Tim Worstall

Meanwhile, in Labour’s decade, billionaires’ wealth quadrupled and three out of five of them paid no income tax. Well, leave aside the fact that income tax is paid upon income and not increases in wealth, I still don’t believe that figure. Whatever you say about the ways in which you can dodge taxes, it really [...]

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In praise of … American women writers What? They write women over there? Rather than create them in the more traditional manner? Explains quite a lot actually.

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This isn’t entirely unheard of. Rare, but not never. Gavin Hyatt, 30, explained that the lump forced its way out after lying inside his abdomen since he was born. Medics said the 4cm growth was a parasitic twin that died in the womb early in their mother’s pregnancy. Mr Hyatt, a former firefighter, from Witney, [...]

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At the ASI. No, it wasn’t the men that ruined the banks. It was allowing women in that did. (Risk tolerance rises in mixed sex environments.)

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Some of the things that these MP’s are claiming for. Sheesh. Phil Woolas, the Home Office Minister, claimed for items of women’s clothing, tampons and nappies. Just think through that. The allowances system is to cover the extra costs. The extra costs of needing to maintain two homes. Babies don’t shit any more, women don’t [...]

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The work was undertaken by Mr. Richard Murphy, who identifies a £25 billion tax gap caused by tax avoidance. Essentially, he looked at headline tax rates and then at the total tax rate, measured the gap and said that it was caused by tax avoidance, but that fails to take into account that we as [...]

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Interestingly Dick Cheney’s first daughter, Elizabeth, was born 9 months and 2 days after the Selective Service System announced that childless married men were to be drafted.

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Sucking at the public teat and getting caught: Now Spitalfields Housing Association, the owners of the three-bedroom house, has engaged lawyers to examine whether she should be allowed to continue renting in Wapping, according to Inside Housing, a trade magazine. Legally a tenant with an assured or secure tenancy must live in the social home [...]

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Leave aside the reality of all this expenses stuff for a moment. Just savour the frothing outrage over expenses coming from journalists.

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I know the arguments and I know how the figures are calculated. According to the DWP, the median weekly income in 2007/08 for a couple with two children was £601 before housing costs and £533 after housing costs. Such a couple would be considered poor if their monthly income pre-housing was £361, or £322 after [...]

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Receipts submitted by the Prime Minister to the Parliamentary authorities disclosed that between 2004 and 2006, he paid Andrew Brown for cleaning at his flat. Andrew Brown, a senior executive at EDF Energy, received £6,577 over 26 months. No, not as bad as it looks but still…. Jack Straw, the Justice Secretary, received a 50 [...]

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It was lonely enough anyway, being the only pig in one of the world’s most devoutly Muslim countries. And that was before swine flu. The white pig, a resident of Kabul Zoo, and believed to be the only such animal in a country where pork and pig-related products are illegal for religious reasons, has been [...]

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What do we want to see emerge from the greatest crisis of capitalism for 70 years? If I had to answer in a single phrase, I would say: new models for a sustainable social market economy. This requires us to change as well as our states. That experiment in creating New Soviet Man worked so [...]

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I’m not sure that this is correct: The result was dramatic, not only in the huge boost to inequality and the income of the well-off, but also in the US-style decline in the share of GDP going to wages and salaries – which fell from a peak of 65% in 1975 to 53% last year [...]

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And in The Guardian no less: The benefits of living in a more stable and healthy economy far outweigh the costs of a warming world more susceptible to crises. Well, quite, a point that is made by many economists. We really don’t want to screw the economy, in fact we’d prefer growth and warming than [...]

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Isn’t it? Binge drinking among women has almost doubled since 1998, in a rapid narrowing of an alcohol gender gap that persisted for generations, research today from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation shows. It found that the proportion of women who binge drink rose from 8% in 1998 to 15% in 2006. Over the same period, [...]

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From this gent. Here. “It would bring in new management and prevent the nonsensical separation of post offices from mail.” This completely contradicts the analogy with Network Rail, where the “natural monopoly” element (the rails) are operated as a not-for-profit, but the use of them is open to competition. You could even argue the same [...]

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No, no, nothing belongs to you. It all belongs to the State, you are only allowed to have what you can prove the State should allow you to keep: A man lost £67,000 in cash found at his home after being unable to explain how he came by it. Police seized the cash under the [...]

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At the same time, the current tax regime employed by the U.S. is being abandoned by the two remaining large capital exporters – the UK and Japan – that had maintained similar regimes. What? I know we’ve exported a lot of capital in the past. That we’ve still got huge overseas holdings (well, people in [...]

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A restructured, modernised Royal Mail and Post Office as a not-for-profit company would have the ability to borrow to invest in new technology, without affecting government borrowing limits, as does Network Rail. It would bring in new management and prevent the nonsensical separation of post offices from mail. Entrepreneurial new managers would seize the wasted [...]

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