Tim Worstall

The Sunday Times investigates Google’s tax arrangements in the UK. Well, actually, they have Richard Murphy read the accounts for them. In a nutshell when you buy an ad from Google you do so from Google Ireland rather than Google UK. Thus tax on any profits ends up in the Irish Treasury rather than the [...]

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This is actually painful to read. Start with a long list of what regulators did wrong with the banking system in recent years. Chris Rexworthy, a former director of the Financial Services Authority, freely admits that the regulator did not understand the risks of banks and building societies that grew so reliant on the money [...]

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This sounds about right: In "The Audit Explosion", a prophetic pamphlet written in 1994, Michael Power, an academic authority on accounting, anticipated the Cynthia Bowers of our day. He predicted that the new craze for targets and reviews would "spread a distinct mentality of administrative control" which would undermine trust and encourage the proliferation of [...]

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Dear God Almighty. Someone has been smoking some serious shit. Advisers manning the “Frank” helpline are informing callers they believed to be children as young as 13 that alcohol is a “much more powerful drug than cannabis” and that using the illegal drug recreationally is not harmful because it “doesn’t get you that high”. Callers [...]

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That’s what stings, the miserable teenieness of the target they set themselves. Thousands of jobs in Whitehall, local government and quangos are set to be lost in the move towards big savings in "back office" functions, IT programmes and finance. It is the clearest sign yet that the government plans a tough spending squeeze which [...]

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See: The “e-borders” system will log passenger information according to the data provided by the airline, which in most cases will be from the non-British passport used for the outbound journey. As a result, a dual national – even if readmitted to Britain by an immigration officer on showing a British passport – could be [...]

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Reading a book this afternoon I find that there used to be something called the "Anti-Gallican League". Dedicated to such absurd ideas as keeping French products, French dancing masters, French garlic and French "frickasees" (as well as, one assumes, French diseases) out of a proper plain beef eating nation such as that personified by John [...]

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I think you have George Osborne wrong – I always felt he was a kid trapped in a man’s body – sort of like Tom Hanks in Big. George really wants to go outside and play football and jump in muddy puddles, but Cameron keeps making him do hard sums as Chancellor.

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Wasn’t that what we were told? I know, I know, I’m repeating myself but this story is simply too lovely not to keep referring to it. Evidence is mounting that Britain’s ­building societies engaged in a splurge of mortgage book buying and risky commercial lending during the property boom that is now threatening the financial [...]

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He’s quite right about this: While there were never enough hours in my days in London, here in rural Portugal the time passes languorously. Once or twice a week we’ll make the trek to the village of São Brás de Alportel but, for the most part, we relish the solitude: planting tomatoes and peppers, trekking [...]

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At the ASI. Just as we should castigate the police for their errors, so should we praise them for their efforts in stopping crusty hippies from committing crimes.

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Interesting for those further to the left of me I think. The two above the fold stories on the front page of the FT today. One is that limiting the growth of government spending to less than 1.1% in real terms is in fact "savage cuts". It’s something of a sign of how the language [...]

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Mr. Murphy really does come out with some unbelievable statements: There is however considerable concern that over very small bands of income the top marginal rate of income tax in the UK will in 2011 be 60% about which they say this: raises the concern as to whether the projected increased revenue will materialise Or [...]

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In the obituary of this brave man (in the paper, not online version) his photo has as the caption: "Webb: Monty once demanded his advice for curing constipation." An interesting way to be remembered.

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71% agree with a new wealth tax on earnings above £250,000; Wealth is a stock, income or earnings a flow. A wealth tax is thus a tax on the stock of stuff that people already have. A tax on earnings would be a tax on the flow and would be an earnings or an income [...]

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Well, true…. Those who favour “stimulating” the economy often employ a medical metaphor. The economy is a dying patient. Questions about the long-term effects of its treatment are irrelevant. All that matters now is keeping it alive. They are foolish to employ this metaphor. Economies cannot die. Even during the Great Depression of the 1930s [...]

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Pickled Politics asks whether they should be banned. No, I dunno. There´s  conflict there between consenting adults being able to do as they wish (and being prepared to accept the consequences of course) and the damage that will/might be inflicted upon the offspring of such. The sort of moral maze that I´m not competent to [...]

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OK, so biofuels create more CO2 than they save. Well done guys, you’ve woken up. However: The environmental group’s executive director Andy Atkins said: "Until ministers can do their sums properly and prove that growing crops for fuel actually cuts carbon, the Government should stop biofuels being added to UK petrol and diesel. Absolutely, it’s [...]

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While just seven per cent of the population attend fee-paying schools, a majority of people working in law, finance and the upper echelons of the media were educated privately, it found. Three-quarters of judges and 70 per cent of finance directors were independently schooled, as were 45 per cent of senior civil servants and 32 [...]

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Having spent so much of my adult life amongst Johnny Foreigner I’m something of a lover of the way in which newspapers supposedly written in English aren’t in fact written in it. Technically correct, but just not quite right. Meanwhile, the European Commission is hoping to convince young people to say "No" to abstinence. The [...]

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