Whitey Grandad

I've just skimmed through it because I'm off on holiday tomorrow, but it does have some twisted logic in places and often muddles the distinction between public employees' benefits and state hand-outs. You are right to point out that the current contributions are paying for current pensions so I'm sorry VFTT, your 6.5% is not going towards your own pension. The problem is not necessarily the size of the pensions but the quantity of them, and they are all 'unfunded'. My gripe is that when Brown raided the private pensions and brought the whole system crashing down, there was not an equivalent contribution from the public sector. I don't know where this retire at 65 comes from, I know lots of ex Local Authority people who have taken retirement earlier than that.

Oops, I almost forgot. There's one other big target and that is Public Sector pensions. Enormous sums have been taken from the private sector and maybe it's time to make the Public Sector employees start to contribute something towards theirs.

As a wise man once said, 'if I were you I wouldn't start from here'. I don't pretend to have the answers, but if we carry on like this we shall be spending all our income on interest payments before very long. Inflation is the obvious answer, but that wipes out savings.

That is the contentious part. The government has claimed that it is off balance but the liabilities are still there, as we saw with Railtrack.

From the cash flow p0int of view, at the moment it's something like £150,000,000,000 excess spending over receipts per year. Our interest payments at the moment are £43,000,000,000 per year. I don't think anybody has been proposing cuts of that order. From the balance sheet, there are also the PFI liabilities that should be included.

I think it's a very noble of Avram to sacrifice this wonderful job of his in order to save the club a few pennies.

It's good to see that someone is taking it seriously. (not)

The problem is bad enough now. The trouble is that at current rates we shall overtake all of them in a few years.

The FL make the rules and they can do what they like, as we found out to our cost.

Then he must also have lived next to me!

Thanks, but I take no pleasure in it. Unfortunately the money has already been spent and now we have to pay back the borrowing. At the moment it is £43billion a year and rising.

The staple items are not subject to VAT. What's fair about income tax where some people pay nothing and some pay 50%?

It was around the time that Ball took charge. Ivan used to live in the same close as me and his daughters played with my kids so I often used to chat to him. I said that I was surprised that he hadn't applied. He said that he had, but that he hadn't even received a reply. He was pretty disgusted about that.

He applied for the job of manager and never even got a reply.

It'll go up to 20% and stay there. Dropping it to 15% was a mistake in my opinion. It makes more sense to tax spending instead of earning.

And the taxes were the death of others.

What on earth are you smoking?

Yes, an over-reliance on the City and a disregard for the manufacturing sector.

The banking crisis was a lot less of a problem in other European countries.

Is that with Pardew in charge?

Is that 'up' or 'down' the slope?

Understandable on such a day.

Not Cameroon then?

Thanks for reminding me. We've got all the dvds downstairs (apart from one in the Prime Miister set that I got from the US and has a duplicate). There's nothing on tele these days, and hardly any news...

Whilst we must guard against complacency there is certainly no cause for alarm. Or was that something else?