Yes, and their financial situation is worse than ours with a real poverty issue.

Mark C – what you are implying is that these immigrants that we see working out in the roads (not hidden in some mine), carrying mobile phones, driving decent cars and wearing decent clothes, are all working illegally for 5 euros per day?

The best ‘solution’ to poverty is a stable childhood in a nurturing environment and a good education.

Pointing our fingers to the horizon doesn’t a solution make…

http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20100325/local/living-in-abject-poverty

She sometimes doesn’t send her children to school to save petrol, or so she said. Why doesn’t she walk them there instead? More importantly, how did she afford a car in the first place, and how does she afford the maintenance and running costs now?

Most important of all, she had her first child at around eighteen when she was, perhaps, naive. But why, oh why, keep on producing children and forcing them to live in such dire conditions? If she loves her children enough, she’d want them to have a better life, even if it means giving them up.

We continue to pump money into unemployment benefits and employers are having the impossible task to balance their labour demand with registered workers as a huge number of people insist on working irregularly. While this, in itself is a crime employers are left with little choice but to risk employing unofficial workers to satisfy their requirements and are duly prosecuted for this infringement.

The Housing authority has been receiving suggestions to implement means tests for those countless tenants who enjoy housing subsidies whilst simultaneously making commercial use of their residential apartment and are being unjustly enriched by the system at the expense of their landlord. Tenants, particularly those who are protected by the pre-1995 laws, should only be granted a subsidy once the landlord has consented and signed for it. While this may allow an element of bargaining power to the landlord, the overall benefits will outweigh the costs and any tenant who is, in any way abusing the system will desist from doing so or renounce his subsidy altogether

This overburdened welfare state is being subsidised by an unfair tax regime and endless fiscal persecution on employers, entrepreneurs who invest hard-earned capital and take commercial risk as well as those employees who have no possibility iof avoiding tax. While a good proportion of our taxes are being squandered on the lazy or those who prefer to abuse the system to paying their due share of tax, the state continues to bury its head in the sand.

@ Jacques: thanks, have downloaded Gibbons but cannot bring myself to read it on the computer. Will check Rubicon however. The only book I read on Rome was Climax of Rome by Grant. It was a very interesting read.

I have often pointed out that many locals are a bunch of spoiled brats, expecting the world to owe them a living and refusing to look beyond the shores of the small rock thereby realizing that there is a much larger and crueler world just over the horizon.

I have been often accused of not knowing what is going on in Malta since I live ‘across the pond’. What they do not realize that at my finger tips are daily news, papers like The Times, Malta Independent and many others some of which I wouldn’t use to even scoop up dogs’ poop with.

They forget that what nonsense they write affects a prospective visitor’s choice of a vacation destination because why would someone prefer to surround himself with some very nasty, unhappy people when they can, at a much cheaper price, visit the Caribbean so frequently advertising their magical seas and sunsets with smiling faces splashed all over the paper ads and television screens?

The political strife is enormous like nowhere else in the world. Some act as if they are living under the oppression of a Communist regime, forgetting that it’s been over thirty years since we tasted the likes of one.

Daphne and her readers have a grave responsibility to ensure that Malta does not go back and elect an incompetent team composed of elements who disgraced Malta and made it a laughing stock of the rest of the world. It was insulting enough when asked where I came from, their reply invariably was, “ah, yes little Mintoff’s island, right?” No it was never Mintoff’s island although his ego is big enough to accommodate a few Maltas.

We cannot keep giving them hope of governing by drawing foregone conclusions. By now they should know where they belong and it will be a long time, preferably when I am no more, that they may reach an adequate level of competency, moderation and sanity which the electorate may look favourably upon.

Keep up the good work Daphne.

Mr Buttigieg……I know!