Giving you more time to waste time
Posts tagged Bad News
Labour Spent £134k on Sofas
Yes. This is why I did not vote Labour (no I didn’t vote conservative either). Hideous, mind numbingly stupid spending! At a time when the entire country, well the entire world actually, was feeling the wrath of a global economic crisis, a Government department bought 28 sofas at a price of £4,120 each.
The shocking-red “Alcove Highback” sofas, by Parisian designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, were ordered for the department’s central London headquarters at a total cost of £134,503. The revelation is part of a new investigation into Whitehall spending by the new Coalition Government, which found that Labour ministers authorised the purchase.
The sofas were aimed to create a “peaceful oasis” in the workplace, part of an efficiency initiative called “SpaceFlex” to make the department “more practical” and save money. Are you ******* kidding me?!? How stupid are you? Look I understand that you need furniture in the workplace. I understand that you want to create a nice workplace with some nice sofas even. But you are insane if you think that justifies spending over £4,000 per sofa! Especially when you are buying 28!! What decent retailer wouldn’t do you a good deal on 28 sofas?
We can’t afford nice things because you can’t run the country properly! So if you think you can take our money so you get nice things when you are not even doing a good job, you sirs are are the worst kind of ignorant! How can you ever justify spending tax payers money on 4 grand sofas? You can’t. End of. Jog on!
Manchester United Owners in Huge Debt
Manchester United are perhaps the biggest football (soccer for you yanks) club on the planet. But even that does not secure financial stability. An investigation by the BBC’s Panorama program into the clubs owners, the notorious Glazer family, have a net debt of £1.1 billion.
How do you get £1.1 billion in debt? Seriously? Only a mammoth level of ignorance could lead you down that path to epic failure. To be fair I do live in a country that is over £150 Billion in debt, but that is the collective of 65 million people. Fans of Manchester United have been against the owners since they bought the club in 2005. The years running up to the 2008 financial crash around the world were perhaps to worst to buy anything, and has seen the demise of many business and businessmen.
The Glazers debt had been no secret. When they purchased Manchester United for £831m, they borrowed £559m which it then loaded onto the club as debt. Over the past 5 years the club has since paid out a massive £460 million on interest, charges and fees on that debt.
The real revelation was that the Glazers are carrying £392 million of previously unknown debt relating to mortgages taken out on 63 of the 64 shopping malls owned by their company First Allied Corporation across the United States. This brings their total debt up to £1.1 billion.
You won’t see the Glazer family on any flights to Manchester any time soon. Fans of Manchester United are furious and fear that the massive debt will force a lack of investment into the clubs team.
“We have campaigned against the takeover because the Glazers have put not one penny into United, while taking huge sums out, and ticket prices have risen for ordinary fans to help pay for it. The revelations about First Allied appear to show they may not have money from elsewhere to invest in the club or pay down all the debts. It will all come from the club.”
Making (no) Sense of Tax Rates
Does anybody in this country actually know anything about tax? Does it really need to be this difficult to make money? I swear they have designed a system that is complicated only so that when you do overpay tax, it is so much hassle to get it back that you end up giving up!
I am not a big fan of the British tax office, or the tax rates. For the past 3 years I have been registered as self employed. That in itself need not be that complicated. But I was self employed whilst working full time in one job and part time in another. This then gets very confusing. I am paying tax for being self employed, despite earning under the threshold for income tax and national insurance, and then paying tax on the earnings I make in my other 2 jobs.
Yet when filling in my tax return online, I get nothing to tell me how much I should be paying or if I have over paid. In fact, last year I moved to Canada for 5 months, and on the day I got their I had a letter from the tax office telling me that my numbers were incorrect for my tax return 2 years previous. They claimed that I had not listed any of my employed earnings from that year.
For the tax year in question, I had earned £300 from my self employed work and the rest entirely from my employed work. Surprisingly enough, I did not forget to leave out 99% of my earnings as they claimed. I did in fact put everything in correctly and paid an extra £95 in income tax as instructed on completion of the return. If I had only listed the £300 self employed earnings as the Tax Auditor claimed, then I would not have to have paid anything.
When I tried to explain this to the tax office, after 2 months of them not answering the phone, I was told that they had no record of me paying anything for that year. Fantastic. It turns out that I actually agreed with the figures they claimed were correct, because they were the exact figure I used the first time. So I sent a letter agreeing that the figures were correct, however informing them that they have clearly lost 2 crucial bits of data from my original tax return of that year, my employment earnings that I did enter correctly and the fact that I already paid the tax due.
A month goes buy and rather than paying any attention to what I actually said they just sent me a new bill for £125. So here is essentially what happened for the first tax year where I was self employed: I earned £300, then paid £215 of tax.
As you can probably imagine, I am quite keen for the tax office to go and hide somewhere where the sun doesn’t shine, to put it very very politely.
Best Albums of the 00's
Climate Change Ad Could Be Banned
Death Of Internet Freedom?
Movies Vs Gaming
VW Golf Mk6 GTi Hands On Review