Originally Posted by stacker1

Originally Posted by exbleep

France pays the most then Germany. UK is third highest contributor but only just ahead of Italy.

Edited to say: France and German contributions are way more than UK.

Not unless its changed in the last 2 years

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,3444385,00.html

Page 5 of http://register.consilium.europa.eu/...15445.en09.pdf
gives the 2010 contributions and France is higher.
Of course, this doesn't tell the whole story. Whilst France is the highest contributor, it gets more back so is actually a lower net contributor than Germany.
According to a Danish EU site (figures only available to 2007) Britain is the second highest net contributor after Germany.
http://www.eu-oplysningen.dk/euo_en/spsv/all/79/

Originally Posted by nigegilb

Funny thing is we have already reached the Dennis Healey socialist moment, that is, comes a point when raising taxes no longer increases revenue merely changes behaviour. So how are the socialist scum going to bring down the deficit?

Ashie? What are your friends saying?

I assume your red mates are planning to take away pension relief for starters. Gordon Brown talks about aspirations, what exactly would he know about that?

I believe they're planning a tin-foil hat tax on rightists posting on ARRSE. But that might just be an extrapolation.

This fact just highlights the gross incompetence's of our present Labour Government!
Mind you, most M.Ps have MUCH MORE interest in what they can get for themselves these days, rather than the state of our country!
Sad but true.

Originally Posted by ashie

I believe they're planning a tin-foil hat tax on rightists posting on ARRSE. But that might just be an extrapolation.

That sounds nasty!

Did it hurt much when you had yours done?

Originally Posted by ashie

Originally Posted by nigegilb

Funny thing is we have already reached the Dennis Healey socialist moment, that is, comes a point when raising taxes no longer increases revenue merely changes behaviour. So how are the socialist scum going to bring down the deficit?

I believe they're planning a tin-foil hat tax on rightists posting on ARRSE. But that might just be an extrapolation.

No need for that. All is well. Nothing to worry about.

Under control because the need to cut public spending is, according to the cretin who currently sits in No. 10, a myth

"The great myth the right are spreading through their friends in the press is that government caused this crisis and that government spending is prolonging it."

"They seek to frighten us with the present level of the deficit but mention neither the automatic reduction that would be achieved as and when growth is resumed, nor the effects of growth on investor confidence for the good of the British people."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/news...ng-a-myth.html

Well now that really is rich: nothing to do with us and no need to worry because everything will by some unexplained process be OK (some day in the unspecified future) irrespective of the vast funding costs associated with having generated and continuing to generate crippling levels of public debt.

(Caution: Bunker Mentality at work.)

'A myth'! Brown is now wholly deluded and is obviously in need of clinical help.

An interesting quip I read somewhere (please forgive non-attribution) stated that a journalist, entertaining a government minister to lunch, asked him what would be the first thing that Labour would do if they won the forthcoming election.

Having recovered from a choking fit the minister replied: get rid of Brown!

Happy days!

Originally Posted by nigegilb

Funny thing is we have already reached the Dennis Healey socialist moment, that is, comes a point when raising taxes no longer increases revenue merely changes behaviour. So how are the socialist scum going to bring down the deficit?

Ashie? What are your friends saying?

I assume your red mates are planning to take away pension relief for starters. Gordon Brown talks about aspirations, what exactly would he know about that?

Ah - the old Laffer Curve. Or is it Laafer Curve? Buggirt if I know.

We've gone far beyond the peak of the curve. Tax revenues are dropping without any help from HMRC, rather than in response to tax rate rises. We're now in the rarely entered part of the curve where tax rates are high enough to damage the economy while tax revenues are falling like a stone.

Dennis Healy famously went cap in hand to the IMF for a loan last time Labour bankrupted Britain by funding the nationalised industries. IIRC, UK debt then was about half what it is now.

Now, times have changed. In addition to being the second biggest contributor to the EU (the Sicillian Mafia wont fund itself you know). We're the fourth biggest contributor to the IMF (the King of Swaziland's fleet of BMWs wont buy their own road tax either). Gordon's largesse knows no bounds.

The odd £13 million to cure African Goat Plague (I kid ye not) and a billion here and there to save the planet from global warming are merely slightly skid marked Y-fronts in the face of Gordon's fiscal dysentery.

I almost felt sorry for the unionistas and their brass band standing outside the Corus steelworks last night as the blast furnace was switched off for the first, and last, time. That billion Gordon gave away last month to 'save poor nations from climate change' would have kept the plant afloat for 6 years!

With corporation tax rates of nearly double the OECD average and a requirement to find £100 million worth of carbon credits every year (to save the planet natch), Tata moving the business back to an Indian Special Economic Zone where corporation tax is zero and where you can spew as much pollution as you like was really a no brainer.

Add the fact that Tata can now sell this year's carbon credits that Gordon gave them for free last year and you've got a Labour government giving a British company £100 million quid to make its workers redundant and relocate to an Asian tax haven.

There is a growing school of thought that nobody is stupid enough to do that by accident. Jobs are being exported to India and UK companies get massive tax breaks to replace UK staff with Indian nationals in the UK because Gordon has decreed that the Indians deserve the jobs more than us Brits do.

Good old Gordon. Dave really must find a way to prosecute him after the election.

How the Curse of Jonah Brown blights everything:

Saturday: "They seek to frighten us with the present level of the deficit but mention neither the automatic reduction that would be achieved as and when growth is resumed, nor the effects of growth on investor confidence for the good of the British people."

Monday: "Even though the UK has technically emerged out of recession, the report warns that there will be "no return to business as usual" for some time to come.

The report accuses UK boardrooms of being "blinkered", following research that showed almost half of UK board directors – 44pc – predict that their companies would return to "pre-recession normality" and that their businesses would not fundamentally change in the next five years."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/e...recession.html

So businesses (and also the Government) have blinded themselves to the very obvious fact that there has been a behavioural shift by consumers because the debt funded boom is over.

We have for example way too many large (debt funded) shopping centres all trying to sell sh1t that nobody really wants any more because they are skint or being properly cautious (unlike our Government) and trying to pay down their credit cards and overdrafts.

There can be no "return to normal" because the past debt boom norm is a busted flush. Businesses need to adapt to that or die and so does the UK Government. Yet still our man is cr@pping on about the need to reduce public spending being a myth!

Whoever wins the next election, there is no option: the axe will have to fall very hard.

To be fair to Dennis Healey, to his immense credit, he did try to address the budget deficit by trying to rein in spending and get the UK economy back under control after the lunacy of his government's mis-management. He put in place the mechanisms which the incoming Conservatives built on but faced the backlash from his own party and the unions.

Healey put country before party and probably cost the Labour Party the election. What is the chance of Brown and Darling doing the same?

This really is only half the story. The biggest single problem, which sits like an elephant in the room, is PFI. Any measure of deficit or debt is merely a drop in the ocean. PFI is killing the public services and will eventually destroy our country.

Unfortunately, no government is going to come in and immediately get rid of it - because they would then be unable to build any new buildings and service provision and innovation would collapse.

So we are stuck with it. I will not vote for any party that does not promise to get rid of PFI. Nothing else is doing us greater damage.