Tim Worstall

Banks which help their customers to avoid paying tax will be targeted by intensive surveillance from HM Revenue & Customs under a new “name and shame” regime to be announced by Alistair Darling next week.

The chancellor is understood to have a hit list of UK and international banks which he will invite to sign his new code of conduct on tax which is designed to save the taxpayer billions of pounds lost through legal and complex avoidance schemes.

Be nice to have a list of banks you know will work on your behalf, not the Treasury’s.

Geoffrey Lean:

For the mountains – or rather the measures taken against the main grain one – proved a godsend to Britain’s fast disappearing farmland birds. Sadly, though, they now face being plunged back into crisis, and ministers seem about to reject a rescue plan. That well-known countryman Lord Mandelson may be partly to blame.

Essentially, set aside led to the recovery of farmland bird populations.

OK, fair enough.

Now we’ve abolished set aside and we shouldn’t, for farmland birds will disappear again.

Again, fair enough.

However, is this the same Geoffrey Lean who insists that farming should go all organic? You know, that more land hungry system which would leave even less land for the birds?

I think it might be you know…..

Even if slowly.

Oil giants will be forced to tussle for contracts worth an estimated $16bn (£9.7bn) live on Iraqi television in a bizarre contest they fear could end up resembling a game show.

More than 30 energy companies, including BP, Shell and ExxonMobil may be forced to make last-minute alliances and reveal their offers in a tense round of bidding due to start early next week.

I’m not so sure about doing it over hours rather than weeks but this is an attempt to rerun Brown’s auction of the 3G spectrum (it was Brown, wasn’t it? One of the few things the Treasury has got absolutely right over the years, anyway).

It’s a great way to extract the maximum rent possible from natural resources. That rent, rightly, going to the national authorities, in just the same way that the rent from spectrum did. One way of describing it is the Georgist (or LVT) taxation of land rents, exapnding our definition of “land” a little here.

It’ll make no difference to the price at which the companies sell their products, as profit maximisers we already assume they’ll charge the maximum the market will bear. It just affects the revenue split between those pumping the oil and those who own the natural resource.

Great idea, at least in principle.

This is an interesting pair of numbers:

In 2008/09, gross income tax receipts were £152.5 billion. In the same year, social security benefits cost the Exchequer £150.1 billion.

In 2009/10, the Treasury is expecting to take in £140.5 billion in gross income tax receipts. Social security benefits are projected to be £164.7 billion.

Or pair of pair of numbers if you prefer.

Income tax is the only one of the major revenue raisers which is progressive: VAT certainly isn’t, excise duties aren’t, inheritance tax raises, at this level of counting, nothing more than a rounding error.

Pretty much the rest of the tax system is regressive, not progressive. So the welfare system, that part of the spending system which is supposed to be progressive is actually being funded, in part, by regressive taxes.

That’s something of a problem I would have thought for those arguing in favour of more redistribution. We already seem to have reached the limit of what we can do through the tax and benefit system.

Raising income tax on the rich isn’t going to help: various reports on the new 50% rate show that we’re around and about the Laffer Curve inflection point. Higher taxes won’t raise much if any new revenue.

And increasing indirect, regressive, taxation doesn’t seem to be the way to redistribute more. Taxing the poor more heavily to give to the poor just ain’t equality producing redistribution.

So, as I say, we seem to have reached the bounds of what is possible in the tax and spend redistribution plan.

Unless, say, we were to cut huge swathes out of the other spending, so as to make redistributive spending come from that one progressive tax, the income tax.

Bit of a bind for the big state redistributionists, no?

Surprisingly good actually:

Last, and possibly best, the ultimate reality channel: TONTINE TV (not to be confused with the reality show that has drifted in and out of development over the last couple of years). As originally conceived over 300 years ago, a tontine was an investment scheme, but I see it as a supercontest. Tontine TV would pick two dozen newborn babies and put $250,000 for each one into a nice safe money market fund. Over the years, the seed money would grow to a staggering sum. Generations of avid TV viewers would watch as babies become children, then teenagers, young adults, and finally senior citizens. The last survivor gets all the dough, which by then might total a billion dollars. Makes Who Wants to be a Millionaire look like a candy store, doesn’t it? Imagine the excitement when we get down to the final three or four survivors! You could argue that the winner — who’s maybe 104 or so at that point, and not all that spiffy in the cognition department — wouldn’t enjoy the money much. Maybe not…but think of his or her inheritors! Sports cars all around! For me, this one can’t come too soon.

As some will know, I spent some years working in Russia. One of the things I noted was that the way they named a company was pretty straightforward. If you were the Nabrezny Chelny Ferroconcrete Plant (to use a completely made up name, it’s actually Kamaz in that town) then as like as not your company name would be “Nabrezny Chelny Ferroconcrete Plant” or a contraction of it.

Atomenergoexport for example was the company that dealt with the export of atomic energy equipment.

Simple enough but this can cause minor problems when no one properly thinks through what the contraction is going to look like in other languages.

For example, If Gazprom were to sign a deal to extract gas in Nigeria one might get Niprom. Or Gazeria. Or, as was actually chosen:

Russia’s energy giant Gazprom has signed a $2.5bn (£1.53bn) deal with Nigeria’s state operated NNPC, to invest in a new joint venture.

The new firm, to be called Nigaz, is set to build refineries, pipelines and gas power stations in Nigeria.*

You know gentlemen? I think you might want to change that, preferably before you get the letterheads printed. Only advice mind, something offered to you for free.

To check just grab any random American who happens to be hanging around your offices.

On the other hand, this might be the very bestest company name since Wang Computers decided to use the same name it did in the US  for the UK market for its service arm.

“Wang Cares”

* Thanks to Mark Tinker for the tip off.

Hmm, this is the response I got to the following question:

Is  a  jersey  bank  account  considered  to  be  a  UK  acc
customer  message:  Additional  Information:  ’If  I  open  a  UK  paypal  account,
can  I  link  that  to  a  Jersey  bank  account?’

Response:

I do apologise but you may not be able to do it. UK PayPal account must
also have a UK bank account. This is because you might be required to
validate information on the account and this will not work if the bank is
not in UK.

However, I would just suggest that you sign up a US PayPal account so you
could be able to register your Jersey bank account. Of course, you must
also have information such as postal address in US.

Perhaps a few remedial lessons in geography would be worthwhile? Jersey is, of course, not the same as New Jersey.

And yes, I was asking the European end of PayPal.

Don’t you know that this doesn’t happen?

The Bush administration’s approach also needlessly targeted adult sex workers who were not trafficked and instead willingly engaged in prostitution and enjoyed decent working conditions.

In The Guardian, anyone who is foreign and a sex worker has been, by definition, trafficked.

Didn’t anyone tell you that?

Erotic shame and guilt would be banished, together with socially enforced monogamy and male and female gender roles.

Good luck with that Peter.

Ain’t gonna happen you know?

Women are equal to men in every way.

Except when they’re not.

Hmm.

Jana Bennett, the BBC’s television chief, claimed almost £2,000 in expenses for flowers – including £100 on a congratulatory bouquet for Jonathan Ross as he considered his £18 million contract.

Bennett, who earns £406,000 a year, sent Ross the flowers in May 2006 as he considered the controversial three-year deal, which she helped to put together as director of television.

The previous month she claimed £55 for the cost of meeting over a meal to discuss the contract.

In June 2005 she claimed £85.25 for a pair of engraved Tiffany cufflinks for the star.

All of those would pass muster in a commercial organisation. They do rather grate though in one funded by government extortion (aka tax).

Why don’t we take Polly up on her idea of offering a subscription option for the BBC: then they can have their salaries, their cufflinks and flowers….if, of course, people wish to pay for them.

So we’re told by Clairol:

Researchers discovered women feel most confident and happy with their love life and body shape shortly before they reach 30.

It is also the period in their life when they enjoy the best sex – but the happiness is relatively shortlived.

….

“The age of 28 has been pinpointed as the time in a woman’s life their hair looks the best, body shape is at its peak and confidence is at an all-time high.

Hmmm.

The age at which people get married for the first time has continued to increase. In 1961 the average age at first marriage in England and Wales was 25.6 years for men and 23.1 years for women; by 2000 this had risen to 30.5 and 28.2 years, respectively.

‘Nuff said really.

PA wire headline.

Bless ‘em, just how would we find out such things without being told in ALL CAPS?

If he’d been any more of a cliche, he’d have been removed from the first draft of his own life by an eagle-eyed editor.

Juliette

And an idiot artist who would deny them.

Baby is UK’s youngest swine…

Can’t help feeling that could have been truncated a tad better…..although of course I have known children like that.

Providing social mobility the capitalist way:

Nine out of ten of our restaurant management staff started out as hourly-paid crew members

Look, this has all got out of hand, hasn’t it?

More than 700 “controlled drinking zones” have been set up across England, giving police sweeping powers to confiscate beer and wine from anyone enjoying a quiet outdoor tipple.

Local authorities are introducing the zones at a rate of 100 a year, The Times has learnt. Some cover whole cities, a radical departure from what the law intended.

Once a control zone is in place, police can seize alcohol from anyone who is not on licensed premises, even if the bottles or cans are unopened. Although drinking is not banned in the zones, police can ask anyone to stop drinking and it is an offence to refuse, punishable by a maximum £500 fine. No explanation or suspicion that the person could be a public nuisance is required. The highest fine will soon rise to £2,500.

….

It found that police are routinely ignoring Home Office guidelines and confiscating bottles of wine and beer from peaceful picnickers and other adults having a quiet drink outdoors. In some cases, drinks have allegedly been seized by police from adults who have just bought them from an off licence and are on their way home.

Hang them, hang them all.

I’ve harped on this before but it’s worth another little run.

Almost one in six children in Britain are living in households in which nobody has a job, according to a new report.

The UK average for children in jobless households is 15.3 per cent, but this rises to almost a quarter in London and 18 per cent in Wales, the North East, the North West and the West Midlands.

The study, released today by the Office for National Statistics, also shows that 22 per cent of British children live in low income households.

The figures are highest in the North East, where 28 per cent of people under the age of 20 live in families with an income at least 40 per cent below the UK average of about £34,000.

At one level of course this is true. We’ve a national definition of poverty and it’s a measure of relative poverty.

However, that national level grossly overstates the actual level of poverty (even relative poverty) if we were to measure it properly.

For, wage levels vary widely across the country (as do the costs of living). One notable number is that white collar female jobs in the NE pay 60% less than white collar female jobs in London. If we took London as our standard (we don’t we take the national level as the standard, but bear with me) then every female in a white collar job in the NE would be poor as compared to one in London.

Which simply ain’t the right way to be measuring poverty, even of the relative kind.

We need to be measuring consumption, adjusted for the regional cost of living, not money income adjusted for tax and benefits.

I’m convinced that the supposed high level of poverty in the UK is in fact a statistical artefact, simply a measure of the way in which London and the SE (with high costs and high wages) dominate the economy in a way that happens in no other large European country.

It is often claimed that Britain has the best democracy that money can buy. Evidently, the monied interests have already bought it. The Conservative and Labour parties are funded by corporations and wealthy individuals.

Really? Oh, gosh, I hadn’t known that.

So I went and checked.

A quick eyeballing says that 50% of donations to the Labour Party came from unions….perhaps more than that by value.

Groups providing funds to political parties expect a return on their investment and the payoff is ideological shaping of politics, help in the legislative process, privileged access to the state machinery and help in securing contracts. They will not easily accept curbs on their pay packets or radical reforms to enhance their public accountability.

Well, yes, that I agree with. So the Labour Party has been bought and paid for by hte unions then. Odd that Prem doesn’t mention that really.