OT- Benefits

Quote: The Angry Pirate "An interesting thought???.....Now that the Government seem to have indicated that £44,000 is enough to live on, without the need for any state help, what about if NOBODY was allowed to earn above that figure for a 1 year period??

Using an extreme example, somebody like Wayne Rooney would allegedly be contributing about £12 million alone to cutting the countries deficit.....The Football Premiership alone would probably cut a huge chunk from our debt....With everybody else thrown in, I reckon we could wipe out a huge amount of the billions we owe....
There was a German woman where I used to work who had grown up in East Germany behind the Iron Curtain, I used to chat to her quite a bit about life in the old GDR. Her view was that yes there were shortages of things and you couldn't get the consumer goods you could in the West, things like food and furniture were always the same few brands on sale everywhere, but she said she thought when she got to the UK and saw the perception that everybody had of the GDR it was unfair. Her Dad is still an old style communist who will never accept the new regime, there's a lot of 'nostalgia' (probably with red-tinted glasses on) in the East about the 'old days' especially in the current financial climate. Although they had restricted access to a lot of consumer goods, stuff like food, housing costs, and fuel bills were heavily subsidised and as long as people shut up and played ball and didn't criticise the State, the State provided them with a decent pension, good levels of free education and healthcare. One of the things she said about it was that although you had restrictions on your freedoms, you couldn't go holidaying easily like you could here, people didn't have worries about the future, would they lose their job, would they get their house repossessed, would they be able to afford health care or social care bills, so because of that people lived more 'social' lives, ironically it's the type of stuff David Cameron wants with the Big Society, her Dad used to run chess clubs and woodwork and metalwork hobby clubs for teenagers in his free time, her Mum used to volunteer to teach people embroidery for free and so on, you had people participating in stuff for their local community just because it was a way of meeting people and having hobbies, rather than now they prefer to stay in playing with their gadgets and plasma TVs....most people in our kind of society tend to scoff at the idea of getting involved in the community for free, they tend to think 'whats in it for me', but it was part of life over there.