Tim Worstall

A Work Foundation report: Beyond the personal costs of being NEET, each young person not in employment, education or training bears a cost to public finances (through benefit payments, lost tax revenues, and healthcare and criminal justice costs), and a public resource cost (due to loss of economic productivity from un- or underemployment, lost personal [...]

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How dare they? How damn dare they? Tell everyone that the NHS is not very good at preventing mortality amenable to health care? There is no evidence for this, envy of the world it is! http://www.bmj.com/content/327/7424/1129.full 2003 report in the British Medical Journal. The NHS comes 18 th out of 19 systems studied in the [...]

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Having looked him up, apparently he’s something like the Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the Open University. And entirely ignorant to boot: Neoliberalism is grounded in the “free, possessive individual”, with the state cast as tyrannical and oppressive. The welfare state, in particular, is the arch enemy of freedom. The state must never govern society, [...]

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Therefore there should be no choice in the NHS. You’ve got to admit the logic is delightfully pure and simple.

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The Observer says: were obtained by non-profit-making investigations company Spinwatch, Non-profit making? Seems so: Spinwatch is an independent non-profit making organisation The choice of language there shows idiot leftism at its best. Not making a profit is actually quite easy. General Motors managed it for years. What they mean is “not for profit”, that is [...]

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Dr. Clarke again: In 2010, Labour actually increased its vote in raw terms among those ranked as AB on the social grade [NRS]. Labour’s vote also held up well among those at the bottom of the social grade [DE]. The real loss for Labour actually occurred among their skilled & semi skilled workers. They lost practically all [...]

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Difficult to believe I know but: The graph above shows the percentage increase in the number of NEETs by region from Q2 2010 to Q2 2011. The North East of England experienced a 21% increase while the North West suffered a 28% increase. The East of England also suffered a 21% increase in NEETs. We [...]

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In the 120-page study, co-authored by academics at the University of York and Heriot-Watt University, Crisis highlights figures released over the summer that show councils have reported 44,160 people accepted as homeless and placed in social housing, an increase of 10% on the previous year and the first increase in almost a decade. Last year [...]

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People in Scotland and Wales will want to know why their chances of accessing a life extending cancer drug are so much lower than their neighbours in England. You have noted that Wales and Scotland do not charge rich bastards for their prescriptions? Whereas English rich bastards do have to pay for their prescriptions, thus [...]

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Once again our expert in Irish feminist history has managed to, well, I’m not quite sure how he got it wrong here but wrong he got it: More than 40,000 people sleep on our streets every night. Hmm. When people actually go out and count it it seems that they come up with quite different [...]

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Currently, 1.7 million families are on housing waiting lists. In the meantime families survive in private rental accommodation that nets landlords profits of £31 billion per year. Oh dearie me. Income is not net profit, net profit is not income. No, I don’t know what the figures is for gross private rent paid but I [...]

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The curse of nef strikes again. That curse being that even when they do manage to get the analysis of the problem correct (a rare enough occurence) they then veer off into entirely insane proposals for the solution. Here they manage to get correct that the major cost of housing in this country is the [...]

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Obama has made some mistakes, to be sure, but at least he ended the wars and has the government on a sound financial footing.

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Full of wonders it is: There currently exists a loophole whereby businesses can offset this year’s profits against last year’s losses. This should stay for SMEs as they struggle through these difficult times, but the government have craftily neglected to tell us that the banks who returned to profit this year are exempt from paying [...]

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‘Such essays cannot await the permanence of the book. They do not belong in the learned journal. They resist packaging in periodicals.’ Ivan Illich D’ye think they were just a tad embarassed to put the “Lenin” in there?

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Anthony Giddens was paid to promote Ghaddafi. The broadcaster was among a number of influential people in the west recruited by the US based Monitor Group to help enhance the profile of Libya between 2006 and 2009 when Muammar Gaddafi was attempting to improve international relations. In addition to Sir David Frost, documents released by [...]

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Yet, if the crisis of 2007-08 taught us one thing, it’s that we need a more diverse banking system for stability, resilience and to work for people. That means more mutuals, co-ops and innovative, smaller local banks, not more risk-takers wanting to gamble unaccountably with other people’s money. Jeebus Simms! Innovation equals risk taking! ‘Coz, [...]

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Compass, that lefty campaigning organisation that charges a subscription fee so that Neal Lawson can earn a hefty wedge, is asking people what is their definition of the Good Society. Here. And seeing as it’s friday, that afternoon when we’re all looking for something to do to while away the hours until the pub, why [...]

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This new report of theirs fails I’m afraid. Growing a Better Future. Fails on two levels. The first will seem a little technical but it’s summed up here: It should be emphasized that the model does not capture potential increases in agricultural productivity that are likely to result from increased research and development efforts incentivized [...]

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Ooooh, yes, we need a radical reform of banking. So, what should that radical reform be? The truth is, we won’t get a banking system that is socially and economically useful until we harness public anger at what banks have done – and continue to do – with a determined political class that asks banks [...]

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