This is the amount that working-related benefits actually cost:
Just one bank bailout that was passed in a single day, without any meaningful consultation of parliament let alone the public, was worth over £37 billion:
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7666570.stm
The government is to pump billions of pounds of taxpayers money into three UK banks in one of the UK's biggest nationalisations.
Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), Lloyds TSB and HBOS will have a total of £37bn injected into them.
That’s nearly four years of the working-related benefits bill in a day. Just one year before this...how was HBOS getting on?
news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6403133.stm
HBOS, the bank formed by a merger of Halifax and Bank of Scotland, has seen a 19% rise in annual pre-tax profit.
Pre-tax profit was £5.71bn in 2006, compared with £4.81bn a year earlier, driven by cost controls and earnings from corporate banking and insurance.
Do you remember getting a share of those profits? No, profit and wealth is privatised and increasingly held in very few hands, risk and any form of responsibility and blame for anything that occurs is socialised. Of course, the £37 billion is just a fraction of the trillions that is screwed out of the economy via banks. HBOS was involved in LIBOR, amongst lots of other underhand activity.
Surprisingly, I don’t recall the Times, the Telegraph, the Sun or the Daily Mail complaining about that on a daily basis for decades. It’s almost as if the people that own those newspapers benefit from elitism and demonise people on the dole in a largely successful attempt to make people that do shitty jobs delude themselves into thinking that they’re (a) better than them, and (b) somehow some form of threat.
Collectively, British people pay private banks hundreds of billions each year. Every time you fill your car up, every time you buy something from a shop, virtually every transaction you’re ever involved in is taxed. This all ultimately goes into the Bank for International Settlements system, which was always intended to dominate the planet economically, which it now does. It’s because of the prominence of crony capitalism / corporate fascism that there aren’t even close to being enough jobs to go around in the first place. What’s the solution? Let’s ensure that there are even less jobs by making people work for their benefit. Obviously just another elitist policy that only benefits the landowners not the serfs.
Contrary to the impression you might get from reading The Sun, this goes against the interest of the average working stiff, as not only does it mean there are less jobs available, but it also ensures that economic activity which would take place does not. This has all kinds of knock on effects on the real economy, and can have quite a significant effect as it happens on a large scale. Meanwhile, the BBC reports that the economic situation is improving because the financial sector expanded and GDP increased. The financial sector that’s screwing everyone.
The race to the bottom hasn’t even come close to unfolding yet because, firstly, the full effects of living in a globalised economic system and the inevitable rise of China and the ‘emerging economies’ has yet to be realised. This is already happening, but increasingly you will see British workers competing in a global marketplace with people who are used to an absolutely piecemeal existence. And secondly the debt can is still being kicked down the road. Once this becomes impossible, which is a mathematical certainty, you will see how bad things get.
We will certainly need some form of benefit system to be in place at that time. Anyone wishing otherwise is just delusional.
