Stop splitting hairs. Do you reckon he would get better public services for his extra tax contributions?
It was that but it was also because communism provided a counter balance and so a stake in society and relative equality and state support was seen as vital so as that communism would not gain a foothold
Since communism collapsed, there has no longer been a counter balance - the idea of “the end of history” predominated in the west
It proved to be completely wrong
The Overton window has been moved far to the right
Labour is moving the Overton window back left in Britain, and the Tories know this, which is why they will try to counter the Labour manifesto with their own large public spending promises, which in reality they don’t mean one whit
At the last Irish election I suggested that people should vote as far left as possible, even if they weren’t themselves that far left
The idea behind that is that the more people that vote far left, the more the counterbalance towards providing moderate social democracy
How are they doing these days?
I merely stated a fact because you stated the reduction of poverty as proof of the success of the Anglo-American model
Venezuela did reduce poverty, therefore, by your logic, Venezuela was successful in its model
I didn’t say it was, I merely said it reduced poverty, which it did
Now poverty has gone up because the model proved to not be a good one in the long run
But so has poverty gone up under the Anglo-American model
The Anglo-American has failed and continues to fail
Wages have fallen way behind productivity, there was the great financial crash and now there’s the ever-present threat of another one, wealth inequality is spiralling, vast amounts of unproductive wealth have accumulated based on assets and dividends and the unproductive finacialisation of economies
This is all great for the people at the top, but it doesn’t filter down, especially to the young
The Anglo-American model is continually failing on basic issues which greatly diminish people’s quality of life, as I listed in a previous post
It has no ideas to fix any of this except more of the same, and the same is not working
The real experiences of the poor and working class are consistently denigrated and ridiculed
In fact what is now abundantly clear is that the Anglo-American model is beginning to mutate into something approaching the Russian model where the concept of objective reality is destroyed, fake threats are perpetually manufactured by those in power and the political technologists try to engineer mass scale confusion and disengagement from politics, so the system will not be challenged and those at the top will remain untouched
That is objective fact
I didn’t suggest the adoption of the Venezuelan model
I merely stated that it reduced poverty - which was your justification for the Anglo-American model
Two can play that game
shit just got real
moore ends his v for vendetta with voting
Deary me.
What has been the reaction in Venezuala to the economic collapse?
What happened in the West?
The West certainly was not pretty, but it’s all relative.
Who’s this guy?
Except again this is nonsense in the context of going on about the Nordic model to aspire to.
Admit you have nfi what goes on there except for the fuzzy stuff you read.
In the UK under Labour in the 2000s there was a dramatic increase in public spending. Similar in Ireland. Single state monopolies had run aground long before the collapse of Communism.
People can either stick their fingers in their ears, whistle away and pretend the Anglo-American model is working, or they can wake up to the reality that it isn’t
There is incredible defensiveness about this, feelings not facts predominating again
Again, what was the reaction?
What happened in the 1970s when the post war consensus collapsed?
Batman?
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The Nordic model is based on large tax intakes as a percentage of GDP and large public spending as a percentage of GDP
That’s what you call tax and spend - though every country in the world taxes and spends
I call it investment, people having a stake in society
It works
You can whistle on down the rabbit hole all you like, but the above is the reality
Except in the likes of Sweden they have ran balanced budgets.
They have public spending caps.
They have scrapped the likes of inheiritance tax.
I listed more above, all things anathema to the Jeremy Corbyn doctrine, but people who don’t understand what they are talking about think that nationalizing the rail is going Nordic.
There are plenty of places where it didn’t collapse because it was well managed
In the UK and US it was obliterated by the so called new right who deregulated everything, cut as much as they could, destroyed workers rights and investment and financialised the economy
We now are where we are, which is a bad place and it’s only going to get worse unless there is a serious change of direction
The Anglo-Americans are still labouring under the delusion that billionaires and tax cuts for the rich create jobs, they don’t, they hoard wealth away from the rest of society and drain it
The UK and US are cast iron proof of that
The Tories and the Republicans are the people who consistently run massive deficits, mate, despite branding themselves as the parties of fiscal prudence
They have been consistently more fiscally irresponsible than their Labour and Democrat counterparts since World War II
And the problem is that they’ve run those deficits by slashing, not investing
Investing benefits society, slashing doesn’t, it damages it severely
Again, that’s objective fact
Sweden can run balanced budgets because it takes in a high amount of tax
That’s the most basic form of accounting
I mean you’d think after the complete and utter disaster that were the Bush tax cuts in America in the 2000s that people would have woken up to the fact that this form of economics is a failure
Kansas slashed and burned, again, a total disaster
But no, the lessons of the past just keep being unlearned
Continual low taxes/tax cuts are like peeling an onion, there’s nothing to peel away by the end, and society is slashed to the bone
@Sidney if we take your view that you should vote left to drag the right to the left as well.
Would if not be more beneficial for labour to sit slightly left of centre rather that far left in order that they might catch more of the middle ground. As it is people are split between hard right and hard left many wanting neither and they are left with a Lib Dem-Tory light option or voting one of the extremes.
It’d be grand if labour were a fringe party operating in the Brexit party mould of dragging the conservatives to the right. But they are supposed to be the party of choice, not a force for pulling to the extremes.
Labour in Ireland should occupy the role you suggest IMO, but labour in the UK cannot
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well moore did also write the finest batman story
