[ZERO] It's remarkable to think that it was just 6 weeks ago when the UK revealed its biggest spending spree in decades - one which sparked a bond market crisis, a political shake up and the resignation of the now former PM Liz Truss. Fast forward to today when in a dramatic reversal, we learn that the UK is sinking into Greek-style austerity: the Telegraph reports that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and finance minister Jeremy Hunt plan to reveal a stealth tax raid on pensions later this month.
The pension lifetime allowance is set to be frozen for two more years, with a rise in line with prices delayed from 2025 to 2027, the newspaper said.
The allowance level has risen with prices in the past, but Sunak - as finance minister last year - froze the allowance until 2025. The move was forecast to bring the Treasury close to a billion pounds over the period, Telegraph said. And with the UK set to remain in a recessionary stagflation, with near-double digit CPI for the foreseeable future, UK retirees' purchasing power will be drained faster than Biden can syphon away oil from the US SPR.
The Treasury is now planning to announce that the freeze will be extended until 2027, the end of the five-year period for which plans will be produced, the report said.
Sunak and Hunt, who need to fill a fiscal gap of nearly 50 billion pounds ($56.88 billion) during the Nov. 17 budget, have agreed to split the cost roughly equally between spending cuts and tax rises, according to the Telegraph.
Your lifetime allowance (LTA) is the maximum amount you can draw from pensions (workplace or personal) in your lifetime without paying extra tax. This figure is currently £1,073,100. Read on to find out more about how this lifetime pension limit may affect you, so you don't face an unexpected tax charge in 2021
#2
This is the UK where early pension taking is outside the norm.
But in the USA there are a substantial number of people drawing pensions starting in their 50s, although in many cases the pensions start as a percentage of final pensions.
Illinois alone has over 20k ex govt (State and Muni) employees drawing over 100k in pensions.
Posted by: Lord Garth ||
11/08/2022 8:39 Comments ||
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A long and healthy analysis of the reasons for the war in Ukraine. This was done at the end of September and is a Twitter thread so follow it down.
Author: Velina Tchakarova, Director of an Austrian private non-partisan research institute & think tank with focus on EU foreign & security policy, NATO, CEE, Black Sea region and Middle East since 1996
Russia has launched a full-scale non-kinetic war on Europe on February 24. It entails nuclear blackmail, commodities (energy, food, fertilizers, critical minerals etc), information warfare, and migration flows. Please, read my very long thread on commodities war
It's time for a big thread 🧵 about the global triple crisis in fuel, food and fertilizers. When it started, how it continues, and what lies ahead amid Russia's war on Ukraine in Europe and the growing Sino-American bifurcation of the global system. #realpolitik#geoeconomics
[YouTube] Why is the German system so stable...because they didn't create it. The British, French and Americans did. No foreign strategic policy = no military = no war. A fool-proof plan...right? Unfortunately, the war in Ukraine has started to poke holes in this system.
Those same policies that once prevented knee-jerk elections and war, are now enabling Olaf Scholz to manipulate the bureaucratic tools and stall any German aid entering Ukraine.
The rest of Europe understands that they are facing military, strategic, environmental and economic crises...all at the same time. Diplomacy and economic integration have been a great tools for Germany in the past, but that won't cut it anymore.
[Bobby's Analysis] I have been tracking COVID data for almost three years now. There were four waves: peaking April, 2020; January, 2021; September, 2021; and January, 2022. The last peak had a seven-day average of 800,000 cases per day, but only 25,000 deaths for the week.
Not too scary.
Yesterday, I was updating my graphs of the data when I noticed the COVID and pneumonia curves crossed in mid-March, 2022. For the week ending March 12, 2022, pneumonia deaths exceeded COVID deaths, and continued to do so every single week since then.
Pneumonia has never been a public health emergency, and for the last seven months, neither has COVID. Pneumonia vaccinations (there are two, and I've had both) are not mandated, and I've had pneumonia twice since I was vaccinated against 35 variations of the disease. There are somewhere around 100 variations, I've been told.
It's time to end the Emergency Use Authorization for the COVID vaccines and publish the report on the vaccines' safety and effectiveness.
Posted by: Bobby ||
11/08/2022 00:00 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11130 views]
Top|| File under: Tin Hat Dictators, Presidents for Life, & Kleptocrats
#1
Nooooo...! But, but, Pfizer profits! And the delicious power the pandemic has given governments at all levels to rule our lives! They can't be expected to just give that up! It's cruel!
[American Greatness] Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Nancy Pelosi are of no use to the Left in the midterms because it is their radical ideology that was finally enacted and wrecked the country.
Over the last few months the four icons of the Democratic Party—Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Nancy Pelosi—have hit the campaign trail.
They’ve weighed in on everything from "right-wing violence" and "election denialists" to the now tired "un-American" semi-fascist MAGA voter—and had nothing much to say about inflation, the border, crime, energy, or the Afghanistan debacle. In this, they remind us just how impoverished and calcified is this left-wing pantheon.
So why should we take anything they say seriously, given their own records—and especially given their mastery of projecting their own shortcomings upon others as some sort of private exculpation or preemptive political strategy?
Still Hopin’ and Changin’?
Barack Obama this past week has assumed the role of surrogate president. He is storming the country, while Joe Biden mopes at home or visits shrinking blue enclaves so he can claim post facto, "At least I was out there stumping."
Over the last six years, we have become accustomed to Obama’s periodic getaways from one of his three estates. It is always the same. From time to time, he reenters politics to remind us that he did not just cash in on his presidency to become a multi-millionaire. Instead, he is still the Chicago "community activist" of his youth. And so, Obama will not be overshadowed by the Biden crew that is enacting all the crazy things he as president had warned were a bit much even for him.
#1
Barack Obama this past week has assumed the role of surrogate president.
He and his communist cohorts and enablers have been the shadow president and government since Biden entered the White House. He has simply 'come out of the closet.'
Whistleblower claims Hunter and then-VP Biden were part of a group call to discuss online gambling venture in Latin America - the president talking like he was chairman of the board
A whistleblower who worked for a Hunter Biden business called Ocho says then-Vice President Joe Biden and Senate Majority leader Harry Reid were part of a conference call with their sons helping set up a gambling business
Posted by: Big Brother Is Sniffing You ||
11/08/2022 18:56 Comments ||
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[BLUF]
[American Thinker] Back in the day, the Brit ruling class sent their sons to Oxbridge to learn "Greats," the Greek and Roman classical texts that would teach their young punks how to rule the realm. Then it switched to "Modern Greats," philosophy, politics, and economics, so their young punks would know how to manage a modern country. But our elite sends their youngsters to college to become wokey activists. How's that working out, rulers? Right now, apparently, everyone in Liberalland is mad as hell that CNN and the New York Times are calling President Biden out on his delta-minus-moron stupid lies.
A wise ruling class would have said Houston We Have a Problem when Trump won in 2016 rather than treat him as a fascist freak. A wise ruling class would have kept its administrative class in check during the pandemic. A wise ruling class would not have increased the money supply by 44 percent in two years. A wise ruling class would not have imagined that the subsequent inflation would be "transitory."
But our ruling class didn't do that, experts agree. And now it is reaping the hurricane, whose category will shortly be determined by the scientists at the National Political Hurricane Center.
A long form editorial from a Columbia professor. It was featured in the Live Journal blog of Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin. I'll never know why other than the keyword Nazi by Joseph Massad
[MiddleEastEye] The ongoing effort since 1991 to bring Eastern Europe into the fold of Nato and the European Union is not the first such integration attempt by Western Europe in recent history.
#2
The Nazis would learn from the precedents of European colonial empires to craft their own plans for Europe
...Stopped reading right there.
Had they learned, they would have treated the conquered as liberated to be uplifted, not as subhuman cattle. (Admittedly, some were better than others, the Brits being the best of the bunch, the French in the middle, and the Belgians at the very bottom) It's been pointed out beyond counting that had the Germans entered the USSR as liberators instead of genocidal conquerors, the USSR may well NOT have survived.
The Germans could not have ultimately won the war, but they could have extended it quite some distance had they treated their Eastern European conquests with even the most basic decencies.
[JP] No one can forget the 1975 "Zionism is Racism" resolution in the UN General Assembly, which Ambassador Chaim Herzog famously tore up as he stood on the rostrum of that body. True, in 1991 the UN revoked the resolution, but it left its mark nonetheless. Trying to undermine Israel’s legitimacy remained a theme in global affairs years later; no one sought to undermine the legitimacy of France, Germany or Sweden.
More recently, the UN established a so-called fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict, placing South African Justice Richard Goldstone at its head. In 2009, the Goldstone Report outrageously presented findings, including an assertion that the IDF had deliberately killed Palestinian civilians.
A short time later, Goldstone repudiated his own report in an op-ed in The Washington Post. But the reputation of the IDF was unquestionably tarnished by the falsehoods the UN had uncritically published and spread.
#1
Goldstone is Jewish in name only. Typical student leftest activist, anti-apartheid champion and kommunis. Pro-terrorist then, pro-terrorist now. Ideal candidate for any UN mission.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[ZERO] It's remarkable to think that it was just 6 weeks ago when the UK revealed its biggest spending spree in decades - one which sparked a bond market crisis, a political shake up and the resignation of the now former PM Liz Truss. Fast forward to today when in a dramatic reversal, we learn that the UK is sinking into Greek-style austerity: the Telegraph reports that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and finance minister Jeremy Hunt plan to reveal a stealth tax raid on pensions later this month.
Why is the German system so stable...because they didn't create it. The British, French and Americans did. No foreign strategic policy = no military = no war. A fool-proof plan...right? Unfortunately, the war in Ukraine has started to poke holes in this system.
[American Greatness] Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Nancy Pelosi are of no use to the Left in the midterms because it is their radical ideology that was finally enacted and wrecked the country.
