cbforever

Looks like a lot of Brits are throwing parties over Thatcher's demise. And here's a reminder as to why:

http://crackerfawn.tumblr.com/tagged/margaret-thatcher

"Her soul was split, kept safe in various trophies to ensure that she would never experience the final death. Most of them were thematically appropriate, emblems of her triumph carefully picked on her rise to power. An orphan's tin whistle. A dead lump of coal. An Argentinian gold tooth.

But there was one more split, one she did not plan for. At the hour of her final triumph she sought out a village in The North and hunted down a family of lower-middle class Scots, intending to use the blood of their child to bring about the final doom. Instead, the mother's faith in the NHS rebounded the killing glare back at her, destroying the sorceress and launching a fragment of her soul into the heart of the innocent baby, locking the two of them in an eldritch union.

With the welfare system gutted, the young man grew up aimless and angry at the world. He died of a drug overdose today, severing her last tenuous grasp upon the world. The. End."

You'd think someone erudite enough to make Silmarillion references might also care to use capital letters.

So what was the issue with Thatcher, Sam? I mean, I just know what a few history briefs and wiki have written about her and she seems to have not been the huge monster people are making her out to be.

To elaborate a bit more, from my discussions with my British buds, her policies ended up fucking over industries in the North, and I think Wales and Ireland. People from small towns in these regions who depended on steel, coal mining, and manufacturing lost their jobs and their communities became impoverished. There can be some argument made in regards to establishing a new equilibrium between the worker's unions and corporate bodies, but as I hear it the execution was so sudden and brutal that there was no time for retraining these workers in new industries and something like 250,000 people became unemployed.

She also sent in the metropolitan police to lay out some pretty hard ass-whuppins in response to the coal miner's strikes.

On the other hand she did invent soft serve ice cream, so it's not all bad.

Also, she either instituted or expanded the VAT, which is one of the most bizarrely regressive tax policies I've ever heard of.

What we're those policies? Where they against the industry or the unions? What is VAT? I information please.


... I hate touchpad keyboards.

Also, VAT = Value Added Tax. It's kinda hard for a lot of Americans to wrap our heads around how this works, including me. But the short of it is that goods are taxed at every level of production, which seems incredibly regressive. There's more complexities, variations, and exceptions to it of course, but on an intuitive level it's just bizarre to me how you expect to develop a high tech economy when a technological device has every one of its components taxed, and every one of those subcomponents taxed, and the raw materials those subcomponents are made from are taxed. I could be wrong, but it seems like under this system a good ends up being taxed in proportion to how technologically complex it is.

In any case, I'd confer with some of my economist friends but I'm busy studying for a huge series of exams on Thursday. Maybe Sam or some other actual British person can explain and correct me.