Tim Worstall

Sir David King writes: Today, the rest of the world pours more than $2 trillion a year into the Gulf states, which is $6m per day. That’s $6 billion a day of course (well, it is if all we’re going to worry about is those pesky orders of magnitude). That the Government’s former Chief Scientific [...]

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My word, we’re so lucky to have this man working on his knighthood as an unpaid advisor to the Coalition, aren’t we? You know, the man who demanded Gordon Mac mere weeks before Fannie and Freddie went tits up? The opacity is dramatised by the ongoing multitrillion dollar trading in derivatives – essentially bets on [...]

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The perfume itself is often the cheapest part of the package, accounting for as little as 3% of the overall cost for the cheaper fragrances, according to one industry estimate. Packaging and marketing make up a far larger proportion of the cost to the manufacturer, but the potential to make money should not be underestimated: [...]

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Who cares about a bunch of misogynist jocks tossing a ball around? Football is commidified nationalism that excludes more than half the population. Not only is it typically humourless she seems not to know that Scotland didn’t qualify….

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“In my opinion it is a grand book…. Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it; and not only in agreement with it, but deeply moved agreement.” John Maynard Keynes. Now, before you peek, guess which book?

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Many politicians have had a long dark night of the poll. They know that public opinion on gay rights has changed. Gallup just issued a poll showing that more than half of Americans believe that “gay or lesbian relations” are “morally acceptable.” Seventy percent, including majorities of all demographic groups, favor allowing openly gay people [...]

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At the ASI. On living wages and why they only work if not many people pay them.

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We’re often told that there is dire lifespan inequality across different parts of the UK. Parts of Glasgae, for example, have male lifespans fully a decade (on average) shorter than rich southern places like Eastbourne or Frinton on Sea. I don’t doubt the raw firgures for a moment, but I do think there’s an adjustment [...]

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So, Ritchie says: There’s a perverse untruth about the fiscal deficit that the likes of the Institute for Fiscal Studies and their acolytes, like Stephanie Flanders on the BBC, keep going on about. This untruth is that we had one before 2008. The truth is that if government had accounted like a company – on [...]

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Snotty little piece about how M&S shouldn’t be paying a bonus to the CEO, and of course all this top level pay is driven by “comparators” and the like. Cue all and sundry quoting from today’s Guardian Media Group results showing bonuses being paid for increasing losses, the way pay is set by using comparators…..

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The more you study economics the more likely you are to be Republican and to hold free-market views. How terrible, eh? The more you study astronomy the more likely you are to think the Earth is not flat, the more you study physics the more likely you are to think that gravity works, not the [...]

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Interesting some of these ideas: introduce a French and Swedish-style wealth tax. Somebody needs to tell Will Straw that Sweden abolished theirs in 2007. And as to the French one: “Eric Pichet, author of a French tax guide, estimates the wealth tax earns the government about $2.6 billion a year but has cost the country [...]

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I did say some time ago that I thought that this was a scam. What’s interesting is how the comments have developed over time. “No, we’re not a scam”! “Umm, maybe they are a scam!” “Well, the old lot turned out to be but we’re not now!”

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On paper, he said, a Chongjin state construction company employs him. But the company has few supplies and no cash to pay its employees. So like more than a third of the workers, the worker said, he pays roughly $5 a month to sign in as an employee on the company’s daily log — and [...]

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We are, in theory at least (playing with spreadsheets, that sort of thing), working on a process to make iron from a particular ore. The ore has a very high (15% or so) alumina content as well as a very high titanium content. No, we do not want to simply switch to another ore which [...]

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OK, so the oil blowout is going to cost BP a lot of money. Rightly so of course. However, a small prediction for us all. There will be someone, somewhere out there, who will insist that BP should not be allowed to get tax relief on these costs. No no, I don’t mean any special [...]

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Or perhaps modern conundrums. In a lesbian relationship, who has to go into the kitchen and make the sammich?

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Now this is actually interesting from Ritchie. If we do a bit of accruals accounting we can close the government deficit. That is, recognise tax revenue when it becomes legally due (ie, when people do the action which leads to a tax liability) rather than when it is actually due or paid, then there was [...]

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Outrage at a billionaire not paying death duty: Which in the current context is a sick joke. And an appropriate epitaph for George W Bush’ s maladministration in favour of the rich. Sad to see that a tax accountant couldn’t realise that the estate was settled under a will written under previous tax law. All [...]

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But the real danger is that Diane Abbott might actually win. What danger in consigning the Labour Party to the dustbin of history?

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