Tim Worstall

Did you know that over 15 times as much money is lost through tax avoidance at the top than is lost to benefit fraud at the bottom? That’s £15BN of public money lost to a powerful elite who can afford to pay tax advisers: No, you’ve really not quite grasped this. That’s £15 billion that [...]

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Hmm, riiiight: ….because continuing economic growth is both unlikely and undesirable. Unh hunh. Global GDP is around $50 trillion (rough, rough numbers here). Some 7 billion people (if not yet then there will be shortly). Call that $7,000 a year each. Say £5,000 each. 60 odd million of us here in the UK. Our share [...]

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At least two organic farmers a week are leaving the movement as consumer demand for premium food stagnates and costs rise. Looks like the environment really is a luxury good, eh?

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This is one way to do it. A woman who has repeatedly given her eggs for IVF treatment has become a "secret" mother to 11 children, making her Britain’s most successful egg donor.

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Here. Labour spinmeisters were going to spread sexy political gossip. Hmm. Looking around apparently the gossip was that one MP had the clap, another is gay and one family member of a third had mental health problems. Err, how many Tory MPs are there? A couple of hundred? Given the incidence of all three in [...]

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At the ASI. Given that we’ve not got and never have had totally unfettered capitalism and free markets it’s a pretty simple thing to say that the future belongs to mixed economies. The point is, how mixed? (To extend the argument a tad, who does the mixing is also pretty important.)

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you tofu-frotting simpletons

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Sinn Féin’s 5 MPs have claimed £21k each for the last 4 years – a total of over £400k – in second home allowances for flats in London even though the thieving bastard terrorists refuse to take their seats in Westminster because they won’t pledge their alleigence to the Queen. So who is to blame [...]

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Looking at the numbers used to bolster this scare story about shipping I spot a number that makes me really think quite hard about those very numbers. OK, I’m fully willing to agree that shipping tends to use very low grade stuff as bunker fuel. High sulphur stuff especially. I’m also willing to believe that [...]

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Olympic planners have been forced to seek public sector support to bail out a £1bn athletes’ village project in east London, after a collapse in interest from private investors. Or Beijing, Sydney, anyone want this monstrous drug fest for sporty types?

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Is our John Harris. If you want a case study in all this, try Hull. About one in five of the working population has no formal qualifications, and through 2008, the numbers claiming jobseeker’s allowance went up by a third. The promotional blurbs for the local regeneration agency enthuse about the likes of Zara, H&M [...]

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With Seumas Milne, which is a bit worrying. Quite why a man who presided over disaster in the financial sector, and damagingly opposed early cuts in interest rates as the crisis deepened, should effectively be allowed to dictate fiscal policy to elected politicians is something of a mystery. Why are we allowing Gordon Brown to [...]

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Up until now the Department for Transport discouraged such schemes, increasing motorists’ frustration at being met by a succession of red lights. It was because the Government feared motorists who were travelling smoothly, rather than stopping and starting, would use less fuel and pay less to the Treasury in duty as a result. I beg [...]

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No love, we´re not picking on you because you have a twat* but because you are a twat**.     *Some would substitute a rather more robustly Anglo Saxon descriptor here. ** Ditto

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Erm, really? Industrial demand for silver, including from the photography industry, is reckoned to be about 65 per cent of total global supplies estimated at 895 tonnes. For gold industrial and dental demand the figure is about 11 per cent of supplies estimated at around 3,880 tonnes, according to consultants GFMS. OK, I realise, this [...]

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It´s not that this article is wrong, it´s that it´s so hugely uninformative. Almost a dozen oil tankers carrying millions of litres of oil and gas have anchored off the British coast because the cargo’s owners are waiting for prices to rise. Well, yes, but why? The article tells us not. The reason is: Right [...]

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The Prime Minister hopes to make Britain "a world leader" in producing and exporting electric cars and hybrid petrol-electric vehicles. The government picking winners. It all always works so well, doesn´t it?

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It suggested that women who retire this year will have an average annual pension of £13,671, compared to £20,313 for men. It means women will retire on £6,642 less a year than their male counterparts. Given that women live a number of years longer than men, on average, there´s not really all that much surprising [...]

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The report said the combined effects of crime, health and costs relating to drug prohibition policies leave the taxpayer with an annual bill of £16.785 billion a year. In contrast, it estimates that legalising and regulating all drugs would cost just £5.951 billion a year, therefore saving the public some £10.834 billion. And the Home [...]

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A spokeswoman for the chancellor said he had done nothing wrong and had had the arrangement approved. Darling let his flat "to cover its costs" and declared that in the register of members’ interests, she said, adding that he paid council tax on his Downing Street residence and was taxed "on the benefit of living [...]

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