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UK general election 2015
Topic Started: May 6 2015, 03:49 PM (1,760 Views)
Miva
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As the line goes "everyone is only ever 6 weeks away from being homeless"; life is temperamental so having high enough taxes so that there can be a safety net of those that fall is important for everyone, no matter how hard right wing politicians want us to believe that "hard working families" (a mantra that I'm frankly sick to death of hearing) will always be rewarded for their work. Redundancies happen all the time and it can happen to anyone regardless of how hard they work or whether or not they have a family.
Edited by Miva, May 8 2015, 01:07 PM.
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Silva
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Fiercer than the Dark

I am not capable of agreeing more than 100% with you there, but I think I would if I could, Miva.

Nobody is as safe as they think they are. Not even the people leading these parties themselves. Occasionally, they fall on hard financial luck later on and it changes their minds.
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Sagie
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crotchety

On a smaller scale, Harly, that happened in Wichita. We had a vote for a 1% sales tax increase recently. The increase would've only lasted a year and all the money from it would've gone to repairing roads, the city's water, and other public works projects that are sorely, sorely needed. It failed because the right painted it as OH NO TAX INCREASES ARE BAAADD.
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cipher
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Fancy Chicken

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-32633718

Interesting link, I'm gonna watch it later but thought I would post this here since it's somewhat relevant.
e r r or
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Miva
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Yeah it's great the greens got that seat again. Greens got a lot of votes this year, it's a shame they only got one seat.
I hope that this time we can all start talking about electoral reform seriously and maybe get another chance to vote to change the system.
Maybe just a dream, but who knows.
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Nikki
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Omniheurist
Single Transferable Vote!
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Harly
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#HarlyforHarly20Harly

Silva
May 8 2015, 01:00 PM
Harly
May 8 2015, 12:45 PM
Also, the popularity of conservatives in America mostly seems, to me, like a result of promises of lower taxes, the same kind of people who would vote for a party like you are presenting UKIP to be (extremely racist), and people who have been overly influenced by conservative media like Fox News. At least where I live to say that is a person is a socialist is basically swearing, and constantly people casually dissing the left.
Lowering taxation is a policy that can be viewed as something attractive to all classes, but it actually only benefits the ones that have no reliance on public services at all. After all, the point of taxation is that it creates the budget which the government then uses to serve/protect its people and maintain order and the rule of law. The rich have no need of such protection - their money already protects them from most of that. Unfortunately, the less educated among us will not notice this, and only pay attention to the idea of lowered costs on their bottom line, without realising that the function of taxation is greatly to their benefit on a wider scale.

How to put it... How else does a king get the rich nobles (to speak in feudal terms) to help the common man and do a good deed, except by taxation? On the surface they pay the king, but if the king spends it on fixing roads and building hospitals, fire stations, government bureaus, militaries - it's to the common man's benefit. The king has no need of most of that. He's rich like the rest of the people he taxes. It's a shame that the commoner can often only see that his bottom line expense seems to go up, although it's not really the commoner's fault. I'd place the blame on the nobles, who own all the town criers (media) who create a climate of fear of loss via taxation.

They're also fed ideas constantly by conservative media sources headed by billion dollar men, and those are a problem in the UK almost as much as the US from what my studies showed - but I don't think they have anything quite as biased and popular as Fox News. It's sad that socialism is demonised in the US to such a degree - it's far from a perfect political point of view, but it's also very far from an evil. I have no interest in it myself, only in green democracy, but it's still unfair that the left-wing of politics is ever so casually thrown aside as an idea. The great thing about politics is that all ideas have some level of merit, and every issue/decision surely deserves a full consideration of the entire spectrum to be fair.
Trust me, I completely understand. I am not defending conservatism, I personally detest it (though that isn't to say I detest any people reading this who happen to be conservative, friendship can cross political lines), I was just explaining why I feel that conservatism is so popular (at least in my country or area). It's just true that, for many voters, the only thing deciding their vote is which candidate will result in them giving the least to taxes, with things like public works not kept in mind at all. There's also the fact that many are distrustful of the government, and would not trust it to do a job with their money even if they understood the connection between taxes, public works, and their benefit from the latter.

Sagie
 
On a smaller scale, Harly, that happened in Wichita. We had a vote for a 1% sales tax increase recently. The increase would've only lasted a year and all the money from it would've gone to repairing roads, the city's water, and other public works projects that are sorely, sorely needed. It failed because the right painted it as OH NO TAX INCREASES ARE BAAADD.
Did most of Wichita actually support the bill, though? If so, yeah, it's really lame. >.< Situations like that kind of make me wish that voting was mandatory, as it is surprisingly common that radical minorities win votes purely because the non-radicals didn't care, even if it may upset someone like Ash.
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cipher
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I'm on the phone so I can't write a proper post. But an argument in favor of lowering taxation and cutting govt programs is that private businesses or organisations often do a more efficient and better job than their govt counterparts. So it may make sense to reduce the tax burden on citizens and corporations and free up more capital to be used as individuals see fit, not what the state sees fit (after all the state doesn't always have the citizens' best interests in mind).
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Harly
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#HarlyforHarly20Harly

Do corporations ever have anyone's best interest in mind besides their own?
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cipher
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Normally they should not; their purpose is to grow the wealth of shareholders. They do have some good side effects for non shareholders however, in that they increase available wealth overall (they pay employees) and many of them donate to charity in ad promotions/campaigns. Also they pool together competent people and drive the development and distribution of useful technology. So they do have some public utility despite themselves lol.
Edited by cipher, May 8 2015, 11:06 PM.
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Harly
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Some, I agree, but if your argument is "The state isn't great at helping people because the people aren't their primary interest", then suggesting that corporations are better at that seems like a total contradiction.
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cipher
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Corporations aren't a vehicle for charity or public acts. The more wealth they keep instead of being payed to the govt, the more they are able to invest and grow, thus increasing the wealth available to the individuals that own shares or are employed. Those individuals can then choose to use their money how they wish - donate to charities and shelters directly, etc if they deem it important.
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Silva
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Fiercer than the Dark

Super happy to hear about the Greens winning a seat again, although it's not the speedy progress we really need yet. Let's hope they get some more seats soon, Miva.

Harly
May 8 2015, 07:51 PM
Trust me, I completely understand. I am not defending conservatism, I personally detest it (though that isn't to say I detest any people reading this who happen to be conservative, friendship can cross political lines), I was just explaining why I feel that conservatism is so popular (at least in my country or area). It's just true that, for many voters, the only thing deciding their vote is which candidate will result in them giving the least to taxes, with things like public works not kept in mind at all. There's also the fact that many are distrustful of the government, and would not trust it to do a job with their money even if they understood the connection between taxes, public works, and their benefit from the latter.
Oh yeah, not to worry Harly. I agree. I fully understood that you weren't supporting conservatism. I was just having fun exploring the causes of mass poor class conservatism and the problems caused in explaining a campaign for a left-wing approach, mainly the complexities of explaining the benefit of taxation.

Yes, mistrust of governments definitely plays a role. I think it's good to be distrustful of a government of course, but only within reason. A lot of the distrust we see among conservatives can border on paranoia, and it's often misplaced. To me it seems strange - I often want to ask conservatives, why be paranoid about taxes, when you can be paranoid about mass surveillance and laws that allow people to be arrested and imprisoned without trial? But the response is rarely very satisfying. x.x

@Cipher: a core problem with the argument that corporations may do a "more efficient" job than governments regarding certain services is that a business has to turn a profit, and profit is achieved while cutting corners. If a government service (for example) becomes privatised, I've seen that the elements of that service that actually helped the poor and cost bunches of money are cut off (because the poor won't be able to campaign against it as easily), because those are the perfect corners to cut to help the bottom line. Corruption is a problem either way, state or corporate, but I think that the potential and drive for massive profits is more obvious and socially strong in private corporations, encouraging corruption.

I agree that a state sometimes doesn't have the citizen's benefit at mind, but I don't think that's the case in the UK, US or Australia. Our leaders are under heavy pressure to show if they believe they are doing the right thing by their people, and they do seem to believe it. To me, the problem is whether they are competent enough at seeing the right decision to make. I think that's more than enough to worry about.

I also have to note my total disagreement with the concept often mentioned by conservatives on this topic - that profits "drip down" onto the poor from strong company performance. While having a company that hires people is great, and in this there is some drip down and raises occur if a company does well, actually the current trend in business is to outsource and reduce spending on hiring to the absolute minimum. Companies are automating as many processes as possible, and this tendency is likely to get worse over time as robotics advances, reducing employment by big business in all the richer nations which could invest in such technology. For the poor, many of whom rely on things like physical strength to work, this is only going to make the situation worse if services are increasingly privatised. Governments at least consider the impact on the poor (or the favourite term in politics at the moment, the "middle class"), whereas corporations seem unlikely to have any direct motivation to. At least governments are somewhat held by elections to near-equally consider the significance of anyone who may or can vote.

I wouldn't trust the rich to ever give more than they take in economic terms in general. Giving hundreds of millions of dollars to charity is, on the surface, great - but if you're holding onto billions of dollars, that's a lot of wealth the public doesn't have, and in an economic sense, what you're not giving may even have more effect than what you do give. People are starving in these so-called "rich nations" we call home, nations with people in them who can share but aren't in the degree that they could - and their reasons not to share are very shallow.
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