Fuengirola Saint

+1.

Come on mate, you know exactly what i mean, we seem to have hit a dead end here,. With Wes coming out with the old Soviet jokes as well, Lets just accept that your free market utopia wouldn´t work without a nice old fashioned dose of government intervention.

In the other countries was it their government´s obsessions as well?

This governments obsession? what about the previous one? They were as bad, i´m not defending this government´s conduct re the banking sector but to try and blame just the government for this mess just shows how obsessed with it you are.

When will you lot learn, Spains government is as socialist as New Labour i.e NOT SOCIALIST. Sorry to shout but i felt it necessary to get the point over as you will insist on calling these governments socialist. It is capitalisms failures that have got us into this mess stop deluding yourselves, capitalism needs and wants high unemployment to keep wage demands down. If a society cannot or does not want to deliver full employment in this day and age then i´m afraid it has failed miserably.

Exactamundo! I afraid the right wingers amongst us cannot see further than their wallet or next tax cut.

They don´t create decent jobs with good pay levels though do they? Where were these jobs in the halcyon days that were the deregulated 80´s and 90´s? it´s just a load of codswallop to justify grabbing more for themselves

God there are some T w a t s on this forum

Whatever

You make some well made points, but reading the text above people will bleat about being to highly taxed or regulated but they generally move factories abroad for lower labour costs and higher profits,nothing more. I don´t feel envy, i don´t really care about the rich because i know in reality i cannot change the way the world is run but i would still prefer a socialist system where people work for the good of the majority instead of the minority. Sorry thats just my view.

He doesn´t have a clue, thinks New Labour are Socialist and gets his political opinions from the Daily Express

High horse for Gemmel! I was just saying that i thought that amount was enough for a comfortable lifestyle.

I don´t know for sure but i think a lot of it is people playing the system. Some people really know what they are about when it comes to benefits. I´ve got a mate back in England who is an alcoholic, he was on JSA being out of work at the time temporarily, then they put him on incapacity benefit because of his alcoholism and voila an instant 20 pounds a week pay rise

I understand what you are trying to say but as i said before who needs much more than €100,000 a year to live a comfortable life, What rates of taxation do you think are fair then?, because there have been so many examples of tax rises for the poorest, i.e VAT on heating up from 5% to 17.5% Why? What heartless **** thought that one up? This governments total **** up on the 10 p rate, don´t even get me started on the poll tax again ;-)

That has always happened,not saying it´s right but it was happening under the Tories as this part of the very same article you pointed me to says and i quote "The last Tory government was damaged by the revelation that people were being pushed off the unemployment roll and onto incapacity benefit to massage the numbers in their favour. We need to look very carefully at what is going on to make sure that the same sleight of hand is not now happening again. I have written to the Minister of State for Work asking her to provide the Government's response to this very serious charge." I really thought you had found evidence that the government had found a new way to massage the figures I remember the YTS in the 80´s. did exactly the same.

I remember the 80´s as a time of chronic unemployment, whole communities laid to waste and the start of the dependency culture that the Daily Mail and Express love to bang on about. Nigel Lawson may have said it was to encourage people to stay in Britain but i think it had a lot to do with keeping more money for themselves

Ah the trickle down effect,that worked wonders in the 80´s eh? Look we are not going to agree, you believe that the rich shouldn´t be taxed at a higher rate and i do i´m afraid. In reality, who needs more than €100,000 a year to live on?

Because, rich man gets tax cut, at the same time poor man gets tax rise, work it out

You are a nutter, you are the one that said in the first place that the government massaged the figures downwards and i said give me one example of this happening, then you put the onus on me to prove otherwise. I will say this only one more time,the government did change the way the figures were worked out by using the ILO figures and not the JSA claimant count used by the previous government, thus adding around 700,000 to the unemployment count.

Oh grow up

No it isn´t fair that the little old lady next door pays more, thats why she gets a 25% discount

No it isn´t fair that the little old lady next door pays more, thats why she gets a 25% discount

When you answer my question that i put to you about Labour massaging the unemployment figures, you implied they had manipulated them to make them lower,you seem to have conveniently ignored that question considering you brought it up in the first place as an answer to ecuk´s post