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The 'Peace Tax' Seven
BillieTheBot
Posts: 8,721 Bot
They are, er, 7 citizens who have worked out around 10% of the taxes they pay are used for 'Defence'. They object to the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and as a result they have paid 90% of the taxes they are due, usually donating the other 10% to charity.
They're all up due in court at some stage or have been threatened with jail by bailiffs. One of them will be in court next Tuesday.
No doubt they will end up in jail, just as those people who adjusted their council tax bills due to inneficient service. Though it would be nice if this catched on.
http://www.peacetaxseven.com/
And to put things in pespective, some staggering facts and figures about military spending in the UK and elsewhere can be found here:
http://www.peacepays.org/door1.aspx
They're all up due in court at some stage or have been threatened with jail by bailiffs. One of them will be in court next Tuesday.
No doubt they will end up in jail, just as those people who adjusted their council tax bills due to inneficient service. Though it would be nice if this catched on.
http://www.peacetaxseven.com/
And to put things in pespective, some staggering facts and figures about military spending in the UK and elsewhere can be found here:
http://www.peacepays.org/door1.aspx
Beep boop. I'm a bot.
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Comments
You can see my point though, unfortunately we either accept taxation and its benefits (wheres Klintock?) and accept we wont like the way some of it is spent. Or we do away with taxation altogether.
I can see their point about not wanting to pay for an ilegal war though
There are some staggering figures in the second link:
- The first day of bombing in Kosovo cost more than an entire new hospital
- It would cost $37bn to provide clean water and a sewage system to everyone in the world. And it would cost $24bn to cut hunger in half. By comparision, the world's combined annual military spending is an incredible $800bn.
- To provide reproductive health care for all women and immunisation for all children in the world would cost $15bn a year. That is a small fraction of most Western countrie's annual defence budgets, or 3 months' worth of Iraqi occupation to the US coffers.
The list is endless. Far too much money is spent on 'defence' and far too much of it ends up being used in objectionable (if not outright murderous and illegal-as-hell) campaigns.
Some good points however, firstly we have peace keeping comitments and are likely to get more, Bosnia, sierra leone etc, so I dont see how we could reduce spending by 90% and still forfill these obligations. Compaired to some other countries Pakistan and North Korea we spend a fraction of our money on the military.
I dispute your costs 37 Billion for clean water for everybody, where are they going to get water with shortages in lots of the world, in most poor countries corruption would take all the money anyway. It sound a bit like the scottish parliment will only cost 40 million.
And we cant just cut the funding of the military like that, theres wages that have to be paid, redundancy.
I thinjk we have the right size military, especialy when you consider that the US marine core alone is bigger than the entire UK armed forces.
In fact, most countries do.
If nations had armed forces which primary mission was Defence they would only need to be a fraction of their size. But let's face it, the immense mayority of operations (or in the case of the US, 100% of operations) Western armies carry out nowadays are acts of aggression against third countries rather than defending one's country.
Last time we did was falklands wasn't it?
A massive proportion of taxes is wasted on the cancerous expansion of the public sector and many of us fundamentally disagree with the billions of pounds siphoned off to the EU - money which in turn funds some disagreeable projects sponsored by the European Union. I wonder if Aladdin will be sympathetic to such people taking this line who consequently refuse to pay an appropriate proportion of taxes...Tbh the line these sponging people are taking is fundamentally undemocratic; if they dislike how the elected government spends taxes they should work to get rid of it through the ballot box.
That Republican avatar you're sporting, you have certainly earned it- with honours!
You are right- why "wasting" money in helping the poor and vulnerable when we could be buying bigger, better, faster cruise missiles to blow up Johnny Foreigners more effectively?
I can see it now- we have our priorities wrong.
Do you have but a trace of humanity in you?
Perhaps they tried already. Not their fault that the party of their choice didn't win. In any event, embarking in illegal wars and killing tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children wasn't in any party's manifesto.
Because all EU funding goes to helping the poor and vulnerable?
Not that the EU funding has much to do with UK taxes anyway... I fear Disillusioned just dropped the name to divert attention from the issue or because perhaps he's not one to miss an opportunity to bash his nemesis the ultra-evil EU. The article was referring to how national taxes are used by the government.
I'd say the effect of the CAP on the enviroment and 3rd World farmers is a close second to spending money on weapons. But as you say, thats a side issue.
Its not how much we spend but what we do with them.
Heh.
The waste in the public sector isn't helping the poor and the vulnerable...Extra National Insurance contributions, additional duty on petrol, cigarettes and alcohol affect a lot of people, including the poor - for the extra tax everybody is paying under this government I do not think they're getting value for money.
What's inhumane about not wanting to fund the EU or wanting a reformed public sector with less bureaucracy and waste? I do not want higher defence spending for the sake of it - but I do think that if we're going to maintain placing the kind of duties and responsibilites we are at the moment in our armed forces we need to adequately fund it. I don't think we should be in a position where overstretch prevents us from supporting vital peace-keeping operations overseas. I can't see anything inhumane about that.
The war was not illegal. And well as bongbudda rightly says the CAP causes a lot of suffering and hurt in the Developing World. For those of us that don't agree with subsidising that suffering through our EU membership I somewhat doubt you'd condone not paying taxes...Their party didn't win? Tough luck, not my problem. The Conservatives didn't win, is that justification for disenchanted Tories to stop paying taxes? I think not.
No. You are suggesting on the whole that EU funding is less worthy than increasing the already absurdly large defence budget we have. I put it to you that EU funding is infinitely more useful and far less morally objectionable than spending billions in even more effective ways of killing people- especially when there is no need to kill them.
Yes. And Saddam really had all those WMDs.
I suspect it doesn't hurt nearly as much as having a latest generation 2,000lb laser ''guided'' bomb drop on top of you
Fair enough. But you miss a crucial point: EU is just politics. Farming subsidies is just politics. Not agreeing with congestion charge, unemployment benefits, etc is just politics.
Embarking in unjustified acts of aggresion that costs the lives of tens of thousands of innocents, and having you pay for it all is far more than just policies. It's a matter of life and death- literally. I certainly can understand where these people are coming from.
And the defence of own borders is naive. If your defending your borders you've really fucked up. Much better to defend at other people's borders (which has been pretty much British defence policy since 1600's which is why so many soldiers are buried from Blenheim through Waterloo to Dunkirk
Balls. It causes untold ecological damage in the EU, leads to mass over production, over use of the soil and farms and reliance on chemicals, it means that products are dumped on the 3rd World which further pushes down their growth, it means that farmers cant access our markets......
You are being too simplistic, its not how much we spend on weapons its what we do with them. If we were spending all our current budget bringing peace to Sudan and the Ivory Coast I'm guessing you wouldnt object.
But the fact remains that the former is linked to the latter. You don't need state-of-the-art, hyper expensive fleets of stealth vertical take off fighters unless you're going to be pretty active engaging in wars and conflicts in numerous foreign lands. You don't need arsenals of Tomahawk missiles- at a cool £1m a shot- unless you plan to bomb foreign capitals from your rather pricey destroyers and frigates.
We spend far too much in defence- and the money could be used for positive and certainly far more important things.
Wasn't that argument used by peace protesters in 1932 (though admittedly with different technology). Sadly the Government was so taken with the argument that there was no possible threat it adopted the spending position that there would be no major threat to the UK within the next ten years.
Ten years later we had already been kicked out of France, Belgium, Norway, Greece, Malaya, Borneo and were being kicked out of Burma, with British cities blitzed by German bombers and only being kept from starvation by the efforts of the Royal Navy and Merchant Navy.
The point is you don't know when a threat is going to materialise and if you've underpaid you're insurance premiums the costs is going to be much higher.
you're right defence is a matter of life or death. Which is an excellent reason for making sure its high enough to deal with threats - not just the ones we can currently see.
I suspect it all boils down to a primal desire to shout "my army is better than yours".
According to the Ministry of Defence itself, "no threats or conventional war attacks from Europe, the Middle East or a new superpower from Asia" are expected over the period to the year 2030".
Yet we are ordering more than a hundred hyper-expensive F35s (even though the Yanks won't let us have any know-how on the technology, so we're utterly dependant on them, though that's another story) and we continue to launch multi-billion pound frigates and destroyers.
No nation needs such massive firepower for defence. Certainly not in today's world anyway.
I don't like paying for scuffers to have Sky telly, should I deduct that too?
But the 'toys' aren't ordered because they look good, but because if the shit hits the fan lives will depend on having better fighters, armour which can shrug of hits from the enemies AT weapons whilst slicing through their armour like butter.
And as for the 2030 quote - the old war office thought that there would be no threat for ten years as late as the mid-30s. Predicitions have a horrible way off being absolutely wrong. I don't think my house is going to burn down, I'm insured in case it is.
In the case of Costa Rica, they don't even bother with 'insurance' any more. Since they got rid of their armed forces altogether, they have lived in more peace and prosperity than any of its neighbours, and despite having had some disputes with them they solved everything through diplomacy.
Whereas sadly it is too late for Britain to be without an army, certainly for the duration of our lifetimes, the government could actually achieve better security for the country through improving their conduct abroad and their diplomatic relations than through buying the best army money can buy.
Translation: Adopt an avidly anti-American stance, adopt the Iranian line towards Israel and remove any danger of fundamentalist Muslim terrorists targeting Britain - result being, as you say 'better security for the country.' Personally I'd rather do the right thing (as we broadly are doing) than appease.
For starters, as many countries know to their cost, adopting a critical stance of the US does not do wonders for one's territorial integrity and security.
And for seconds, the biggest appeasers of tyrants and dictators anywhere happen to be the likes of US and Britain (though not the only ones of course).
What I meant is that the security and safety interests of any country are far better served by the said country acting sensibly and fairly towards other nations than by behaving unfairly and then providing itself with a big army to try to deter any attacks.
Better not to appease brutal dictators and refuse to give them weapons and support, than to shower them with arms only to to fight them a few years later because the dog has turned on its master.
That way you don't create problems- or enemies.
We're not overinsured though.
Nor are we Costa Rica. Come to that Luxemburg has got a fuck all armed forces as well. And basically for the same reason.
They know if they got invaded there's other's who'll step in and defend them.
And there's no contradiction between having a sensible foreign policy and having an army for when that fails. Its probably worth noting that a sensible foreign policy does require intervention in other countries, better to deal with the problem before it comes to the UK borders.