Tim Worstall

You might recall that the Tax Journal had a little survey on who agreed with Murph over the tax gap etc. The results are in: The UK should not have a general anti-avoidance rule, according to two thirds of respondents to a Tax Journal online survey. More than 300 of the 400 respondents did not [...]

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Via, will be far more valuable than other souvenirs in the future.

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Well, not “we”, but “they”: The Muslim LGBTQI group Imaan today criticised the East End Gay Pride event, saying its organisers had close links to the English Defence League. The event was organised for 2nd April, supposedly in retaliation to homophobic stickers being placed around East London declaring it was a ‘gay free zone’. It’s [...]

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We’re told why we cannot just abolish corporation tax and tax money when people receive it instead. Yet there’s something missing from the analysis. A very basic piece of economics actually. The entire economy, every single little bit of it, ends up in the pockets of an individual someone, somewhere. Ineed, this is one of [...]

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So there’s an investigation into whether LIBOR, the rate at which banks lend to sech other and which is the benchmark for huge swathes of other interest rates, was manipulated during the crisis a few years back. Good, excellent, possibly or potentially dodgy dealings should be investigated. Yet Ritchie turns to autorant mode: So much [...]

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Come one now, we all know that it was the greed in the freemarket banking sector that caused all of our problems! Just nationalise the lot of them and be done with it! During the financial crisis, problems with Germany’s state-owned banks brought the country’s financial system to the brink of collapse and received billions [...]

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There’s a reason psychiatrists prescribe drugs rather than talking therapy: the latter makes no money for pharmaceutical firms And of course there’s no tu quoque possible here at all: Harriet Fraad is a practising psychotherapist and hypnotherapist in New York City. She has been in private practice for 37 years and seen hundreds of people [...]

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NIESR’s study into the “generational accounts”, conducted with the support of the Office for National Statistics, is based on the assumption that “over time, the Government must balance its books” and uses current policy and projections. “Our basic simulations suggest that taxes need to rise by about 6pc of GDP over and above the changes [...]

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Japanese debt has become about the most expesnive in the world to insure. Rilly? Gosh: The Bank of Japan’s promise yesterday of a ¥15 trillion ($182 billion) cash injection into its banking system managed to soothe global equities, but not debt markets as Japanese government credit default swap rates used to insure against debt default [...]

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The cost of alcohol to British society is currently estimated at over £25bn per annum. This is not just the health costs, but also costs relating to crime and disorder, including domestic violence and fights and accidents on the streets. Health workers see the personal costs; we see the fractured families, the individual tragedies of [...]

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The bank, which survived the banking crisis without a direct taxpayer bailout, incurred controversy when it admitted to the Treasury select committee that it paid just £113m of corporation tax in the UK in 2009 – when it made £11.9bn of profits. Still not telling us that £7 billionish of that was not taxable in [...]

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Readings at the plant, taken at 10.20am, varied considerably. Edano told reporters that the highest level around one of the reactors was 400 millisieverts, with a reading of 100 millisieverts around another. We’ve moved from microsieverts to millisieverts and yes, we are now very definitely in the range which is dangerous to human health. One [...]

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Because that is, as Ritchie says, the spirit of the law, isn’t it? They’re right, we’re wrong, so send the cheque. Nearly 10,000 people had their debt cancelled under the concession, despite Mr Gauke claiming in Parliament last year that it “does not apply that often in practice and I do not want people to [...]

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I have been offered a fee (of the scale of two steak dinners for two/box of Cuban cigars level) to answer the following question: Basically I’m wondering how to weigh up the pros and cons of using spare income for either a) investing for my retirement (probably as index trackers in an ISA) or b) [...]

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technicians were last night battling to save from meltdown nuclear reactors with failed emergency cooling systems. Only a few weeks away from the 25th anniversary of the world’s worst nuclear accident, no one can be under any illusions of what could result if the technicians lose their battle. Complete and total bollocks. Absolutely the worst [...]

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Years ago there was a nutter on Usenet who used to keep telling us all that Boron was just the thing to enable the storage of hydrogen. You’d be able to fill up a car tank, just like you do with petrol. Turns out he wasn’t a nutter after all. Cella Energy is hoping to [...]

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As Happy As A Cardiff Pizzeria

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“Greenpeace is calling for the phase out of existing reactors, and no construction of new commercial nuclear reactors. Governments should invest in renewable energy resources that are not only environmentally sound but also affordable and reliable”. Well, that last sentence at least. Do let us know when you’ve found or designed renewable energy resources that [...]

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Adoption of this policy would require reversal of the policy of reducing staffing at HM Revenue & Customs by 15,000 people over the period to 2015 and recruiting new staff at Companies House as opposed to the 250 redundancies announcedv in March 2011. Strangely, this report is not funded by PCS, the union which represents [...]

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Don’t think so Radley. Acid, yes, but not cocaine.

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