Wednesday 23 June 2010

Boom and Bust Budget?

Looking at the budget out of which I seem to come out about the same, in terms of personal finances, there were a few aspects that I didn’t like that much, however I expect those who understand more about economics or the sound of underground spirits better than I do will soon correct me on.

The first is the way the VAT rise has been handled, in as much as this seems likely to cause a minnie boom at he end of this year followed by a minnie bust at the beginning of next.

In physics there is a thing called the butterfly effect and I hope it doesn’t apply with underground spirit noises.

Another is the personal allowance thing, doling out this extran money in the same amount to everyone with an income under £101,000 per year seems a bit daft really, I don’t really think it is appropriate to be giving tax breaks to people earning over £1,000 pounds a week.

The other thing I don’t like the look of is that the wrst off of the pensioners seem to be hit disproportional hard.

The things I am not sure that it addresses that well are, the people at the bottom end of the skills bracket who are only marginally better off working than being on benefit and the public sector pension burden.

Anyway as I said I am a bit out of my depth here, and with books being zero rated the VAT increase will probably be pretty much offset by the increase in personal allowance, so I come out about the same.

Here is the link to the most recent pictures http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/610/id32.htm yesterday evening in Broadstairs, a few people dressed up in Dickens, period costume, something that only occurred to me after trying to photograph the Dickens costumes is that there are quite a few marginals in Broadstairs.

By this I mean they are not wearing clothing that relates to this period of time, but it often doesn’t look as though they are wearing clothing that relates to Dickens period of time either.

This isn’t any sort of criticism of people in Broadstairs and suppose it often most describes the group I fall into.

The rest of the page is pictures of Ramsgate today.

4 comments:

  1. On the housing and benefits front - look here http://liberalconspiracy.org/2010/06/23/new-government-housing-policy-make-people-homeless/ just about sums it all up.

    BTW im on low income, own my own house and look after a disabled person with a child and on the governmetns calculations i will be worse off by about £30 more a week more than i am earning / getting allowances for at the moment - and i struggle now having to find and extra 165 a month because our government wont help

    Im going into Lawful Rebellion - they can stick their taxes where the sun dont shine

    info

    http://www.thebcgroup.org.uk/content/join-us-lawful-rebellion

    http://www.tpuc.org/node/285

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  2. The pensioners should count themselves lucky to be getting a wrist off at all at their age!

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  3. Its what Labour were saying before the election: A VAT hike affects pensioners, a rise in NI does not, that was the choice. Pensioners are very lucky that they have still got their free bus passes. But no more free swimming for pensioners unless they take to the sea!

    Its not what was in the budget that will have an impact on Thanet as much as all the other measures being taken that will affect education, transport, the police and despite the ring fence, on health. Health waiting time targets could go back to the bad old days. Thanet had more than its fair share of grants under Labour.

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  4. Time to get rid of all district councils, they all seem to have directors and chief executives on over £100K. Michael for Mayor of Thanet

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.