Margaret Thatcher has died

It really doesn't matter. The system doesn't need more money coming in, it needs less going out. You can run a perfectly good country on the receipts that the IRS makes in 1 year.

Sure, get rid of the Loopholes I talked about earlier so top rate earners pay a similar amount to the lower guys - but the impact of that alone in marginal.
 
totally disagree with you in principle. but yes, we do have a spending problem. the reason the u.s.a. is in the situation we're in debt-wise is not because of social insurance and medical coverage for the elderly. the reason we have such a high debt and yearly deficits is giveaways to the already rich for the last almost 40 years. you bet there's socialism in this country, and it ain't for poor people and the middle class.

if you're decrying the debt problem now, then where were you 1981-1993 and again 2001-2009? why is it always when a democratic president is in power, we've got a problem? republican president and congress, "let's give the rich MORE money"--see 1981, 1986, 2001 and 2003.

i'm in the top 15%. just so you know. i work my ass off to have what i have, so does my wife. considering i make 400% of the median household income, i have no problem paying taxes or paying more. anyone in the top 1% that says they're paying too much...well there's a word for that, and it's what your poo goes through.
 
so it's alright for a guy that made $1,000,000 in investment profit to be left with $850,000? while a guy making a salary $40,000 is left $26,000? wow. nice loophole. wish i had that one.
 
Well, firstly the guy making 1M has just kicked in 10x what the guy making 40K has. After which the guy making 40K has access to subsided housing and other benefits such as retirement accounts which phase out for higher earners.

The loopholes exist for people making any amount of money.

But yeah, I am fine with the 1M guy paying say 30-40% tax.

But again that won't cut it. Not because of the subsidizing of the rich, because of things like wars in countries far from your land.
 
look, i agree with you about personal responsibility and living within your means, mattt. but i just think your perception of the tax code and what, as a country, our spending priorities should be are completely wrong. i'll just leave it at that. because i like you.
 
Thatcher left families to starve while the bailiffs emptied their houses and the council served eviction notices. All because they couldn't afford to pay the poll tax.

Just how civilised was Thatchers Britain?



The whole point of the right to buy scheme was to bribe the electorate and reduce the governments responsibility for looking after people. Conservatives are all about low tax, small government, no regulation and maximum profit. New Labour adopted these policies. There was never any intention to replace social housing stock lost in right to buy sales. The privet sector and charities were supposed to step in and do that.

Unless you can pay off your mortgage within 20 or 30 years of buying the property I'd agree there is no point to owning property. You'll basically end up paying the equivalent of rent to a landlord who has none of the usual responsibilities of a landlord and will evict you at the first opportunity.

Sorry about your gran btw



Because there were waiting lists for people to get into social housing and god knows how many homeless in the country? I guess the homeless don't matter though.



And yet we see these tower blocks being demolished up and down the country today.

Council housing wasn't an experiment. It was an absolute necessity to replace housing lost during World War 2 and to lift people out of the slums and give them somewhere affordable and clean to live in.

The disenfranchisement you talk about didn't settle in until people were put out of their jobs and the abject poverty that became a way of life for the working class in the 80s took hold. Thatcher's Poll Tax was massively responsible for that as was her obsession with making people redundant.



How about millions? Millions of council houses have been sold off since Thatcher introduced the right to buy.



There's absolutely no reason why a business can't be state owned and run by a business man. This is in fact how modern state owned companies like the Student Loans Company work for the most part. SLC pays it's executives the going rate and recruits from the same pool of talent as any other company. It could be a massive money generator for government if the government wanted it to be.

There's no reason on Earth why Thatcher couldn't have done something similar with British Steel, British Petroleum, British Rail, British Airways, British Telecom and so the list goes on. These industries fell into decline through mismanagement and a distinct lack of investment. There was absolutely no need to sell them off whole sale.
 
I can't agree with this bit (the bit I bolded.) They pay lip service to the idea of small government, but at heart they are still the centralisers that the tories always have been. They don't really trust local government, and prefer to let quangos run things than locally elected representatives.

The point about low tax also needs to be qualified. Sure, they like to lower income tax when they can, but previous cuts were paid for by massively hiking up direct taxes such as VAT. Basically, they tax the poor harder in order to cut taxes for the better off.
 
Russell Brand on being a child of Thatcher http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/apr/09/russell-brand-margaret-thatcher?CMP=twt_gu

and yes it is that Russell Brand and no, it's not what you would expect from him.
 
http://http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/margaret-thatcher-and-iraq

your paying for this Woman's funeral remember, not that she shouldn't be given a good send off, its just one that should involve fire.
 
Privatisation summed up perfectly.

"... I just now watched the British Gas one again. It's like a whimsical live-action episode of Postman Pat where his cat is craftily carved up and sold back to him. ..."
 
Article on Bloomberg:
Five years earlier, a previous Tory government had been voted out of office after it had tried, and failed, to settle a strike by the coal miners’ union. That strike had literally shut down the country. Edward Heath’s government called a general election asking, “Who governs Britain, us or the unions?” The country gave its answer by voting in a Labour government.

Characteristically, Britain’s then-militant unions showed no restraint in victory. Seeking ever-higher wages, public- sector unions called a series of strikes in the winter of 1978- 79, the “Winter of Discontent,” leading to the biggest mass stoppage since the General Strike of 1926. Bodies were left unburied when gravediggers stopped work. Leicester Square became a rat-infested garbage dump, the trash piled 10 feet deep.

With voters at the point of despair, Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan returned from a meeting in (of all places) Guadeloupe to say the country was taking “rather a parochial view” of these problems. The U.K.’s best-selling tabloid newspaper, The Sun, led next day with the indelible headline, “Crisis? What Crisis?” and the government’s fate was sealed.

This is the sense in which Thatcher, who won the election in May 1979, was a product of the times. Even so, she was rare among leading conservatives for her determination to end the war she rightly believed the unions had already declared not with compromise, but with total victory. She and an inner circle of ministers made elaborate preparations (building up coal stocks, for instance, and restricting the unions’ right to strike in sympathy with other aggrieved workers) so that the government could face and win the next coal miners’ strike -- which it did. In that battle, the National Union of Mineworkers wasn’t just beaten -- it was wiped out.

Further measures to limit union rights followed. British unionism, which had staked everything on confrontation rather than cooperation, went into rapid decline. In a second front in the same war, Thatcher led an assault on the U.K.’s state-owned enterprises -- she brought the term “privatization” into common usage. She also sold the country’s publicly owned housing stock. She believed in free enterprise and thought the state had grown out of bounds, but she was no more driven by a deeply thought- through ideology than her friend Ronald Reagan. She got little respect from intellectuals and mostly returned the compliment. Her instincts were her guide.

Broken Alliance
Most consequentially of all, she broke the alliance between the Labour Party and organized labor, thus remaking the political opposition. Subsequent Labour governments made no move to restore the rights that Thatcher had taken away. They knew how unpopular that would be. Reluctantly and by degrees, the Labour Party moved to the right, until it eventually had a leader, Tony Blair, whom the Economist magazine once celebrated on its cover as “The Strangest Tory Ever Sold.”

The reconstruction of the Labour Party was Thatcher’s most significant achievement. But it’s worth remembering that her triumph over the unions would never have been consolidated if she hadn’t won another war, as well -- the one over some tiny, barely inhabited islands in the far South Atlantic. In this other pivotal moment, she showed the same unflinching determination as she had at home, together with another trait common to those whom history anoints as great leaders -- astounding luck.

The war to win back the Falklands from the Argentine force that occupied them in 1982 was, by any standards, a reckless venture. By the early 1980s, Britain lacked the capacity to dominate even a weak military opponent at that distance. Argentina was fighting close to home. It had state-of-the-art air-to-surface missiles and much faster aircraft than the U.K.’s ship-launched jets, as well. Argentina should have won the war and nearly did. It lost through a combination of pantomime incompetence and fecklessness -- things that Thatcher had no right to count on. A sensible prime minister would have argued for sanctions and a negotiated settlement. Thatcher wasn’t interested. You don’t win wars that way.

If Britain had lost the Falklands War, the humiliation would have been abject, and Thatcher’s chances of being seen as the country’s greatest “peacetime” prime minister would have been zero. There would have been no subsequent domestic achievements, either, since she would probably have failed to win re-election.

Falklands Triumph
The Falklands victory expunged memories of the Suez crisis of the 1950s and sustained Britain’s “proud island nation” myth for several more decades -- several decades too long. It helps to sustain that myth even now, though with gradually diminishing power. It shapes attitudes to Europe, and much else. (And a good thing, too, she would have said. Didn’t she warn us how Europe would make a hash of things?)

The very qualities that made Thatcher indispensable as the scourge of the U.K.’s unions and toxic public sector came closer than most Britons realize to making her a nullity through foreign misadventure. She was lucky -- as great leaders have to be. And the fact remains, she won the war that mattered most -- the war to save the British economy. For that, in my view, no praise is too great.
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This notion that Big Government is better than Big Evil companies... Atleast when a company is on its own you can choose wether to give it money or not. When its the government you don't get an option they put a gun at your head/policeman at the door, and take your money.

You don't have to give a company any money, you have the Freedom to choose.

Raz
 
Actually you should check the facts - I know because I lived through them. In Britain we had an economic boom during the Eighties which is the decade she was prime minister.

How is that crushing the economy in her own time. The early part of her time was spent putting the economy throught the wringer which it needed to get back on it's feet.

Are you not aware of the British economy prior to that, not much to "crush" really, it was already in the toilet.
 
Well why should you get it if you don't need it. Surely it's better off going to those that need the help?

Don't take "hand out" over literally. It's just a description of the state paying out money. All the money of the state come from us, so it's kind of irrelevant talking about what you pay for. Do you expect an itemised statement of everything you paid the taxman so you may one day ask for your bit, or where your money was spent. It's not going to happen like that.

If you are well off and don't need the income, then I believe that state should re distribute that which you would otherwise receive (if you needed it) to those in greater need.

I hardly think this is unfair. The money you pay in goes to pay many many things. How much of those do you use up during your lifetime, How many times do you use the NHS for example or what about if you have no kids. You have still contributed to education and national health though the same as someone who has seen more benefit from those departments.

So later on if I am well of and don't need the help why should I take the money just because I've been paying taxes anyway. It doesn't work like that with every other service where you get it when and where you are in need of it. So if a person is not in need of the state pension why do we give money to the well off ?
 
Well the workers of private companies went on strike, not the private sector itself - your wording was a bit unclear on that. Of course the situation was not simplistic or clear cut, with different things happening at different stages. But I was speaking off the 80% figure you gave, and was pointing out that a model like that where 80% of the people are working for nationalised industry under the influence of powerful unions could not really sustain this country, or do it justice.
 
We're talking about state pensions, so firstly it's not correct to characterize the state as your employer - that may or may not be the case, depending who you work for. Either way here, you are entitled to a state pension. People also receive personal pensions from the state - like say a retired policeman did. This was the case when an uncle of mine retired some years back. He was very very well looked after. Things may have changed since.

No one in this country has an agreement with the state in regards to what they will get by way of the state pension. This pension is something everyone who has worked and paid National Insurance contributions to the government gets or is entitled to. Many in the Public sector do get personal pensions from their state employers (like my uncle who served the police force), but this has nothing to do with the standard state pension we are discussing.
 
You're taking a very narrow view of things.

There are various ways by which we might decide that the economy was 'in the toilet'. Inflation might be one of them, unemployment might be another.

Let's take unemployment for example, since it was one of the key points in the Conservatives general election campaign in 1979. I assume that you remember the billboard adverts designed by Saatchi & Saatchi, with a picture of a long dole queue an dthe slogan 'Labour isn't working'. Within a couple of years, unemployment under Thatcher had gone up fourfold (at a conservative estimate.) And it never went back down to pre-Thatcher levels.

Leaving aside the cynicism of their election campaign, the fact is that by at least one very important measure, the economy suffered enormously under Thatcher. The focus was all on inflation, but the effects of massive unemployment were far more damaging.

And then you have the house price bubble, the problem caused by soaring interest rates, the long-term effects of reregulating the City (and they have really come come to roost in the last few years!)

So overall, the economy didn't really benefit from Thatcher. It was all just 'bling', and a quick buck for the fat Cats in the city. Our industrial and manufacturing base was destroyed, and replaced with an unhealthy reliance on the financial services sector and on the service industries.
 
Sure they matter, no one likes or wants to see people homeless. But this is a difference in fundamental ideology. And it revolves around how you think it's best to help and empower people.

Some think it's better to teach people to fish for themselves others think it's better to just provide them some fish every week.


edit:
To house these people you need to provide new homes for them or kick those currently in the homes out into the street. Now what do you do if you are skint and can't pay for these new homes ?
 
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