Fun Online Polls: Debts and Madeleine McCann

After two weeks of voting, your responses to the question "What weighs more heavily on the next generation?" are as follows:

One trillion-plus of public sector debt - 37%
One trillion-plus of mortgage debt - 9%
One's as bad as the other - 14%
Nothing to worry about. They owe it to the older generation - 3%
They'll have a collective nervous breakdown, declare themselves bankrupt or move abroad - 37%

Sobers made a fair comment: "Public debt is worse because mortgage debt has an asset attached (the house). Unfortunately no citizen can ask for his share of govt assets to be sold to cover his share of govt debt. Thus upon being born you are totally liable for your share of govt debts, but have an asset to put against your parents' mortgage debt if you inherit it.".

However, the best observation was by I Hate The Government: "It used to be that we talked of having mortages over 100 years, instead now we will have debt for ever. The goverment owns the banks, thus now owns a substancial property portfolio, making it impossible for anyone to pay a fair price for a property. They let this happen, they cannot hold on to status quo forever."

Which sort of sums it up, the interests of home-owners (who only care about prices going up and/or getting out of negative equity), the banks and 'the government' in the narrower sense, are now more-or-less completely aligned, and we have a post-modern tax/subsidy system where the interests of the productive economy are completely ignored (i.e. taxed to death) in order to tackle one of the symptoms (to wit, falling house prices), but not the root causes, of the recession.
-------------------------------
Anyway, to round off Silly Week, let's see if we can help out The Daily Mail, The Daily Mirror and The Sun etc. with this week's Fun Online Poll: "Have you seen this woman?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.