Are monies going where voters want monies to go?

 

What we call Democracy are merely a collection of blank cheques to be used in many ways other than the ways voters want their monies to be used.

In every election, voters are asked to support a given candidate and/or political party and many attend polling stations or use other ways of voting to make a choice. But what choice are they really making? Apart from marking their ballots, what choices are they really making?

In actual fact, they are just giving away their decision making powers to individuals that they hardly know or that they hardly ever meet for the said individuals to do as they please. They are given away the entitlement to make decisions. They are giving away their rights.

Democracy is based on illusions. Democracy is a mirage. Democracy is fiction. And the consequences of maintaining fiction can be and usually have been  catastrophic, because all voters can do is to vote down a political party to replace it with yet another ilusion months or years later. We lie to ourselves pretending that things will be better if so or so gets elected.

Elections are about how monies are used and when it comes to how monies are going to be used we have no choice whatsoever. We have got no choice in terms of where the monies are going to be coming from or how monies are going to be spent. Decisions about where the monies are going to be coming from are arbitrary and decisions about where the monies are going to go are equally arbitrary.

What we call Peace is in actual fact an ongoing War in which those who have little bargaining power are bound to lose.

This is why voters should be able to keep in their pockets as much of their monies as possible and be able to make their own personal decisions. The numbers of those in employment are debatable as they don't tell us the truth about subemploment, the kind of employment leading to even greater poverty. If in spite of working long hours you don't get enough to have decent life then you are not employed and you are actually a slave. This is Modern Slavery. If we were to discriminate between those who earn enough and those who do not earn enough then the numbers of those in real employment would be much lower.  

Jeremy Hunt: November 17th 2022 - Tax Day

 

November 17th 2022 - Tax Day

A hole in public finances of  more than 50 billion Pound will have to be plugged. Apart from the prospect of budget cuts affecting services, the alternative is a massive amount of tax increases.

Kwasi Kwarteng was slaughtered, thrown to the wolves, because he wanted to implement Liz Truss policies of tax reductions. What will happen to Jeremy Hunt when he announces a budget that contains punitive measures?

Let us remember that on the first round of the leadership election that led to the Premiership of Liz Truss the now Chancellor of the Exchequer didn't manage to progress beyond the first round. He was not popular among MPs and was not popular among the Membership of the Conservative Party. Now, the same man is going to propose a budget that goes against what is the declared ideological stance of the Conservative Party. Rising energy costs, rising interest rates plus rising taxes. If you are a business owner struggling to survive in the present financial environment, how are you going to react? Will you minimize your business to reduce fixed costs and in doing so sent your staff to the queue of the unemployed? A very harsh winter coming for those who lose their jobs when families are already struggling to pay for rental accommodation because they don't have the means to afford mortgage payments.

Wasn't Rishi Sunak the one who suggested that we should have a long term approach instead of shock therapy? Will such a budget be compatible with long term thinking? If Jeremy Hunt goes to far, this could the end of Jeremy Hunt and also the end of an already wavering Rishi Sunak? What next? Another leadership election?

Just a few months ago it was reported that recent interest rates will put more than 500,000 mortgages in jeopardy. Will more taxes and more unemployment make the situation better or worse? If the mortgage business falters, the financial system as a whole will be in serious trouble. We don't need even to explain what a wave of mortgage and load defaults will do to the economy.

Employment rises but wages fall. What about pensions?

Employment rises but wages fall. What about pensions?

The news that employment is rising but wages are falling make the Bank of England postpone the announced rise of interest rates. Less income also means less savings for pensions and the realisation that with lower wages the aspiration of buying or renting homes might be nothing more than an aspiration when banks are only lending the equivalent of three annual salaries when the amount required to be able to have a mortgage is not less than eight annual salaries.

The gap between the monies available for pensions and the monies that would be required to be able to provide pensions is also growing at a faster pace than ever before because savings are not a generating high yields while interest rates remain relatively low.

Therefore, there is a vicious circle. People earn less. Because people earn less the Bank of England cannot take the risk of putting up interest rates without facing the possibility of millions losing their homes because they cannot afford monthly payments at higher interest rates. While this is happening, people who earn less save less and get less interest payments for what they save. Putting up salaries would mean less capital available to employ more people and having less people employed means having to make more welfare payments.

The situation is not sustainable because sooner than later retirement age will come and millions of people who earn little and have no savings will have not enough pension funds or no pension at all as retirement age is rising because there is not enough money available to pay pensions.