Get up stand up.

Bin it. Just another bunch of wailers.

pierrot wrote: »

which guys? what congress?

wh-wh-what congress? Where am I? Who took my false teeth? Where is my brain medicine?

Do we really want old man Pierrot here with his finger on the button?

More and more of the same old I'm afraid. Listening to Radio 1 this morning, they discussed the salaries of our Union leaders - they ranged for €70,000 per annum to over €170,000 per annum. I was surprised to hear that in many of the public setor unions, the pay of the leaders are linked to the pay of certain grades within the civil service, if these grades drop, so do the union heads.

Compare our situation over all with that of Germany :

Group of rich Germans call for wealth tax


Agence France-Presse
October 23, 2009 01:35am
[A GROUP of rich Germans have launched a petition to call for a wealth tax to help the country bounce back from an economic crisis, because, as one said, he had "a lot of money I do not need".

The text, posted on the internet at www.appel-vermoegensabgabe.de, has been signed by 44 people who want to convince the government of newly re-elected Chancellor Angela Merkel to raise their taxes.

None of the names are those of Germany's richest families.

But for retired doctor Dieter Kelmkuhl, 66, it is time the wealthy came to the aid of their country.

He reckons that if the 2.2 million Germans who have personal fortunes of more than €500,000 ($808,734) paid a tax of five per cent this year and next, it would provide the state with €100 billion ($161.75 billion).

Mr Kelmkuhl got the idea when Berlin stumped up billions of euros to save banks and give the recession-hit economy a boost, as the gulf between rich and poor grows wider in Europe's biggest economy.

"It made me mad to think that we suddenly found all this money for the banks, money that we did not have before for urgent programs like education and the environment," the left of centre weekly Die Zeit quoted him as saying.




The former doctor would like Germany to have its own version of the US group United for a Fair Economy (UFA), which includes around 700 wealthy US residents, according to the left-of-centre daily Tagesspiegel.

His plan would set a 5 per cent tax for two years to fund specific projects followed by a reduction to one per cent, the level of the tax when it was abandoned in 1997. Germany still slaps a 25 per cent levy on capital gains.

One signer, 69-year-old Peter Vollmer, said he backed the petition because he had inherited "a lot of money I do not need".

Since her September 27 election victory, Mrs Merkel and her Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) have been locked in talks hammering out a common program with their new partners, the Free Democrats (FDP).

The FDP promised €35 billion ($56.61 billion) in tax cuts in its election campaign, but with Germany's public finances shot to bits by the recession, Mrs Merkel's party is wary of agreeing to such reductions.

On Wednesday, Mr Lehmkuhl, Mr Vollmer and a few friends held a rally in the Tiergarten in central Berlin, throwing fake banknotes into the air for photographers in what they called a bid to provoke discussion of the idea.

"It's really strange that so few people came," Mr Vollmer said.
We have no real sense of social responsibility in this country though this is a lot to do with the fact that our politicians have done little to earn trust or respect.