Tim Worstall

There’s two distinct arguments going on about bank bonus payments at the moment: unfortunately, the possibly meritorious one is being used to bolster the case for the less so. Think back a couple of years and we were being told that it was the chasing of bonuses that caused the crash. In essence, that if [...]

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New data has revealed that employees are suffering painful real-term pay cuts as salary increases fail to keep up with the rate at which prices are rising, according to the take home pay indices to be published by the payments processor VocaLink. Meanwhile the official rate of inflation, the consumer price index (CPI), hit 3.3pc [...]

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OK, so this is a horribly laid out table, sorry. Table 1: Gender Pay Gap in the European Union Comparable Structure of Earnings Survey National sources 2002 2006 2007 2008 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 EU27 : 17.7 17.6 18.0 16 16 16s 15 15 15 15s EU15 : : : : 16 [...]

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Ritchie notes this: Investing in woodland Investing in commercial woodland attracts the flowing tax advantages: Capital Gains Tax. As timber grows it will increase in value. This increase is exempt from capital gains tax, but any increase in the value of the land is not exempt. Income Tax. Any income or profit generated from woodland [...]

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Fortunately, economists maximize the present value of an infinitely-lived, intertemporal stream of discounted future utility (with discount rates being approximated from the consumption CAPM), so what matters is lifetime, rather than just flow utility. Yes, that’s one way of putting it.

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But sadly won’t be, for all that I agree with every word. Here.

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At the ASI. Why are people worried about the poor getting rich?

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Sunny Hundal: This Saturday we’re hosting the first annual Netroots UK conference. It brings together the new generation of left activists, working and discussing politics online, with the veteran institutions of trade unions and many more in between. The hope is that we can begin to build a new infrastructure to bring together campaigners and [...]

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One of the worst ideas in circulation is to make manifestos legally binding, nailing parties to pre-election promises. The danger is that politics will increasingly end up in the courts, with judges, not voters, in charge. Democracy needs politicians to be judged in the court of public opinion. Oh, right, so those “legally binding reductions [...]

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Michael White: For the record, MPs were unpaid until the radical Liberal chancellor David Lloyd George found them £400 a year in 1910, the annus mirabilis of progressive taxation when LG faced down the Lords. According to the National Archives ready-reckoner, that £400 is worth £22,824 today – so MPs on £65,738 have achieved a [...]

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A small number of suspects will still face legal curbs on their freedom without being put on trial, he signalled. The new security regime will mean that a small number of suspects will still be subjected to far-reaching restrictions on their freedom, electronically tagged and prevented from travelling freely. An announcement on anti-terrorism laws is [...]

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Drugs were “readily available” at global financial company JP Morgan, the Old Bailey has heard.

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A month a grand. Around minimum wage or so.

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The 2011 research workshop co-organised by the Association for Accountancy & Business Affairs and the Tax Justice Network will explore connections between debt, tax justice and human rights. The themes that might be explored within this remit are wide, potentially including issues such as how debt impacts on public finances; how tax avoidance infringes human rights; why tax [...]

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At the Guardian. Pleasantly astonished to find that I’m not the only person arguing for the use of cash in organ transplants.

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PLAYBOY: Isn’t cocaine the currently fashionable drug in Hollywood? NICHOLSON: I see it around. PLAYBOY: Have you tried it? NICHOLSON: Yeah, it’s basically an upper, but it doesn’t seem to do too much to me. I don’t think it’ll be fashionable for long, because it’s expensive and we’re in a depression; whether the world chooses [...]

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Via Bishop Hill, we get this. The first part seems to be that Irish macroeconomics forecasters warned of the property bubble in 2005, not much notice was taken of their warning and other later predictions concentrated on other matters. Ho hum, macro forecasters right is hardly a basis for criticism. Rather a cause for celebration, [...]

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They may not seem romantic, but a list of questions any couple must ask to have a chance of succeeding in their relationship has been published by a law firm. So it’s supposed to be more than “Are you a good shag? Am I?” then?

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The children of a retired chartered surveyor who committed suicide after being charged with his arthritic wife’s murder have criticised the legal system for punishing their father’s “act of love”. I know this sounds rather callous but the man did admit to police to killing his wife: in a pre-meditated manner. Thus he should be [...]

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So I’m doing a google search on some horrible technical stuff which I need to understand more about. One of the first page  results was an article I’d written essentially giving the broad brush picture and noting that I really need to bone up more on the details of this horrible technical stuff. I won’t [...]

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