VATs

No, I’m not talking about the strange but effective pause-time first person combat system of Fallout 3 fame but the other and very much more boring kind. (Although I wouldn’t put it past Les Government to coerce Microsoft into using their Gamer Live system to subtract 17.5% of my Action Points, for them to put to use in another one of their completely legal and not-at-all hypercritical wars…)

Any who, by now (yes, just one paragraph in) you can already tell that my other articles haven’t been going so well and, in an effort not to be dispelled from the collective for posting too infrequently, I have fallen back to my ranting roots. Please also find enclosed a very special analogy expanded beyond comparability by yours truly…

So, VAT it is (that’s Value Added Tax for all of those dyslexics that have stumbled upon this site whilst looking for superior methods of vegetable drainage). Every type of financial data seems to be in the news at the moment and today was no different, as the Government rolled out VAT to take a kicking. Alistair Darling, our most amusingly named Chancellor (yes I too have Blackadder like visions of Gordan Brown shouting “Darling, Darling, what are you doing Darling??”), has decided to tinker with this little blighter now. Oh goody, I hear you collectively sigh, that’ll do the trick…

The analogy I heard involved the good ship Britannia having hit an iceberg and The Treasury were simply rearranging the deck chairs on board instead of solving the problem at hand. This, I feel, gives them too much credit, so I take it upon myself to embellish the story for greater accuracy and my own bloody enjoyment (after all we are British and, as such, enjoy kicking ourselves in the gut at every opportunity).

T’is certainly true, we have hit an iceberg of monetary problem here. However, we all stood on the bow and watched this problem approach, shouting at the captain to reach ramming speed before impact. Now we’ve hit that little Credit Crunch we’ve discovered it was just the tip of a very deep, very dark and extremely cold recession.

What-ho, the Powers That Be spring into action, but instead of pointlessly rearranging the deckchairs they begin to handout caviar and champagne to the idiots that reassured us it wasn’t such a big chunk of icy rock and stoked the furnaces to prove it. Even worse, they’re now ushered into the lifeboats and bid good voyage…

Now it’s time for the deckchairs, but instead of simply moving them around our higher-ups decide to pile them in the middle of the deck, pour flammable liquor across them and set them alight. Never considering for second that it would only result in giving us a choice between immolation and the slow sink into the freezing depths beneath, but at least we’ll have warm feeling inside and something pretty to lookout as we meet our self-inflicted demise.

Oh, and I almost forgot, there’s those poor souls that have already fallen over the side into the murky ice filled waters and are struggling for air as we speak. Why I’m sure our erstwhile commanders have a solution for them too, and here it is. Allow them to present the ping-pong ball measures. That’s right, enough of these little blighters can raise a ship (They saw it on MythBusters once) so if we throw just the right amount at these unfortunate bastards they should be able to cling on to them and rescue themselves…

Hurrah!!! Oh the humanity!!!! Etc…

It’s at times such as these I like to remind myself that all this financial shenanigans is completely made-up, an artificial mechanic we’ve been bred to believe in. Ho-hum, what’s on the other channel?? Zombie-Celebrity-Knife crime?? Brilliant…

Tags: analogy, economy, finance, government, money, rant, ships, Zombie celebrity knife crime