Thought is may be interesting to see how the recession is affecting the group of people on this Site. This could be a straw poll of the entire country.
How is the recession affecting you overall?
POSITIVE - You still have a job, mortgage payments down, utilities down, deflation in shops, cheaper products.
NEGATIVE - You or your partner have lost their job, arrears, real cash flow problems, threat of job losses, general feel of doom and gloom.
NO DIFFERENT - You life is largely unaffected either way by the recession.
(Try to avoid the perceptions created by shock TV reports and just vote how it is actually affecting you day to day ignoring the TV and newspaper news)
What a delightful thread and far more interesting than the news coverage, thank you.
I have many friends and family who have been sacrificed by their employers and Im trying to support them emotionally as best I can. One thing that I keep bringing up is the huge number of colleagues who were victims of the last capitalist shake down who have moved on and who tell me are happier than they ever would have been had things continued as they were.
As for the deflation in shops- it's spin. In reality, food prices on (especially) basic items continue to rise.
i am 3 years into a fixed rate mortgage and have found its the only real place where i am losing money but i still thank goodness for it cos things could so easily have gone the oposite direction and i may have been in a position of losing my home
as wales has not recovered fully from the previous 2 recessions i find other areas of my cash flow have changed very little but i do also find myself shopping around for bargains and settling on shop brands rather than named brands in my shopping basket
I love it when people refere to being " sacrificed by their employers ".
I run a print business and I can assure you that times are the hardest I have known in over 30 years. It is not just the print business, but all the things that affect my business.
Now IF I had an employee who I was paying good money too, but for the sake of my business I had to make them redundent, then sorry nothing Capitalist about that.....that is just pure common sense.
It would not be a personnel decision, but a business one. So easy for people who probably have never owned a business to bleat on about employers but...they would no doubt do exactly the same things, IF ever put into that position.
Yes times are hard, yes people are finding things tough but....don't tar every employer with the same brush. Like me my business, whatever money I have made has been through bloody hard work and believe me some sacrifices along the way.
It always seems to be the same kind of people who moan about employers. IF those people had any sense themselves they too would have their own business, but some people do not have the business accruments needed to do so.
Yes we are finding it tough, and yes I do have my own bills to pay but......thankfully through hard work and graft, we will survive this and come out of it stronger. If not I will join others down the dole office.
Well said Kent, thank you for the well informed focused and non personal rant.
If one thing gets my goat its bleeding heart liberals who disagree with me and by definition have spent their entire life eating lentil burgers whilst chained to a tree and never doing an honest days work.
There's no option in the poll for us to select either :cry:
We count ourselves as extremely lucky; we decided to sell up and take a couple of years off from business with no mill-stone round our neck. Having achieved our objective (it took a year to finally complete) the recession then hit and boy could things have been so different :shock:
Personally, I don't think we would have survived if we hadn't sold when we did and I'm sure we would have been a nice target for bank foreclosure and an addition to the ever increasing bankruptcy statistic in UK.
I agree with T7; unless you have run your own business, you cannot believe the pressure you can be placed under.
I'm glad we were out of the firing line this time round. We are both now far more relaxed than we ever were and ready to focus on our next adventure.
My heart is bleeding for the capitalists. Its a terrible terrible thing when you cant find a use for your workers and are forced to abandon the profits from their labours.
Of course its pretty sad for the workers too. I assume they are the first against the wall when the recession hits as I have yet to see any capitalist make themselves redundant before the workers.
I do have a tip though. If you can get control of resources rather than workers you can normally ride out the recessions comfortably.
I try to avoid justifying my opinions based on my expertise in a particular field as I have been accused of egotism on that basis. However we can assume that I have been both a capitalist and a capitalist worker for the purposes of this debate.
To clarify I find it difficult to distinguish between capitalists based on the number of people they exploit.
It would in my view Dave, assuming they weren't rewarded fully for the contribution their work made to the profits of a business.
Imagine I have my own business painting widgets. I get more widgets than I can paint on my own so I employ an experienced widget painter. In fact she is such a good widget painter that I can do 3 times the work I did before. Now the going rate for a widget painter is £12,000 so thats what I pay her. Before I employed this lady my business made a net profit of £20,000 and now she is working for me we make £60,000. Because it is my business I make an additional profit of lets say £20,000 from her labour. If the widget business goes down hill I can sack her and keep my job and if she goes sick I can get rid of her too. That's what I mean by exploitation.
I realise its a very simplistic model but I cant sit back and listen to tales of the altruism of employers without saying something.
Fair enough Dave but Ive had a good look round and I cant see any capitalist countries that are thriving or indeed have thrived without an inevitable crash that hurts a lot of people.
I would happily argue that you do not in fact get your fair reward for the work you do for your employer. I assume there are shareholders or partners who benefit from the profits. I could be wrong of course. In terms of my lady widget painter setting up her own business, that requires education/capital/connections. I think the real work of painting widgets is more valuable and deserves a greater reward than any of those things.
These basic principles aren't communist, that would be like me calling a capitalist a fascist.
There is a dull incredibly long winded and patronising book that seeks to explain things slightly better than I can. Its called the Ragged Trousered Philanthropist and is actually worth ploughing through for a while although I admit even this lefty libertarian found it gripped his pips at times.
No offence taken at all Dave, its an accusation that anybody with leftish tendencies like me is a little over sensitive about.
Max, I take your points. I think we have to agree to differ.
One point I would make is that it is relatively easy to dump sick staff and it is a practice I witness and try to help those people fight on an almost daily basis.
Ben I really don't mean to ask a rude question but.....do you work?
If you do, do you work for a Capitilist boss or....if you do not work do you get your money off of the Capitilist Government?
That is not a rude question, just some sort of explanation for your thoughts.
Let me respond GnV to the tax and national insurance and fiddling expenses point.
Some people see state benefits as a hand out to the indolent, I see it as a subsidy for employers who do not pay a living wage. How can somebody work 40 hours a week and still the government has to step in to make sure they don't live in poverty.
In terms of fiddling expenses frankly the MPs dont worry me at all. I know as do you that every business big and small fiddles its expenses and evades/avoids tax at every opportunity. As one tiny example with apologies to anyone in the business have you ever seen a hairdresser fill out their appointment diary in pen? Why do you think petrol stations constantly ask if you need a VAT receipt? I left the accounting profession when I realised the deeply corrupt practices involved in professional tax evasion. Its systemised its endemic and its totally ignored. I believe HM revenue and customs dont even look into known fiddles of less than £10,000. The media seem to prefer to focus on benefit scroungers.
I am afraid you wont convince me that our system is the "natural order" or that its fair or even approaching reasonably fair.
seriously though I had for the best part of 18 months our jobs under threat, and to be honest it is something I would never wish on anyone else, thankfully now my job is a lot safer than it was, but to have to keep looking over your shoulder and wondering if you would have a job does affect your spending patterns...save just in case... not spend on "x" just in case, not go out as much just in case
:D :D 
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