Tim Worstall

While she is at least being inventive, I don’t think she’s quite grasped the major problem here.

James Lloyd of the International Longevity Centre has produced an ingenious social insurance scheme the Department of Health is studying with enthusiasm. The joy of this scheme is that it is voluntary: payment only applies to the over-65s, when […]

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Cracking down on those evil criminals.

A plumber with a heart condition spent 18 hours in a police cell after being accused of dropping an apple core while on the way to collect a prescription for his wife. Keith Hirst was arrested by five police officers, taken to a police station and had his DNA and […]

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Here.
Shows the difference between using cash and accrual accounting.
By the latter standards the US budget deficit for 2007 was $2,400,000,000,000.
Yes, $2.4 trillion. For one year.

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Spotted at The Devil:

The Commons authorities argued in court earlier that MPs had a reasonable expectation that there would not be full disclosure of expenses—only their total expenses.

Is irony the right word for this?
That on the one hand the argument is that MPs have some reasonable expectation that the rules are not changed upon them, […]

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Well, quite:

The head of Britain’s biggest independent schools’ organisation has launched an extraordinary attack on the "very poor" quality of state education. Chris Parry, the new chief executive of the Independent Schools Council (ISC), said standards were "offensive" to parents who pay their taxes and forced hundreds of thousands to go private.

The standards in parts […]

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A £165 million package of student support due to be introduced in September will disproportionately benefit undergraduates from middle-class families while providing only minimal support for the poor, the Conservatives claim.
The means-tested student maintenance grant, which covers living costs but not fees, will be available to students whose parents earn up to £60,000. Previously the […]

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The Daily Telegraph understands that members of the House of Commons Commission, who have been considering the matter on behalf of MPs, will submit a suggested pay rise soon to Sir John of between £10,000 and £15,000.
…
A Commons source said: "All the experts the committee consulted agreed that MPs were underpaid by between £10,000 and […]

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Man who has made fortune out of public service broadcasting defends public service broadcasting.
Shocker, eh?

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The overarching discipline is to ensure that we keep to time and budget.

Yes, quite.

So far we are on track…

Ah, no, saw your lips move there. You’re lying.

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Even the Court of Appeal thinks that councils are working towards targets for adoptions:

Lord Justice Thorpe said that East Sussex county council appeared more concerned with meeting a quota than the best interests of the family.
The adoption proceedings began while the father was in hospital after a heart attack, […]

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It’s a sign of what Brown did:

The blow to tax revenues from the credit crunch is set to send the Chancellor plunging £16 billion or more deeper into the red over the next two years than he has planned, calculations for The Times indicate today.
The estimates of the toll on tax receipts by the National […]

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A controversial plan to increase pay rates for prisoners while ministers are being deluged by the row over the 10p tax rate abolition was scrapped yesterday on the direct orders of Gordon Brown.
The Prime Minister intervened to overrule the Prison Service Management Board after learning that it had given the go-ahead to increasing the minimum […]

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I, like many others, have wondered whether we could just get shot of this whole Olympics thing.

In 1970 Denver was awarded the 1976 Winter Olympics. By 1972 the estimated costs had trebled (a smaller increase than we have already seen for 2012).
As the US is a democracy, the people of Denver were allowed to vote […]

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Organisers of the 2012 London Olympics have block-booked 1,925 rooms in some of the capital’s most exclusive hotels for international delegates and their spouses at a cost of £10m.
Top officials have been allocated 345 suites costing up to £3,000 a night at six Park Lane hotels including the Dorchester, the Hilton and Grosvenor House. Half […]

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Guys, you still want them?

Taxpayers may have to come to the rescue of building plans for the London Olympics because the project has been hit by the global credit crisis.
Australian-owned Bovis Lend Lease, which was selected last year to construct the £2 billion Olympic Village in east London, is struggling to raise money to finance […]

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Hull is clearly a veritiable paradise on earth. There are no problems still remaining from the floods, poverty has been abolished, there are no children needing council care, the libraries are fully stocked, the schools paragons of perfection.

She said: "I had just picked up Chloe from nursery. We were both hungry so I got […]

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Bob Spink’s first EDM as the UKIP MP:

That this House notes that carers’ earnings must not exceed £95 net per week in order to qualify for the carer’s allowance benefit, that maximum individual earnings combined with the carer’s allowance equates to only £7,568 per annum and, as a result, working carers are adversely affected by […]

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Yesterday I suggested that those responsible for having to pay the £100,000 to Morrisons might be forced to pay it themselves, rather than us taxpayers picking up the bill.

It was business as usual yesterday at the Office of Fair Trading. A badly drafted, inaccurate and sensationalist press release may have cost us taxpayers £100,000 and […]

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The best performing schools in the country are receiving up to £1,800 per pupil less than their neighbours, The Sunday Telegraph can reveal.

Nope, it’s obviously the way that you spend it.

"Some of the schools into which big money is being poured are the 638 secondaries with poor results that Mr Brown is threatening to close. […]

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David Craig, a former government consultant, calculates that private sector workers are for the first time being forced to pay more in taxes to fund public sector pensions than they manage to save for their own retirement.
Individuals poured about £15.6 billion into personal and company pensions in 2005. In the same year private sector […]

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