Producing 2.1M barrels of oil a day kinda helps to balance the budget ;-)
Budget surplus (+):
15% of GDP (2011 est.)
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Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!
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You deserve that infraction for being mean to Maggio.. I hope you have learned your lesson. Now go to your room and don't come out till you are ready to say you're sorry.
bad bad boy!!
morituri te salutant
nope, ive simply begun seeing 30-40 percent + of my salary disappear to fund god awful government programmes. If I was in charge I'd vastly reduce spending and use that to fund tax breaks for the lower tax brackets (and not as we did by scaling back additional tax rate brackets). Currently studying tax for my job doesn't help with the attitude. All the unnecessary complexity and admin! thieving innocent hard workers at every corner!
exactly. a culture of entitlement and assumption that the government will provide. changes would have to be made gradually obviously. but even then its so engrained one has to wonder, is there any hope for many of these people? So often Im going on my way to work / in shop / walking on streets and there are just so many people who I have no idea how they would survive in a professional, salary earning environment.
hmm things that are particularly bad? how about the Department for International Development. Cut the whole lot out. I dont buy this whole "Britain Brand Building" bullshit. Nor do I believe that people should be forced to help starving kids etc across the world. Why not increase Gift Aid benefits or something if the goverment wants people to help the 3rd world out?
Spending on military projects that are none of our business - Libya conflict, Syrian conflict support....if were gonna be helping out terrorists, why not start helping out Hamas against Israel too?
EU? I dont really care for all the "omg our trade will suffer with EU" argument...or the "we can work in EU now too and get equal benefits..."....Personally, for me, the possibility of staying as an independent country without having power centralised to a massive extent in a federalist state (with no real representation or oversight and a loss of national sovereignty) outweighs all possible economic benefits (and with the massive unnecessary spending and corruption at EU, one could argue about which way things weighed in terms of benefits). Not to mention theres a whole other world out there with whom we can trade with and with whom we have much closer ties to on so many levels if we wanted to start integrating.
Im sure there are many things that need to be changed economically in this country, but the fact that a social-cultural change needs to happen is even more obvious. We have too many people who's net contribution to society im just unsure about. Although I guess you could argue that they do bring in valuable revenue through purchase of cigarettes & alchohol on which they pay tax etc etc
Btw Will, have you read the book "Jennifer Government"? Highly recommend it. Its somewhat a dig against anti-big government people, but the irony is, i actually quite liked the vision it proposed as opposed to what big government might entail in a dystopian future
Last edited by Divine Intervention; 11-21-2012 at 18:08.
Oh, and I'm also anti-green energy subsidising. Its all a big scam IMO and a way to rinse the tax payers and funnel money into the hands of vested interests. This is coming from some one who spent several months working for a green-tech start up. I have no problems with supporting entrepreneurship and enterprise, but supporting an industry on the tax payers back seems a little too left wing for me.
Will, I'm surprised that you're not more anti-EU considering that I remember you as being a British patriot? Do you want to see UK become some little bit of a massive state? Sure we might be able to "compete" more with China and USA as a whole economy...but at what expense? To have our money being spent on some unaccountable project in some back water part of europe? To have our voice have such an inconsequential voice in the greater manner of things? How can such different people be represented by one unanimous body? Obviously were suffering massive sociol engineering to make us some homogeneous group and have us lose our sense of identity, but until that fated day comes....should we not be fighting for whats in our best intersets?
btw, Croydon by-elections happening atm, funny thing...my mum wanted to vote National Front . Had to explain why its not really a good idea xD
Tell her to spoil the ballot Did you vote for a police commisioner?
Patriotism is a waste of time unless we somehow bring back the empire, and there's more chance of Poland conquering Russia than that.
As to the EU, I agree there's plenty wrong with it, but the UK is too small to be credible standing on our own, and the other option is to become 51st state. Sod that, better the French and Germans than the madness that runs rampant in the US. (no offense to the yanks here btw) We either become:
1) Insignificant Island
2) Major player in EU
3) Officialy a US colony (arguable we're already one unofficialy)