Why are we Brits in a Mess?

Some people think the Government is a Piggy Bank with an ever open cash point. It isn’t.
In a society such as the UK, the Government has to produce each year a profit and loss account just like any other ‘business’. However the Government does the sums in a different way to every one else. The Gross Domestic Product is an important figure in all its calculations. GDP is the notional value of the sum of all our labours including those who don’t work. If the total doesn’t rise, and the size of the population does, then it has got less money to spend on each individual. When it is short of cash to balance the books, it either has to increase the tax on the earners or reduce the benefits to the unemployed - or borrow. As a nation we are already over borrowed.

Unfortunately for the British Government, much of the profits earned by corporations and international traders - including those bankers is earned overseas and operations based overseas don’t have to pay British tax unless they have a good reason to do so. So it is important to be fair to those who are making the money in the hope that they will stay here and not move to the blue clear waters of The Bahamas or the ski slopes in Switzerland. Stop knocking the Bankers - they make the bread which we all need to feed off.

What we Brits make most of, is not cars, pharmaceuticals, petrol, jet aircraft wings, it is credit. We borrow internationally from Joe to lend to Charlie. We make money out of money. Which is exactly why a lot of us are out of work, because you have to be clever to do that. Those white collared chaps driving around in Porsches are very clever. They make money out of digits on a computer screen.

Likewise the Insurance wallahs bet that something is not going to happen and in the majority of cases they are right, so they get paid for not having to pay out. It is a form of gambling really. Some outfits promise to pay up when the pension holder is old, then the recipient goes and dies before he gets a divi. Sad but true. The one certain thing in life is death - it is just a question of when.

The property tycoons make money out of thin air because land doesn’t grow anymore and the demand for what you build on it, such as houses increases every year. Restrict the supply and you increase the price. Its always a good business to sell something in short supply which they don’t make it any more.

Our ancestors did something very clever years ago. They persuaded the rest of the world that the centre of the surface of the planet runs through Greenwich - so we Brits decide at what time the sun shines when it does. We are always in a position to be the middle man. We have taught most of the world to speak English - at least a version of it. They may speak some other lingo at home but to communicate with the world they have to speak English or their version of it. Even the Chinese use English to speak to each other in the same way as do the Indians.

And Mr Gates isn’t even British. We ought to charge him for using our language.

We Brits do a lot of things which other countries don’t. We are presently waging three expensive wars.
The Iraq war was to protect the crude oil market and if Saddam Hussein got his hands on the Kuwaiti oil, petrol might now be unobtainable -
especially if SH had later gone for the Saudi oil as well.

We are in Afghanistan because it is feared that those wild deserted uplands are breeding grounds for the terrorist who might blow up our tube
trains - again. We have been there before and have come away with our tails between our legs but we still volunteered to go back.
We never seem to learn.

We are in Libya for the second time for some good reason maybe Oil, maybe atomic bombs, maybe something the Colonel said, but whatever
we are there, doing our bit. The Germans aren’t there this time - it is none of their business - there again it wasn’t really the last time
they were there.

To do all that interfering, which we Brits have been doing since Queen Elizabeth 1st was on the throne, we spend quite a lot of money in maintaining an overseas presence hence the Foreign Office. We also have a Ministry of ‘Defence‘.

We also keep the nation reasonably healthy at no cost to the sick, unless the treatment is urgent.
We educate every child to a level where he/she should be able to read and write a tax form.
We have a very complex regulatory system so that we comply not only with the rules laid down by the EU but also by those made by our own Government.

We have a judicial system which tries to make sure that all crooks and criminals get their come uppance in due course.
And then we have a Transport Ministry which tries to keep the cars on the roads moving in a country which has never really believed in building
motorways.
We also have a system whereby there is more land devoted to sheep eating grass than there is for humans to grow vegetables.
We don’t even have a use for the trees these days either.

Etc etc etc
Governments can always spend money, even before they get it.

Now all this bureaucracy has to be paid for - somehow. The fewer people who work, - the unemployed, the sick the old the young - the more the workers have to pay. Some pay more than 50% of what they earn before they even see their pay cheque. Some citizens don’t pay anything and they get a cheque through the post merely for living. Some only pay when they spend or drive or have an alcoholic drink or post a letter. In Britain, Tax has more names than the Devil. The one thing we are never told as kids is that the reason why we are called British on our birth certificates is that we are seen as a potential future tax payer to the HMRC.

The balance we have presently got wrong is that there are now 65 million of us and all of us have ideas of how our lives can be improved - at a cost . Sorry, at this time there are not enough workers.

It is as though we are all queuing up at the same hole in the wall at the same time and there aren’t enough notes in the machine.