nothing. They have 50k tucked away for a rainy day with no intention of spending it in the forseeable future. And yet you moan about these low income Poles daring to move £2k overseas into a bank account. Where it might ultimately get invested in that high growth economy into improving a standard of living that can afford to buy more UK exported goods and services?

For what it's worth, I hope to make annual investments (which of course include ex-UK funds) well in excess of £2k. Should I be shot as a traitor?

Immigration is not a bad thing in some aspects its good dont get get me wrong but my question is "where does it stop? With English being a second language in many big city schools where does it stop?

This is just BS. "in some aspects its good dont get get me wrong but..." is a cowardly way of admitting the views you are going to put across in the second part of the sentence are not acceptable to the majority and you do pretty much recognise the other person is correct - but you still want to have one last try to make your shortsighted statement "where does it stop" after sweetening it up. To us adults, that doesn't work.

You could draw a parallel with someone saying, "I've nothing against blacks and gays, don't get me wrong, in fact some of my best friends are, and they're great in those fabulous musicals I like, but to be honest it might be better if we put them on an island somewhere away from the rest of us and dropped a bomb on them"

There were 200,000 births to immigrant mothers in Britain last year

Meaningless sensationalist crap. On 64 million people it's only 0.03%. How many to non-immigrant mothers ? How many to British people on council estates? How many people died this year? Were any of them immigrants? Will any of the babies born to immigrant mothers grow up to be taxpaying adults and support me in my retirement in 40 years? The Public Has A Right to Know!

Office for National Statistics reveals 4 in 10 of these children born in London

I lived in New York for a couple of years. Had I fathered a child he would have been born to an immigrant and he would have been born in New York being the largest city around, a great place to be as a visitor, and a place providing me with employment and an environment I could be productive and spend the spoils of what I produced. Now I'm back in the UK. Is the UK or the US better off than if I was still over there? In the context of the world needing to hold billions of enlightened humans, is it good that I've lived in more than one culture?

Fertility rates for non-UK born women are higher than for those born here

Excellent, and the strong family values in those cultures will ensure their numerous children will financially support them into old age rather than putting them in a home. You can spin any statistic absolutely any way you want.

The Question is when is Enough is Enough.

Spoken like a true UKIP/ BNP pamphlet. Capital letters for the Important Words too. That will help indoctrinate the newcomers to the Cause. I admire your passion for bigotry, though I don't share it.

You-kip

Oh my days I've heard it all now as you've spoilt a completely decent debate with a childish Quote mentioning those scummy BNP party.

Its obvious now that if you're white and English and you mention that you want out of the EU it means your a Racist. (Well Done)

bowlhead99

To be honest, it was pretty childish of me to try and give you the decency of a debate. I should have just sat back and let the thread die out while you and doughnutmachine yabbered on for a bit and then gave up. Sorry about that.

As mentioned, I don't necessarily argue for or against our membership of the EU in its current form, but I'm more than happy to play devil's advocate in the face of naivety to expose someone as a fool.

Did you say you were white and English? That's none of my business. I just saw you coming up with ill-thought-out opinions towards those whose family history in the UK didn't go back many generations, and wondered if that was justifiable. From your comments here, you clearly believe in your cause, broadly in line with UKIP manifesto quotes:

"...We will no longer be governed by an undemocratic and autocratic European Union or ruled by its unelected bureaucrats, commissioners, multiple presidents and judges..."

"...We will return power to the men and women of Britain, the taxpayers, pensioners, mums and dads and workers, and remove it from the unelected commissioners in Europe..."

"...Europe
Withdrawal from the European Union would therefore be the most important single foundation stone of our rebuilt British democracy. Without it, virtually nothing can be achieved..."

"...Immigration – A crisis without parallel
Britain’s very existence today is threatened by immigration..."

Clearly you know your party line pretty well. I take your points.

Oh wait there must have been a mix-up. The first quote was from the front page of the UKIP 2010 General Election Manifesto. But the last three were from the BNP 2005 General Election Manifesto.

I don't know how I could ever have confused the two. Apologies.

talexuser

doughnutmachine wrote: »

ex chancellor Lawson seems to be against the EU.

Wasn't he the chap who had the great idea of following the exchange rate mechanism? That turned out well! Also I seem to remember the "Lawson Boom" with 8% inflation and 15% interest rates and nearly doubling unemployment! Obviously a man to be taken seriously.