Tim Worstall

Lordy: A new “super-tax” on bank bonuses will be introduced immediately, the chancellor announced today, in an attempt to stop banks using profits to pay large bonuses to bankers. Alistair Darling attempted to appease critics who feared the tax on bonuses would prompt defections from the City by insisting the 50% tax rate on bonuses [...]

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A rise in national insurance then, eh? Excellent, so everyone’s on board with the basics of taxation then, yes? If you subsidise something you get more of it, if you tax it you get less of it. OK. So, we’re in a recession. Worried about unemployment in fact. High and rising unemployment. So, would you [...]

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There’s something close to fascistic about some of his ideas: Let’s get over this fetish with rating agencies: the reality is the markets will provide the cash and if they don’t we’ll require that bankers do so by lending money to the government through Treasury Deposits. Forced loans now….

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From David Friedman.

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The Times gets a musician to read about climate change and report on what he finds out. Rather than go through the whole thing marking all of the errors (essentially, he seems to have started at Mark Lynas and then moved to the more alarmist sources). A tax of £120 per ton on CO2 emissions [...]

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British health care is little better than that of former Communist countries, which spend a fraction of the billions poured into the NHS. A survey published yesterday by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development sees Britain languishing with the Czech Republic and Poland in international league tables on health. But it’s not all bad [...]

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Legalised euthanasia has led to a severe decline in the quality of care for terminally-ill patients in Holland, it has been claimed. What did anyone think would happen? Why invest in hospices, in palliative care, if there’s an injection which will solve the problem once and for all?

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A judge has sentenced a businessman at the centre of a fraud case to 3½ years in jail despite admitting the existence of fresh evidence that casts doubt on the safety of his conviction. Oh aye, so what happened? Bowles was convicted by a jury in June of cheating the Revenue of £1.2 million in [...]

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Is believing two contradictory things before breakfast actually a requirement for being a Green? Ed Matthew, senior economics campaigner at Friends of the Earth “Cutting emissions must be at the heart of the pre-budget report – slashing energy waste, developing the UK’s vast renewable energy potential, ending fuel poverty and creating tens of thousands of [...]

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It will say: “Where there are elements of the financial services industry that are generating super-normal returns for either executives or shareholders because of the existence of market failures, then there may be a case for increasing taxation on those returns.” It will argue the transaction tax must be set at a low rate to [...]

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How many editorial staff? Around 80 journalists will also be culled in the new year, after the company wrote to all 800 of its editorial staff offering them individually-tailored voluntary redundancy payouts. 800? Does that include the printers etc? I’ve no idea how many other papers have but that does seem rather a lot, doesn’t [...]

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I suspect that we’re going to hear a lot about this: Paul Volcker, the chairman of President Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, stunned a business conference in Sussex yesterday, saying there is “little evidence innovation in financial markets has had a visible effect on the productivities of the economy”. See! See! Even Reagan’s arch monetarist [...]

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The images, taken in Hudson Bay, Canada, around 200 miles north of the town of Churchill, Manitoba, show a male polar bear carrying the bloodied head of a polar bear cub it has killed for food. Polar bears usually subsist on seals, which they hunt from a platform of sea ice. But the melting of [...]

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The Leader of the House of Commons …..spent more than £300 of public money a month on a professional “media monitoring” service to supply stories about her from newspapers. Ever heard of Google News? Google Alerts? As to the very local papers, surely your constituency office subscribes to htem all?

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Peace on earth is a little tough to ask for. I am, despite being not worthy, loved by those I wish to be loved by and to my surprise by some who I have wronged. My parents, my wife, my family are all hale and hearty despite some of them being in dangerous parts of [...]

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My word, is there no beginning to this man’s knowledge? It is important to stress the fact that this report is about tackling tax avoidance. This is distinct and different from raising taxes. This is the wrong time for the UK to raise taxes: they could shatter a fragile economic recovery as they are equivalent [...]

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Holly Sampson’s a porn star and she’s been linked to as being someone who was banging Tiger Woods. This is a bit different from the cocktail waitresses and nightclub managers that he’s been linked with, yes? Just one tiny thought. Holly Sampson was apparently seeing Tiger before he married. The cocktail waitresses and nightclub managers [...]

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So Reform proposes that: Research for this paper indicates that the public sector workforce needs to reduce by at least one million people (15 per cent of the total) if the structural deficit is to be eliminated, over a period of years. Hmm, we’ve a large structural deficit, one which we need to deal with [...]

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In their new report. Green Quantitative Easing of course! In this way, quantitative easing could be used to increase long-term, sustainable economic activity and with it a huge growth in jobs. The Chancellor, Alistair Darling should announce in his pre-budget report that the extensions in quantitative easing would be used to fund a Green New [...]

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Meanwhile gap-toothed television viewers across America’s Deep South have expressed relief that Woods has finally started acting like a proper black man. Alabama grits farmer Roy Hobbs said: “I was gittin’ real confused and fearful for a times back there. What with his impeccable manners and white man’s speakin’ voice, I was thinkin’ maybes ma [...]

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