Hiya all,
Having read this mornings papers, it occurs to me that in the UK now, it is better to be stupid or nasty than a normal, hardworking person. Let me explain...
It seems that if you are stupid and take out one of the loans that you cant afford, or sign up for insurance on products that a worthless, by moaning about it a bit or being too stupid to realise that you cant afford them at the time, or too stupid to find work, the debts, insurance or bad things are written off. Whereas, if you have the means to pay, you are hounded into the ground. Cases in point are Barcleys who have recorded record amounts of bad debt write-off this week, and the chap in Brighton who topped himself for owing £5000 to the CSA who had started taking it out of his wages, leaving him nothing to live on.
It seems the government are creating a society where its better to be stupid or lazy that it is to work. If you work, you pay taxes on your income, almost everything you buy, and everything you do. But if your stupid or lazy, the state pays you large amounts to encourage you to stay that way. Again, case in point is reports which states its something like £4200 a year better off to be a couple that splits, than one that stays together.
And the government seems to want to hurt business as well. The introduction of taxes like IR35 hurt start-up business, whilst tax breaks encourage work to be shifted to other countries.
The government even makes matters worse in their public service schemes. The CSA now has a backload of over 3 years, and have reported that it costs 54p for every pound collected. Now that to me sounds like a hopeless situation, and encourages the nasty people not to pay.
But its not all the governments fault. The UK at large has encouraged people to spend, spend, spend, and its all coming home to roost. But as a hard working tax payer, I seem to be paying more and more to make up for the stupidness of others. We have record debt, every 2nd advert on the television is for refinance deals (which we all know are either cons at 19.9% interest), and a large part of the television on sky now is "phone up" quiz shows at £1 per call.
Somebody make me feel better by telling me that it will all sort itself out, and that those that are stupid with their money will suffer in the long term - because it doesn't seem like it at the moment.
Or is it simply stealth taxes on the stupids of the country to weed them all out?