As I know I have a lot of socialists on my flist, I thought that whenever I update the  Red Book, I'd post it here. This allows my socialist buddies to gape in horror at the inequality of modern society, and allows my non-socialist buddies to get a glimpse of what it is that angers me.

And look! I found a little friendly Red Book userpic. How cool am I?

Most of what goes in the Red Book is articles from newspapers, so I can produce the links, thusly:

http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2082466,00.html

Unfortunately, the nice graphs are often missing from links.

To those too lazy to read, that links to a story about how inequality today is the same as in Thatcher's time. Pre-tax, the top fifth of households earn 16 times more than the bottom fifth, with £68700:£4200. After tax and benefits, they still have four times more, £49300:£13500.

Overall, the poorest fifth pay the largest proportion of their income in taxs. This is due to indirect taxes charged at a standard rate such as VAT.

So, tell me that isn't pretty screwed up.

You Are 20% Capitalist, 80% Socialist

You see a lot of injustice in the world, and you'd like to see it fixed. As far as you're concerned, all the wrong people have the power. You're strongly in favor of the redistribution of wealth - and more protection for the average person.

This was utterly bizarre. How does wanting to legalize drugs and prostitution make me capitalist? How does recognising that capitalism discriminates against the stupid make me capitalist? Pah, I say, pah!

EDIT:

Well this prompted me to re-do the political compass test at http://www.politicalcompass.org/questionnaire. My score was:

Economic Left/Right: -9.50
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.82

This is interesting because my score from the last time I did this in April 2006 was -8.25, -6.67. I have got a lot more communist, which I expected. However, I thought that I had been drifting rightwards socially (belief in the State rather than society, belief in rule by an elite rather than popular democracy). According to this thing, I am more or less the same on the social scale.

So... yeah. Cool.