Topic: David Cameron: Taxes will rise unless we can raid bank accounts - page 2. (Read 2650 times)

Btw, the equivalent US powers are massively more draconian: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_levies

If a person owes taxes, and have the money in their bank account, gov should be allowed to take the money out of his account, instead of wasting time and money in courts or raising taxes. This is a different issue to the one in Cyprus.

They are completely different.
In Cyprus, the banks became insolvent, and customer deposits took a haircut to refinance them. For customers who had done nothing wrong.
In the UK, if you owe taxes, and have refused to pay them after being contacted several times, and you have enough money to pay, they will take what you owe.

Which, as a principle, is fine. The problem is that it costs more to take an individual to court to recover the tax they owe than is gained by recovering the tax.
Which people can evade paying taxes with a likelihood of no real penalty.

In Cyprus, the regime decided that people owed them money and that they should be able to remove it at will from their bank account.

In the UK, if the regime decides that you owe them money, they will be able to remove it at will from your bank account.

They were both for taxation. They were both theft.

Hmm... didn't thought about that. Already many people are finding their funds frozen for silly reasons, such as trading in Bitcoins. Yes... this can be exploited by the government.


I agree. Only the courts should be having that sort of power.... not the government.

Yes. I started it.

Potential side effects. People cash can be frozen without court order if they happen to support opposition party and so on and on. And then person have to go to court with free lawyer, as money are frozen, and try to argue for months to have money released.

I suggest to stash % of fiat in crypto currencies.

Think about it harder. His suggestion is a horrible idea. It opens up an avenue of abuse of unprecedented power. There should always be a presumption of innocence, and if the government wants to take something they should be able to prove that you are guilty, not take the money and then make you prove you are innocent to get it back.

Well.. if this is true, then I don't have anything against Cameron or this measure. He is just collecting the tax arrears and not robbing anyone as the Cypriots did over there.

This is completely unlike what happened in Cyprus. In Cyprus they took money from everybody. What Cameron is suggesting is that the government should be able to target people who owe tax money and take money from their accounts. The government can already do this if they get proper approval from the courts, but Cameron wants to save time and money and just take what he thinks is his instead of proving it, the lazy bastard.

Please find a pro-taxation thread, if you want to be silly.

Where does a man acquire character ? I am tempted to say that he can acquire it nowhere - and that that is the point I was trying to make.

But that answer wouldn't be wholly true - because I reckon a man can, over time, acquire character to some degree - and if he can it wouldn't be via the lofty towers of Oxford and Cambridge and eating icecream off golden plates.

 It might, for example, be acquired through having the responsibility of being the head of a family - and having people rely on you - sticking with a job you secretly loathe for years because you are the provider. It could be through being unemployed for several years  - and the hard graft and determination it took to lift yourself out of the poverty trap. It might be through being a teenager and having sole caring responsibility for a sick parent. It might be through starting up your own business and having the responsibility of keeping afloat when the whole economy seems to be conspiring against you. It might be acquired through being a union rep and fighting someones corner when no-one else would.

    Why aren't these things valued ? Why is a PPE degree a requisite for any kind of political success ? Its ridiculous.



I take your point about the professions (largely a closed shop etc) - but we are talking about politics here, which is a qualitatively different beast - we are talking about the diverse and multifarious life experiences of a population being authentically represented in the corridors of power. Thats all democracy is about - not being au faire with Plato's political philosophy, not knowing the difference between M1 and M3 money supply. All that stuff can be acquired at any time by an alert mind as and when the need arises.

In short, I don't want a Health Secretary who uses Bupa, an Education Secretary who has his son down on the waiting list for Eton - and I don't want a Chancellor who will leave office to several lucrative non executive directorships/consultancies with the likes of Credit Suisse and Santander. I don't want this because it means that they have no vested interest in the success of those sectors for which we have delegated them the responsibility. For them, the career politician, the interest is via proxy - whereas for you and I, its our lives.

Well, that's a truism.

If fewer people are victims of theft, the remaining victims will need to lose more in order for the thieves to get the same amount.

To add some commonsense:

If a certain proportion of the population don't pay the taxes they owe, everyone else has to pay more to ensure the same total amount of tax revenue.
That isn't particularly complicated.

A half of the shadow cabinet are public school/Oxbridge - it doesn't bode well for a representative democratic Govt. that its leaders are drawn from such a narrow and privileged elite.

The main requisites of being a good politician are the same as those required to be a good man :- a)intelligence  b)courage   and c) a sense of morality.  
   Unfortunately, none of these three things can be acquired from a University education. It is the illusion that they can that has led us into the sorry situation that we find ourselves in today.


I hope you are right.

Within less than 2 weeks, the European election results will be announced. In UK, the UKIP is expected to perform extremely well. Also, the far-right and the far-left are expected to improve on their numbers all over the EU. If the election results are extremely disappointing for Cameron's party, I don't think that he will have the balls to steal money out of bank accounts.

I've been a Labour man all my life - so I know where you are coming from. Up until relatively recently I could have written the exact same things as you - imploring people to vote etc - and I agree with a lot of what you posted above.

Its a big subject this, so I'm gonna keep it brief (not least because I've been at work all day and I'm knackered).

The main points I'd like to make are :-

    1) the FPP electoral system isn't fit for purpose (i.e..representative Govt.) - and the 2 big parties have no will to alter it as they are the ones who benefit from it. Some poor deluded souls voted for the Lib Dems in the last election purely on the strength of their PR ticket - and look how that turned out.

     2) the turning point for Labour was in the 1980's - at which point they chose to   a) drop Clause 4 from their constitution    and  b) stand by as Thatcher eroded Union power (anti union legislation that the Labour Party/Govt. have never repealed BTW) and the NUM waged the most politically/economically significant battle in modern British history - without any backing from Neil Kinnock and the Labour Party

      3) Blair and Iraq (not in my name)

      4) Mandelson and his privatisation (plans) of Royal Mail

       5) the way that the "Iron Chancellor" courted the City and the very people that caused the 2008 devastating economic crash - of course, he had no choice but to court them, because the Labour Govt. (in the absence of Clause 4) are only trying to manage capitalism better than the capitalists

       6) the way that todays career Labour politicians (ie. they've never had a proper job) are drawn from the same narrow Oxbridge academic elite background as their Tory counterparts. Its a long long way from Nye Bevan. This isn't what the Labour Party is supposed to be about - its supposed to be the party of the people. Fuck passing exams - how about a bit of nouse and life experience ?

      7) the main parties may or may not prefer low turnouts (for their own self serving reasons) - but their legitimacy/mandate is seriously eroded with a low turnout. And to my mind, they are illegitimate in their representation of the interests of the people of the United Kingdom. The only reason people vote currently in the numbers that they do is that they hope against hope/want to believe that it will make a blind bit of a difference. Which it patently doesn't.



    
In short, the Labour Party has compromised so much I don't know who they are anymore. Do they ?

I still hope they get in over the Tories/Lib Dems. - I'm sentimental like that  

But I won't be voting for them - been there, done that.

For what it's worth, I'd rather see Labour in than the current lot and maybe their actions will convince me to soften my stance if they get in and do a good job this time around.  It sounds like a promising start, but compromise still sounds less tempting than slamming on the brakes and pulling a massive u-turn from our current route.  Maybe a Labour/Green coalition could work?  Sadly we've still got a while to go before the general election either way.  


We agree completely on that part, then.  I still sometimes wonder how the public were gullible enough to fall for the ridiculous fear campaign attached to the "no" lobby on the AV referendum.  But then I see the same thing with both the tories and ukippers banging on about all the "scary foreigners coming to get us and steal our livelihoods".  And the public are falling for it yet again.  Pity that people are so easily manipulated.

They've got some fairly radical policies in stark contrast to the other parties.  Things like re-nationalising the trains which no other party is proposing.  Not just stopping NHS privatisation, but also reversing some of the public service sell offs.  Scrapping Tuition fees.  Placing a cap on bankers’ bonuses.  Stuff like that.

There's a "mini-manifesto" here if you wanted to check it out:  http://issuu.com/lifework/docs/minimaniissuu?e=7496317/7612527

I'd like to know what policies justify the Green Party's position.

Not a snarky reply, genuinely interested.