That's fucking stupid

Posts Tagged ‘debt’

A little birdie told me recently that a large bank in the city is due to announce another record quarter of profits, and with that another round of record bonuses will follow. The Daily Heil will no doubt bleat on about fat cats and that sort of thing but here’s why they should just sit quietly in the corner with a large box of shutthefuckup.

In the first quarter of this year the bank in question made £1.2bn profits and set aside half of that for bonus payments. It’s fair to assume that as my source described both the profits and the bonus this quarter as record breaking it will be in excess of that figure. The bonus pool for the year is rumoured to be as much as £14bn.

And around five and a half billion of that is going straight to the treasury.

That’s a lot of schools and hospitals.

Or it’s payback of about 3% of the national debt that Gordon has kindly run up for us.

I have a mate called Pete who used to be quite substantially in debt. He was so far in debt that it didn’t seem real to him so whenever he was a bit down about it he just went on a little spending spree to cheer himself up.

This is largely the mentality that the Labour government is hoping we will fall for. They are so far out of ideas for quick fixes and temporary solutions to stave off unpopularity that they are encouraging us to ‘forget the economic failures of the last ten years, just go spend lots of cash and have a good christmas to cheer yourselves up’. Rather than job creation or building long term economic growth to reduce the massive government borrowing, we are just going to go out and spend some money to make us feel a little better. The best bit about the whole charade is that the tax breaks that we have been promised to encourage this growth are on the things that we don’t really need. Rather than cutting the price of essentials like food, we are making a tiny saving (assuming the retailers pass the saving on) on the luxury goods and general tat that we consume like bloated pigs.

And to set the record straight, the VAT drop of 2.5% will not mean that something costing £100 will be £2.50 cheaper, it means that something previously costing £100 will be £2.13 cheaper. Either way it’s still a pissy small amount and entirely smoke an mirrors to fool the public into feeling better about everything this winter rather than storming parliament and bringing the Labour party to justice.