bankrupt UK no Foreign Aid Yes !

[Arginald Valleywater]

Makes my blood boil..

[rhino]

I was reading the newspapers today. About 85% of people find that life in the UK is very hard. People are finding it tough. Pay freezes, high taxes, high fuel and food prices, etc.
The Government don't care about us. They've spent so much on the war and now they have to cut back. Cut back on everything.
It's a shame they don't have money to give to foriegn aid. Sad muppets!

[Zorro]

"About 85% of people find that life in the UK is very hard. People are finding it tough. Pay freezes, high taxes, high fuel and food prices, etc"

The fact that pay can be frozen indicates people are making money and can buy food, other countries can't do that.

The fact that taxes are going up, you only get taxed on income, so if you have an income you can buy food, other countries can't do that.

High fuel and food prices, at least we have food and fuel available, other countries do not have either.

The UK is in a bad way YES, but you cannot compare what we are suffering to what the starving in Africa suffer. As humans we should do everything possible to help the less fortunate.

I do not think a lot of people on this forum realise just how fortunate they are to live in a country with clean running water, a sewer system, food readily available, doctors and nurses within a short distance of you home, a wellfair system to allow those unemployed to still receive money and accommodation. The system may not be perfect, but I would take it over any of the countries we are trying to help.

As a civilized nation it is our duty to help the less fortunate, and if you truly disagree with this you should take a good long look at yourself and really think about what you are saying. By voting against giving foreign aid you are as good a pulling the trigger yourself, is this who you really are or want to be?

[beutelwolf]

Zorro wrote:

> As a civilized nation it is our duty to help the less
> fortunate,

No, it is not.
And the flip-side of that attitude we all got to know as colonialism, when civilized nations thought it to be their duty to promote Christianity in general, and the British/French/whatever way of life in particular.

> and if you truly disagree with this you should take
> a good long look at yourself and really think about what you
> are saying. By voting against giving foreign aid you are as
> good a pulling the trigger yourself, is this who you really are
> or want to be?

Let's cut the chase short: yes!

Apart from that it is highly questionable whether foreign aid is actually all that helpful, especially if it is sustained aid over a long period of time, rather than a fix of a temporary problem after a natural disaster (drought does not count as usually is a chronic problem).

Starvation is a natural form of regulation against over-population, for all animals, including us. By avoiding regional starvation through food aid we stop that regulating mechanism, but we don't defeat starvation. We just fend it off for a while till it will hit everybody. It's not unlike the banking crisis of 2008: everybody was ensuring everything against anything, making local financial disasters unlikely, and global ones inevitable.

[BRFOT]

"you only get taxed on income"

Eh? Whats VAT then?

[Alex L]

"you only get taxed on income"


As BRFOT says, then there is VAT, along with say, petrol nudging ?7 per gallon of which around ?6 is tax, then all the 'stealth taxes'.

Here is another one, every year, sometimes more often, OFGEM fines an energy company for some misdemeanor, sometimes ?8,000,000.00 sometimes only ?2,000,000.00 but the energy companies only income is from the consumer, so the government gets the fine, we pick up the tab.

[Zorro]

My wording was clumsy I did not mean the only tax we get is income tax, the point I was trying to get across was to pay income tax you need an income, which people from these countries do not have, to pay VAT you need to buy something, something these people cannot do because they have no money and there is nothing to buy, to pay capitol gains tax you need capitol in the first place, to pay inheritance tax there needs to be money to inherit etc etc etc.

My point is, not matter how bad we think it is for us it does not even touch the surface of what others are suffering and we should try and help rather than allow them to die in font of us.