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Blimey, seems to miss a bit

In his budget speech Jeremy Hunt made the following statement. “The average earner in the UK now has the lowest effective personal tax rate since 1975 — and one that is lower than in America, France, Germany or any G7 country.”

Given that the overall tax burden — the tax take as a fraction of national income — is reaching record levels, it is a remarkable claim. I have neither heard nor seen much commentary on it.

The answer actually is obvious. But not in fact said:

Lots of inflation has been good for VAT revenues.

That’s the only reference.

But the answer is that the tax system has moved – partially, to be sure – over to taxing consumption rather than income. VAT is at more than double the rate it was in 1975. We’ve the insurance tax, APD, landfill tax and on and on and on.

We should have done this too, consumption taxation is less distortionary than income taxation. But that’s what the explanation is all the same.

Simple solution here

The rule of law is declining across the EU

Everybody should leave the EU therefore.

Of course, the report is wildly different from that. It actually portrays the EU – snigger – as the protector of the rule of law.

Blimey

Something with high capital costs, high running costs, is not very popular with the punters:

Public enthusiasm for heat pumps has been overestimated by ministers, putting the Government’s net zero goals at risk, the spending watchdog has warned.

Strike me down with a feather, eh?

Working with the Americans can be difficult

One of the UK’s most senior military figures in Afghanistan was sent home in disgrace after drinking champagne with colleagues, The Telegraph can reveal.

Maj Gen Charlie Herbert OBE took up a post in June 2017 in Kabul as deputy advisor to the ministry of the interior, the government department responsible for law enforcement, civil order and fighting crime.

No, nothing to do with Afghans, Muslims or anything:

in breach of a US rule on the consumption of alcohol.”

The American armed forces can get very anal puckered about booze. It’s not just that the Navy is dry.

Just as an example, USN is clean shaven. Pops was RN and so could continue to wear his beard as he had done all his adult life. But one posting had him, RN Captain, under USN Admiral. So, off the beard came. While feasible to insist upon RN rules, line of command and all that, be polite etc.

US military really can be very anal.

Second order effects, changes in demand etc

Labour’s private school tax raid could cost the taxpayer £1.6 billion a year as it forces a quarter of pupils into the state sector, a new report has found.

Sir Keir Starmer’s party has made introducing VAT on independent school fees a flagship policy, claiming it would generate £1.7 billion to spend on state education.

But an analysis by the Adam Smith Institute (ASI), a free market think tank, warned that the policy was based on flawed assumptions and could cost the public purse billions across a single parliament.

Not historically accurate, no

What is the point of power if it is not to help the most vulnerable and least well off, which there is no sign that Labour will do?

Power has been, historically, sought after and acquired for one of two reasons.

1) To live high on the hog.

2) To have power over others.

It has always been vastly, vastly, better to be ruled by the first set of greedy bastards than by those who enjoy the actual process of power itself.

Blimey

Someone has actually read and understood Animal Farm then:

In the independent Haiti, though, the necessities of a class-driven world ensured that the new ruling class governed as would any elite, whether in Haiti, France or America. Its objectives were to maintain power, suppress dissent and enforce the exploitation of labour.

And, of course, so different from a world which was not class riven:

US leaders cavilled at Duvalier’s brutality, but saw him as an important asset against communism, especially Fidel Castro’s Cuba. And so the aid poured in.

The situation in Cuba being so wholly, entirely, different from that in Haiti. Of course.

Possibly, just possibly…..

….even the American media are getting indigestion here:

Lichtman added: “If this was anybody but Trump, any other presidential candidate on trial, it would be the trial of the century and the mainstream media would be screaming that, if the candidate got convicted, he should be bounced from the campaign. Instead they’ve misrepresented and trivialised this case.”

All this insistence that Orange Man Bad is being rejected by that basic gut feel. Lawfare, well, yes it works, but only up to a point. When the gut feel of the populace is that it’s all very politically partial then perhaps it doesn’t?

The Guardian and numbers

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Why 933 days?

Gonna be a problem

Labour’s plans will have a significant impact on parts of the media industry, which relies heavily on freelancers and other workers on precarious, short-term contracts.

As I’ve pointed out about California’s crack down upon gig work. It’s very, very, difficult to blank out zero hours contracts, legally, without also killing the entire basis of freelancing. Which is, of course, how large parts of the media work.

Folk might wake up to this at some point….for it isn’t that gig delivery and driving companies invented a new method of employment. Instead, they just picked up one that was lying around in the economy already – often and largely in media.

Marketing speak

It added: “‘Fresh ale’ provides exciting new opportunities for pubs to serve ale, all while preserving the beloved handpull ritual that delivers the traditional theatre of serve that ale is famed for.”

Shoot them. Not particularly because of the beer thing, just that language and justification.

I rather like this idea

Sure, I’ve no idea whther it’s technically possible – I guess it’s getting close to be but that’s all – and I’d have my worries about the costings but:

Britain homes could one day be powered by electricity generated in America under plans to install up to six power cables across the Atlantic.

The cables would stretch roughly 3,500 miles across the ocean, reaching depths of up to 11,000 feet, and carrying power roughly equivalent to several nuclear power stations.

A group of London investors and energy consultants are behind the ambitious scheme, as they claim technological advances in subsea cables could allow the creation of a global “intercontinental grid”.

Simon Ludlam, one of the businessmen backing the project, says such a cable would enable electricity to be traded across the Atlantic, taking advantage of the differences in peak demand as the power line crosses time zones.

The cost of such an ambitious project is uncertain, although current estimates suggest it will be above £20bn but potentially cheaper than the £46bn being spent on Hinkley Point C – Britain’s new nuclear power station.

The thing is – with all those ccaveats about price and doability – that if it is possible to do it at some reasonable price then it is a good and sensible thing to be doing. Which does mark it out, distinguish it, from the usual Green plans.

I’d also point out that cheaper than Hinkley isn’t quite true. If we build Kinkley then operating costs are near zero. If we build the cables we’ve still got to buy the power in the US. But even so, intercontinental connectors, if they can be done, are a perfectly sensible idea.

OK

That it took so long for the streamers to renegotiate terms with Sag-Aftra, Porter says, has resulted in a shrinking middle class of working actors. “Those Friends people are making $100m a year!” he exclaims. “I’m getting six-cent cheques! It’s not OK!”
….
The Pose star plays a divorcing dad in Our Son, but he has other things on his mind – such as getting paid, why his James Baldwin biopic is like Barbie and trying to understand the Israel-Gaza conflict

Billy Porter is known for going big.

Who?

Err, yes?

(According to one analysis, 30% of the properties sold in Paradise, California, after the catastrophic Camp fire went for less than their assessed value.)

Assessed value will incude the value of the building – and even if not, that the piece of land is in an area surrounded by other buildings, and electricity, and telephone, and water connections and – all the things that no longer exist.

Burnt out rubble in a whoilly burnt out town is cheap. Horrors.

Snigger

I gather that the article is here, but I would not bother reading it because the above summary reveals just how wrong Policy Exchange is and these authors are.

First, savings do not fund investment. The UK has £8,100 billion of financial wealth according to the Office for National Statistics: vastly more cash is available from savings than might ever be needed to fund investment and that investment is not happening because that is not the use now made of savings. They are almost all used for speculative purposes, those saved with the government excepted.

Second, investment is actually almost invariably funded by credit, and that is created out of thin air by banks. Policy Exchange reveals that it does not know how the economy works.

Odd that an accountant seems not to have heard of equity as a component in investing.

Nor, obviously, that net new investment is going to be net new saving, not the current stock of saving? For it that were not true, then where would all the results of the investing of the past be if not in the stock of saving/investment?

I might have said this you know

Professor Joseph Stiglitz: Debt does matter, both economically, and, perhaps even more, politically. Let me first try toexplain MMT, the modern monetary theory, which has argued that it does not matter at all. I also want to make it clearthat the view held by many people, that it is the most important thing, is wrong. I am not at all worried about the level ofdebt in the United States. So the view that we face an existential crisis because of the debt is wrong, but the other view, that we do not have to think about it, is also wrong.

The origin of the view that it does not matter at all goes back to the 2008 financial crisis, where we expanded the basemoney supply enormously—by fivefold in the US and Europe—and there was no inflation. That led people to believe that you could increase the money supply enormously without any inflationary consequences. There was no inflation, because the money went from the Government into the banks’ coffers and they did not lend it, so it did not have any inflationaryeffect, but it did not have any benefit either.

If that money had gone into the banks, the banks had lent it, and the people to whom it had been lent had spent it, wewould have had enormous inflation, but we would not have needed to increase the money supply that much. We kept doing it, because we hoped that increasing the money supply would stimulate the economy, but it had a very weak effect.That is the fallacy in MMT: if you increase the money supply and nobody spends the money, it does not cause a problem, but it does not solve a problem, either.

That’s Joe Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate.

No, he is not saying it because I did, not did I because he, both because that’s actually correct. As everyone was in fact saying back then.

Here in a retired acciountant from Wandsworth on the subject:

So we have to conclude that Stiglitz did this deliberately. I stress, that I really would not mind if Joe Stiglitz had offered an honest critique of MMT to this committee. He is, of course, entitled to do so. Economics is full of disagreements. But he did nothing of the sort. He did three things.

First he revealed his ignorance, not just of MMT, but also of banking, the role of the national debt, and the fact that there is such a thing as double entry so that when discussing that issue we also have to consider the preferences of those who own wealth and their desire for safe places to save.

Second, he misrepresented the truth, and I am really not sure that this is what anyone should do before a parliamentary committee.

Third, as a consequence, he might have served his purpose but he made himself look stupid in the process. He might, like many economists, think that a worthwhile thing to do, but I would have thought that he had by now reached a sufficient stage of maturity to get over playing such silly games.

Who to believe, eh, who to believe?