Tim Worstall

Some praise her dress sense, others her warmth, and others celebrate her as a powerful role model; but perhaps the most astute move of America’s first lady was to plough up the White House lawn for a vegetable garden. Now she has her first harvest, with 225lb of food grown so far, and over 50 [...]

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How is it that Michael Moore‘s father could buy a house and raise a family on the income of one auto worker, and still have a pension for his retirement? And yet this is not possible in the vastly more productive economy of today? Who says it’s not possible? If you’re happy to have a [...]

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Child poverty reduced if both parents go to work That’s a turn up for the books, ain’t it?

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In 1952, he was convicted of “gross indecency” – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later. Thousands of people have [...]

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Britain’s public debt will explode to 180pc of GDP within a decade unless future governments take drastic measures to restore fiscal probity, according to a confidential study by the European Commission. OK, this is the EU speaking, but still, pretty scary. Carrying on simply isn’t an option. So what are the options? Attempts to bring [...]

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Madelson’s just approved something of a hostage to fortune. The sale of General Motors’ European operations to car parts giant Magna, backed by the Russian Sberbank, has left the Vauxhall workforce concerned that the Ellesmere Port and Luton plants will close. In fact, it’s rather odd that the paper doesn’t mention this. Magna/Sberbank actually also [...]

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At The American. Baumol on bending the curve in health care. You need more high technology, not less, to do that.

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Instead, the medics should adopt an idea that may sound outlandish initially. It’s based on the idea of “make the polluter pay”. The booze industry should be forced to pay a levy proportional to the rate of drink-related disease its products cause each year. It’s some bar tab: alcohol misuse costs the NHS about £2.7 [...]

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This is hardly new: Britain would be healthier if wheat farms were treated with an important mineral to produce more nutritious bread, scientists have claimed. Crops in Britain have never been altered for human health reasons in this manner, but Professor Steve McGrath, of Rothamsted Research, said that adding selenium to fertilisers would have a [...]

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But the pretence that Soviet repression reached anything like the scale or depths of Nazi savagery – or that the postwar “enslavement” of eastern Europe can be equated with wartime Nazi genocide – is a mendacity that tips towards Holocaust denial. It is certainly not a mistake that could have been made by the Auschwitz [...]

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In a speech last night, Mrs Ward, a primary school teacher from Doncaster, said Labour had “tried hard on this issue” but had failed to fill the vacuum left by the death of the mining and manufacturing industries in many working-class communities. She said it meant a “small, significant and growing minority” of children were [...]

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And an overwhelming 83% of respondents agreed that excessive bonuses and executive pay fuelled risk-taking, which played a major part in the economic crash. The YouGov poll, commissioned by centre-left pressure group Compass, found that 73% of voters agreed with a tax on £10,000-plus bonuses. Some 68% would also support the Government in imposing a [...]

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It would appear that Dean Wormer’s advice did not apply to everyone.

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Tens of billions of pounds will have to be raised through flight taxes to compensate developing countries for the damage air travel does to the environment, according to the Government’s advisory body on climate change. Have none of these fuckwits actually read the Stern Review? We should tax emissions, internalise the current externalities. Great, and [...]

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So says our Ritchie. I discussed this with a wise friend last evening, over a glass or two of quite nice wine, I admit. They thought I was mad to accept any such comments on the blog: I said it came with the territory. The idea I was an extremist, as many of these commentators [...]

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That’s the basic thought behind this argument: In line with the government’s 2% inflation target, the Treasury’s assumption is that productivity in the economy as a whole will rise at 2% a year and pay at an average of 4%. Hence, if pay in the public services is to remain competitive with that outside, it [...]

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Tristram Stuart, author of a new book on food waste and a contributor to a special food waste issue of the Food Ethics Council’s magazine, said: “There are nearly a billion malnourished people in the world, but all of them could be lifted out of hunger with less than a quarter of the food wasted [...]

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Re: As for construction many of the old types of work are now done by machines.This did not matter while the economy was expanding.But now that we are in a recession it is much harder for someone to get a job digging dirt since machinary does so much of it nowdays.The days when we all [...]

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Here.

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Pass a law to peg benefits and national minimum wage levels to rise annually until they reach a living wage level. At a time of large and rising unemployment we’re going to increase the cost of labour to employers and also to increase the benefit level so as to make employment less attractive to employees? [...]

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