PJC Journal – Original

Gordon Brown has
been hard at work again. He has been working on even more schemes to take more
and more of your money.

Not content with controlling
your movements, stopping people travelling freely around the UK, sharing all
your personal secrets with an ever widening group of civil servants, companies
and other interested parties (such as genetics experiments), he now wants to
take whatever you have left when you are dead. 

Unless we stop
this man now, Britain will have the same economic cycle as Zimbabwe within 5 years.

He has already
robbed the pension schemes, and put this country in hoc for public service
pensions to the tune of 56pct of GDP. 

Now an awful
scheme is being hatched in the Treasury to punish anyone who has had the
temerity to live to 75. Given life expectancies, that may be you one day – or
even now – so take heed. It does not get worse than this – that some personal
pension funds could end up being taxed at 170% on death.

The Soviet Union never aspired to such malefactions. 

Here's what's on
the cards. If you get to 75 and have saved a few pounds that you may have
planned to leave to grieving widow/starving kids, etc, the Chancellor seems to
be intent on taking almost all of it off them.

The Treasury is
working on a plan which could land descendants of the elderly with a tax bill
that is greater than their inheritance. 

Somebody there
has the curious idea that money a worker saved in what is called an
Alternatively Secured Pension is a way of avoiding tax. Anything saved does not
escape an inheritance tax of 44%, fair enough, but on top of that the Treasury
is planning to tax the remaining funds at the amazing rate of 70%.

That is not all.
James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson for The Business report on their research as
follows: “If the descendants are members of certain types of pension funds
- such as self-invested personal pensions – the overall tax charge could rise
to a crippling 170%.” They add laconically that this “runs the risk
of landing descendants with a tax bill greater than their inheritance”.
And how! 

Richard Harwood,
of Grant Thornton, has shown how the bereaved could also be thus the
desperately deprived. Other calculations by John Pages at Technical
Connections, published in he Personal Finance Society's magazine, Financial
Solutions, suggests how easily the tax take could exceed 110%.

Gordon Brown is bankrupting
Britain, and
buying votes in the process, making everyone dependant on the state.  Tricks like to start paying child benefit to unborn
infants from the 29th week of pregnancy. 

The exploding costs of the private finance initiative (PFI), the scheme by
which private companies build, finance and manage infrastructure projects such
as hospitals and schools, in return for hefty fees from the government as part
of a long-term contract, have now got out of hand.

The scam that
Brown uses is that this shifts debt off the public sector’s balance sheet; but
as a table buried in one of the PBR’s appendices reveals, government payments under
signed PFI contracts will total £158bn between 2006-07
and 2030-31. The same table in March’s Budget estimated payments for the same
period to be £142.4bn.

So, in only nine
months, costs of the PFI
scheme have jumped by almost 11%, an astonishing rise but one which is set to
be repeated several times over the next few years.  

This hidden cost
comes as it becomes increasingly obvious just how bad a state the public
finances really are in. A recent forecast put the real level of government
debt at a staggering £1.34 trillion,
three times the Chancellor’s official figures, by taking into account the PFI, the public-sector pension deficit and
Network Rail debts.

Brown has now borrowed some £100bn more
than he announced he would in 2001. 

Given that Brown
aspires to prime minister, the highest office of state, it is still worth
exposing his latest shenanigans; they tell us everything we need to know about
his integrity and suitability for 10 Downing Street.
 

The Golden Rule
states the current budget (excluding capital spending) should be in surplus
over the economic cycle; the Sustainable Investment Rule that net borrowing
should never breach 40% of GDP.

Thanks to the
Chancellor’s creative accounting, constant manipulation of definitions
and relentless shifting of the goalposts, his rules have been utterly
discredited; whenever the Golden Rule was close to being broken, the Chancellor
simply lengthened the cycle or redefined spending.  

This process was
taken one final and ludicrous step further last week.

First, Brown
increased the economy’s trend growth rate from 2.5% in the years ahead to
2.75%, allowing him to spend an additional £2bn-£3bn a year without breaching
his rules and cutting future current spending as a share of GDP.  

Second, he has
now decided to shift the timing of the economic cycle yet again: it will end
early next year, two years earlier than his estimate at the time of the Budget
and ensuring that the economic cycle coincided perfectly with the political
cycle, starting in 1997 and finishing in 2007 when he becomes prime minister,
if he ever does.

Given Brown’s
predilection to fiddle and interfere with every nook and cranny of the economy,
it is no wonder that productivity growth in Britain is still poor, or that unemployment is up
298,000 over the past two years, despite the City and house price boom.  

The unemployment
rate has risen from 4.8% in the third quarter of 2004 to 5.7% in the third
quarter of this year, while 5.4m working-age Britons now rely on benefits.

History will be
less kind to Brown than contemporary notices: he will be remembered as the
Chancellor who undermined Britain’s long-term competitiveness, increased
tax-and-spend to ludicrous levels and stood in the way of essential market-led
reforms to public services.

A pity,
therefore, that a man clearly not fit to be Great Britain’s next prime minister is clearly not fit
for purpose as Chancellor.

Source
 

Unless we stop
this man now, Britain
will be no better than Zimbabwe
within 5 years.

 

Gordon Brown has
been hard at work again. He has been working on even more schemes to take more
and more of your money.

Not content with controlling
your movements, stopping people travelling freely around the UK, sharing all
your personal secrets with an ever widening group of civil servants, companies
and other interested parties (such as genetics experiments), he now wants to
take whatever you have left when you are dead. 

Unless we stop
this man now, Britain will have the same economic cycle as Zimbabwe within 5 years.

He has already
robbed the pension schemes, and put this country in hoc for public service
pensions to the tune of 56pct of GDP. 

Now an awful
scheme is being hatched in the Treasury to punish anyone who has had the
temerity to live to 75. Given life expectancies, that may be you one day – or
even now – so take heed. It does not get worse than this – that some personal
pension funds could end up being taxed at 170% on death.

The Soviet Union never aspired to such malefactions. 

Here's what's on
the cards. If you get to 75 and have saved a few pounds that you may have
planned to leave to grieving widow/starving kids, etc, the Chancellor seems to
be intent on taking almost all of it off them.

The Treasury is
working on a plan which could land descendants of the elderly with a tax bill
that is greater than their inheritance. 

Somebody there
has the curious idea that money a worker saved in what is called an
Alternatively Secured Pension is a way of avoiding tax. Anything saved does not
escape an inheritance tax of 44%, fair enough, but on top of that the Treasury
is planning to tax the remaining funds at the amazing rate of 70%.

That is not all.
James Forsyth and Fraser Nelson for The Business report on their research as
follows: “If the descendants are members of certain types of pension funds
- such as self-invested personal pensions – the overall tax charge could rise
to a crippling 170%.” They add laconically that this “runs the risk
of landing descendants with a tax bill greater than their inheritance”.
And how! 

Richard Harwood,
of Grant Thornton, has shown how the bereaved could also be thus the
desperately deprived. Other calculations by John Pages at Technical
Connections, published in he Personal Finance Society's magazine, Financial
Solutions, suggests how easily the tax take could exceed 110%.

Gordon Brown is bankrupting
Britain, and
buying votes in the process, making everyone dependant on the state.  Tricks like to start paying child benefit to unborn
infants from the 29th week of pregnancy. 

The exploding costs of the private finance initiative (PFI), the scheme by
which private companies build, finance and manage infrastructure projects such
as hospitals and schools, in return for hefty fees from the government as part
of a long-term contract, have now got out of hand.

The scam that
Brown uses is that this shifts debt off the public sector’s balance sheet; but
as a table buried in one of the PBR’s appendices reveals, government payments under
signed PFI contracts will total £158bn between 2006-07
and 2030-31. The same table in March’s Budget estimated payments for the same
period to be £142.4bn.

So, in only nine
months, costs of the PFI
scheme have jumped by almost 11%, an astonishing rise but one which is set to
be repeated several times over the next few years.  

This hidden cost
comes as it becomes increasingly obvious just how bad a state the public
finances really are in. A recent forecast put the real level of government
debt at a staggering £1.34 trillion,
three times the Chancellor’s official figures, by taking into account the PFI, the public-sector pension deficit and
Network Rail debts.

Brown has now borrowed some £100bn more
than he announced he would in 2001. 

Given that Brown
aspires to prime minister, the highest office of state, it is still worth
exposing his latest shenanigans; they tell us everything we need to know about
his integrity and suitability for 10 Downing Street.
 

The Golden Rule
states the current budget (excluding capital spending) should be in surplus
over the economic cycle; the Sustainable Investment Rule that net borrowing
should never breach 40% of GDP.

Thanks to the
Chancellor’s creative accounting, constant manipulation of definitions
and relentless shifting of the goalposts, his rules have been utterly
discredited; whenever the Golden Rule was close to being broken, the Chancellor
simply lengthened the cycle or redefined spending.  

This process was
taken one final and ludicrous step further last week.

First, Brown
increased the economy’s trend growth rate from 2.5% in the years ahead to
2.75%, allowing him to spend an additional £2bn-£3bn a year without breaching
his rules and cutting future current spending as a share of GDP.  

Second, he has
now decided to shift the timing of the economic cycle yet again: it will end
early next year, two years earlier than his estimate at the time of the Budget
and ensuring that the economic cycle coincided perfectly with the political
cycle, starting in 1997 and finishing in 2007 when he becomes prime minister,
if he ever does.

Given Brown’s
predilection to fiddle and interfere with every nook and cranny of the economy,
it is no wonder that productivity growth in Britain is still poor, or that unemployment is up
298,000 over the past two years, despite the City and house price boom.  

The unemployment
rate has risen from 4.8% in the third quarter of 2004 to 5.7% in the third
quarter of this year, while 5.4m working-age Britons now rely on benefits.

History will be
less kind to Brown than contemporary notices: he will be remembered as the
Chancellor who undermined Britain’s long-term competitiveness, increased
tax-and-spend to ludicrous levels and stood in the way of essential market-led
reforms to public services.

A pity,
therefore, that a man clearly not fit to be Great Britain’s next prime minister is clearly not fit
for purpose as Chancellor.

Source
 

Unless we stop
this man now, Britain
will be no better than Zimbabwe
within 5 years.

 

Kleptocracy

Kleptocracies are
dictatorships or some other form of autocratic government, or lapsed
democracies that have transformed into oligarchies, since democracy makes
outright thievery for direct personal gain slightly more difficult to sustain
in the long term and still remain in power, more subtlety is employed.

Kleptocratic
governance means that the economy is subordinated to the interests of the
kleptocrats.

Distributive
states that derive their wealth from the extraction of natural resources or
service industries, can be particularly prone to kleptocracy.  

Redistributive economies that derive their
wealth through taxation of their population have a natural limitation on how
far they can extend the kleptocratic policies on their population without
destabilizing their government through extending their grab to their own supporters
or driving the income producers away from the country or making them withdraw
their labour or capital.

The creation of a
kleptocracy powered by dictatorship typically results in many years of general
hardship and suffering for the vast majority of citizens as civil society and
the rule of law disintegrate.  

In addition,
kleptocrats routinely ignore economic and social problems in their quest to
amass ever more wealth and power.

Some observers
use the term 'kleptocracy' to disparage political processes which permit
corporations to influence political policy. A more accurate term for this type
of corporate influence over a state is plutocracy. 

 

Plutocracy

Plutocracy is a pejorative reference
to the disproportionate influence (both positive and negative) the wealthy have
on the political process in contemporary society.

Positive
influence includes campaign contributions and bribes; negative influence
includes refusing to support the government financially by refusing to pay
taxes, threatening to move profitable industries elsewhere, and so on.

It can also be
exerted by the owners and ad buyers of media properties which can shape public
perception of political issues. Recent examples include Rupert Murdoch's News
Corp's alleged political agendas in Australia, the UK [ref] and the United States or George Soros' efforts to back
left-leaning PACs (political action committees) and the oil industry oligarchy
which may back right-leaning PACs, or of wealthy individuals and organizations
exerting financial pressure on governments to pass favorable legislation, such
as the members of the Smith
Institute and Political
Research Taskforce. 

A Plutocracy is a
government controlled by a percentage of extremely wealthy
individuals. In many forms of government, those in
power benefit financially, sometimes enough to belong to the aforementioned
wealthy class. This gives rise to the theory that any governmental system can,
and will eventually progress, or descend, to a plutocratic state given enough
time and resources.

Classically, a
plutocracy was an oligarchy, which is to say a government controlled by the wealthy
few. Usually this meant that these ‘plutocrats’ controlled not only the
executive, legislative and judicial aspects of government, but also most of the
natural resources, including the armed forces. To a certain degree, there are
still some situations in which private corporations and wealthy individuals may
exert such strong influence on governments, that the effect can arguably be
compared to a plutocracy.

The protection
society has against kleptocracy and plutocracy is largely dependent on the
effectiveness of the rule of law to prevent political leaders abusing their
powers, the free flow of information (necessary to properly identify government
wrongdoers) and ability of the population to remove corrupt leaders from
office.

Many such
protections are included in legal documents such as a constitution or a bill of
rights and are also found in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, Article 17. 

Is
this one of the many reasons why this NuLab government want to restrict or remove
our right to know under the Freedom Of Information Act, to suppress what we can
see government doing?

How
IS Tony Blair going to pay for his 5 houses?, with a mortgage bill of £20,000
per month (much larger than his take home ministerial pay). 

Is
this perhaps why David Cameron is calling for a ‘new’ bill of rights (we do
already have one),
and his call to opt out of the Human Rights Act?

 

Is
this the Britain we want?

How much
government corruption is there? Are there any civil servants or politicians who
are not on the gravy train?

Are there any who are willing to speak out, to be whistle-blowers?

 

 

Kleptocracy

Kleptocracies are
dictatorships or some other form of autocratic government, or lapsed
democracies that have transformed into oligarchies, since democracy makes
outright thievery for direct personal gain slightly more difficult to sustain
in the long term and still remain in power, more subtlety is employed.

Kleptocratic
governance means that the economy is subordinated to the interests of the
kleptocrats.

Distributive
states that derive their wealth from the extraction of natural resources or
service industries, can be particularly prone to kleptocracy.  

Redistributive economies that derive their
wealth through taxation of their population have a natural limitation on how
far they can extend the kleptocratic policies on their population without
destabilizing their government through extending their grab to their own supporters
or driving the income producers away from the country or making them withdraw
their labour or capital.

The creation of a
kleptocracy powered by dictatorship typically results in many years of general
hardship and suffering for the vast majority of citizens as civil society and
the rule of law disintegrate.  

In addition,
kleptocrats routinely ignore economic and social problems in their quest to
amass ever more wealth and power.

Some observers
use the term 'kleptocracy' to disparage political processes which permit
corporations to influence political policy. A more accurate term for this type
of corporate influence over a state is plutocracy. 

 

Plutocracy

Plutocracy is a pejorative reference
to the disproportionate influence (both positive and negative) the wealthy have
on the political process in contemporary society.

Positive
influence includes campaign contributions and bribes; negative influence
includes refusing to support the government financially by refusing to pay
taxes, threatening to move profitable industries elsewhere, and so on.

It can also be
exerted by the owners and ad buyers of media properties which can shape public
perception of political issues. Recent examples include Rupert Murdoch's News
Corp's alleged political agendas in Australia, the UK [ref] and the United States or George Soros' efforts to back
left-leaning PACs (political action committees) and the oil industry oligarchy
which may back right-leaning PACs, or of wealthy individuals and organizations
exerting financial pressure on governments to pass favorable legislation, such
as the members of the Smith
Institute and Political
Research Taskforce. 

A Plutocracy is a
government controlled by a percentage of extremely wealthy
individuals. In many forms of government, those in
power benefit financially, sometimes enough to belong to the aforementioned
wealthy class. This gives rise to the theory that any governmental system can,
and will eventually progress, or descend, to a plutocratic state given enough
time and resources.

Classically, a
plutocracy was an oligarchy, which is to say a government controlled by the wealthy
few. Usually this meant that these ‘plutocrats’ controlled not only the
executive, legislative and judicial aspects of government, but also most of the
natural resources, including the armed forces. To a certain degree, there are
still some situations in which private corporations and wealthy individuals may
exert such strong influence on governments, that the effect can arguably be
compared to a plutocracy.

The protection
society has against kleptocracy and plutocracy is largely dependent on the
effectiveness of the rule of law to prevent political leaders abusing their
powers, the free flow of information (necessary to properly identify government
wrongdoers) and ability of the population to remove corrupt leaders from
office.

Many such
protections are included in legal documents such as a constitution or a bill of
rights and are also found in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, Article 17. 

Is
this one of the many reasons why this NuLab government want to restrict or remove
our right to know under the Freedom Of Information Act, to suppress what we can
see government doing?

How
IS Tony Blair going to pay for his 5 houses?, with a mortgage bill of £20,000
per month (much larger than his take home ministerial pay). 

Is
this perhaps why David Cameron is calling for a ‘new’ bill of rights (we do
already have one),
and his call to opt out of the Human Rights Act?

 

Is
this the Britain we want?

How much
government corruption is there? Are there any civil servants or politicians who
are not on the gravy train?

Are there any who are willing to speak out, to be whistle-blowers?