The four ceremonies together will cost £81m, after the government used public funds to double the budget following a presentation to the prime minister by Boyle and Stephen Daldry.
Every income tax payer in the country has to pay £2.75 each for a disco party for lycra clad druggies.
A disco party they\’re not allowed to go to.
There\’s a reason government costs so fucking much you know?
With this in mind, it is clear that a very large number, and quite possibly the vast majority, of abortions carried out in this country are against the spirit, if not quite the word, of the law, and that practically all the doctors in this country who sign abortion forms are every bit as guilty as the reviled consultants who have offered sexually selected abortion.
If it is indeed the spirit of the law that must be followed, as we are told by our favourite retired accountant from Wandsworth, then why aren\’t half the doctors in the country behind bars?
Therefore no one should have a choice of which surgeon replaces their hip.
I have to admit that this logic doesn\’t exactly stun with its shiny convincingness. But it is the argument that he\’s using.
Lovely figures these:
Former South African president Thabo Mbeki has been given the responsibility of leading a high-level team to stem the illegal outflow of about $50bn (R384bn) yearly of African resources out of the continent.
Mbeki, who was recently appointed chairperson of the UN Economic Commission on Africa (Uneca) panel, is determined to put a stop to marauding foreign companies, individuals and governments draining the continent’s resources and wealth with impunity and thereby undermining the prospects of Africa’s development.
“About $50bn is exported out of Africa illegally every year,” Mbeki has said. “Almost $25bn comes into the continent.
“That means (Africa) loses twice the capital it receives in financial assistance.”
This then becomes the proof that country by country reporting is required and that, of course, we\’re all ripping the place off.
But I\’m afraid that we\’re not comparing like with like here. For the $25 billion is the official aid, the ODA stuff. The $50 billion (however inflated or not that number might be) is what is happening in the private sector.
And if we want to talk about the private sector outflows then we\’ve got to compare that with the private sector inflows. Which, if I\’m reading this right, are in the $100 to $120 billion a year sort of range.
Comparing what the private sector takes out with what the private sector puts in might be useful: comparing what the private sector takes out with what the public sector puts in is simply nonsense.
A vote for the London mayor could be between the true left and the true right. But they\’d rather squabble over our wallets
All politics is about who gets to control the content of our wallets.
Doctors at British clinics have been secretly filmed agreeing to terminate foetuses purely because they are either male or female. Clinicians admitted they were prepared to falsify paperwork to arrange the abortions even though it is illegal to conduct such “sex-selection” procedures.
Andrew Lansley, the Health Secretary, said: “I’m extremely concerned to hear about these allegations. Sex selection is illegal and is morally wrong.
Not just a surprise, quite stunning in fact.
Now we all know that UK law does not in fact provide for abortions on demand. But that\’s what the law says. The debate around it is a little more clear cut.
On the one side, it\’s not a human, just a blob, entirely up to the woman what she wants to do with it.
On the other it\’s one of God\’s chosen creatures and so deserving of the same protections the rest of us get.
Despite not believing in the God part I\’m, as you know, very much in that second camp and thus resolutely out of step with modern society. My argument is the humanist one, that this life is all there is and no, no one should have their experience of it curtailed just because someone else doesn\’t want you around.
Sorry about that statement of belief but it always seems necessary when we discuss this particular subject.
Which leads us to the surprise: we\’ve a large and vocal minority (I am pretty sure that the majority are rather uncomfortably on the fence between the two positions going along with Bubba\’s hopethat it will be safe, legal and rare and something of a sadness but still something that must be done sometimes) telling us that it\’s damn all to do with anyone but the mother. At which point, of course there will be people offering sex specific abortions because that\’s what some people want. It\’s an inevitable consequence of the existence of the technology and that assertion that it is entirely the mother\’s choice.
And as to the statement that this is morally wrong, words, almost, fail me. It\’s morally acceptable, correct even, to hoick a baby out to die in a bucket because, well, I\’m going on holiday and it would be inconvenient, but morally wrong because it does or does not have a dick?
Even I, and indeed the Catholic Church, can see the point, the morality, of treatment which saves the life of the mother but has the side effect of the death of the foetus. But once you\’ve gone beyond that, to the effect that one person\’s choices determine the life or not of another, there is no moral dividing line between acceptable reasons for such choices and not acceptable reasons for such choices.
There may be political lines one can draw: We want women to be able to kill the babies they don\’t want but we didn\’t mean killing babaies just because they are female, as one example. But that\’s not a viable moral line. Either there are reasons why women should not be allowed to abort a foetus or there are not. And if we have already said that it\’s entirely the woman concerned\’s choice then we have already decided that there are no reasons why not.
Or, in short, women are generally, these days, expected to abort a chromosome 21 trisomy foetus. To go from this to insisting that an XX, XY, XXY, XYY or any other of the various possible combinations should not be aborted, indeed must not be aborted, it is immoral and illegal to do so, seems most strange. Especially when it\’s just fine to do so as long as that it is XX or XY isn\’t the reason you\’re doing it.
Fair play for revealing it all:
But for the sake of clarity I expect my main sources of funding this year to be, in the order of their significance:
Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust – a Quaker foundation – for core funding on work related to tax and poverty.
The Task Force on Financial Integrity and Economic Development – in turn funded by the Norwegian government in the main – for work on country-by-country reporting.
The Socialist group of MEPs in the EU parliament for services supplied relating to the tax gap.
The TUC for services supplied on a range of issues.
The Tax Justice Network for services supplied, mainly for editorial issues.
Other bits and pieces such as BBC appearance fees, odd articles and reimbursement of expenses.
I also have a small income as a practicing accountant.
We know that the JRCT money is £35,000 a year. The other sums are lower but at a rough guess we\’d say, what, £50k a year all told? £60k ?
Certainly puts him in the top 5%. Add in the part time pro-rata GP\’s salary of the distaff side and household income will roar well over £100k. Not a bad whack actually: almost to the point where Ritchie is the 1%.
And just to repeat something I\’ve done before, in order my income comes from freelance writing fees, running the global scandium oligopoly and this year, fees for investigating the slags in the \’ore mountains. A not entirely dissimilar sum in individual earnings in fact.
One interesting point to note: the entire lack of my income coming from anything government funded or indeed anything substantial that is tax privileged.
Because German banks lent recklessly to Greece they have now, in effect, appointed the Troika to run the country to recover their debt.
The banks have just agreed to an over 70% haircut on the debts they are owned. 70% in NPV terms, not nominal….er, 53% in nominal?
This is evidence that Greece is being held to ransom to pay back the private banks in what manner?
It\’s the debt to the official holders that is to be paid back at par. Not to the private holders.
It\’s Ritchie\’s Courageous State that Greece is being forced to pay back.
Well, OK, maybe, maybe this is true.
In order for it to be true or not true we\’ve got to start wibbling around the edges of what is in fact rape, what is sexual assault and so on. Meaning that if we\’re wibbling around these sorts of definitions then we\’re about right in terms of orders of magnitude at least.
What\’s happening is, of course, that we\’re adding the rape statistics for men in prison to the gross numbers for the society as a whole.
To which a couple of things might be added: the state is clearly failing in its duty of care to those that are in its care. Indeed, one way of reading the numbers is that it is the prison guards themselves doing a lot of the raping (according to standard rape doctrine the imbalance of power there makes it impossible that there could ever be a consensual sexual relationship in such situations).
The other is that, well, where are the \”Take Back the Cells\” marches? Or is it OK that some tax evader gets his bum split but not OK that frat pledges shout \”No means Yes\”?
Oh yes, we see all the standard fallacies here.
Although there is a scientific consensus that no exposure is safe, no matter how brief,
No love, there isn\’t a scientific consensus that says that there is no safe level of radioactivity. Forget hormesis for a moment and just concentrate on the obvious fallacy of the statement. We\’re all bombarded with radiation all the time. Everything from cosmic rays through to uranium in the soil to bananas and Brazil nuts. And while we do all fall down dead eventually we\’re not all falling down dead from the radiation from these sources.
One favourite (and unchecked) story about Brazil nuts is that they are sufficiently radioactive that you would not be able to take them out of a nuclear power plant. They are over the limit for allowable radiation to leave the plant.
Oh, and given the amount of radiation that atmospheric tests put into the environment then we should all have fallen down dead by now if there really was no safe level.
We get the other great folly as well. The stories of really bad stuff happening are from the military bomb making plants. Sorry, but no, we cannot use the evidence of people, in the middle of the Cold War, making plutonium triggers as evidence against people producing electricity. That would be like using the evidence of copper sheathed bullets to argue against copper wiring.
And then we get the great one:
Then, Japan was hit by a tsunami, and the cooling systems of the Fukushima nuclear reactor were overwhelmed, giving the world apocalyptic images of toxic floods and floating cars, of whole provinces made uninhabitable.
Well, yes, the tsunami killed lots of people, indeed. And the failure of the nuclear plant has killed no one. So we\’d better abolish tsunamis then, eh?
Finally, what\’s wrong with the whole piece, indeed, the basic mode of thinking behind it, is that it is looking only at absolute risk, taking no account whatsoever or relative risk. If we decide that we actually do want to have electricity then we need to look at which system of producing the electricity we desire kills the fewest of us. And in that nuclear wins hands down. More Americans fall off the roof installing solar panels each year than have ever been kiled by civilian nuclear power in the US.
Oh, and coal fired power stations distribute more radiation around the world than nuclear power plants do as well.
Does the 50p tax rate actually increase total revenues?
The Treasury received £10.35 billion in income tax payments from those paying by self-assessment last month, a drop of £509 million compared with January 2011. Most other taxes produced higher revenues over the same period.
Senior sources said that the first official figures indicated that there had been “manoeuvring” by well-off Britons to avoid the new higher rate. The figures will add to pressure on the Coalition to drop the levy amid fears it is forcing entrepreneurs to relocate abroad.
The self-assessment returns from January, when most income tax is paid by the better-off, have been eagerly awaited by the Treasury and government ministers as they provide the first evidence of the success, or failure, of the 50p rate. It is the first year following the introduction of the 50p rate which had been expected to boost tax revenues from self-assessment by more than £1billion.
We don\’t quite know yet, not all returns are in and accounted for. But we might well be looking at real, live, evidence of the Laffer Curve in the wild.
It wouldn\’t be a terrible surprise if we did in fact see it either. The various calculations that have been done looking at where that Laffer Peak is (Peter Diamond and Saetz for example) seem to indicate that what with the way the NI system works etc, the peak for income tax is in the 40 – 50 p range. Quite possibly a little lower in fact, given that they were calculating for the US, where tax is levied on a passport basis and here we levy on a residence basis.
Which is one are where Ritchie is in fact correct. If we were to move to a passport basis for taxation then we would in theory move the Laffer Curve peak upwards. Something which I regard as a good enough reason not to move to a passport basis. The residence based taxation system places a limit on the amount that government can squeeze out of us. Something which I regard as desirable: something that he does not. For I tend to think that we are not helots to one state or another purely based upon the accident of birth whereas he seems to think that we are.
Tehre is one further amusement in this. We know that Ritchie has an Irish passport because he\’s told us so. We don\’t know whether he\’s a UK one as well: I would assume so but don\’t know. But wouldn\’t it be amusing if he didn\’t and thus the passport based system which he is urging upon all would not actually apply to him?
The investigation into a former trader at the company was triggered after a breach of the company’s own internal controls last August.
A junior trader, who worked at the company’s investment arm, was dismissed after attempting the rogue trade, thought to have been worth about $150m and alleged to be linked to Argentine warrants.
According to a spokesman for the £60bn asset management giant, the trade was stopped and police and regulators were notified.
Internal controls thwart attempted illegal trade.
How dare the bastards show that internal self-regulation works?
An interesting way to deal with that residual business vote in the City Corporation:
Businesses pay taxes in the form of corporation tax (£48bn), local business rates (£25bn) and employer National Insurance Contributions (£55bn) but have no say in the running of local or national government. It\’s taxation without representation.
It\’s an interesting thought certainly.
There is something that amuses about the whole situation as well. The way in which certain people can hold two directly contradictory ideas.
The left (OK, perhaps certain particularly vocal pieces of the left) seem to be most against the business franchise. Yet it is those same people who insist that it actually is \”business\” that pays those particular taxes.
We can also see it from the other side: myself for example. I\’m rather in favour of the business franchise, for local govt at least. But I\’m also one who screams loudly enough that employers\’ NI is really paid by the workers in lower wages, corporation tax by the workers and shareholders in some proportion. That is, that business itself does\’t bear the incidence of these taxes.
Which leaves us all rather confused really. Those insisting that those who really do pay taxes shouldn\’t have representation and those who agree that they\’re not really paying taxes quite happy for them to have the vote.
I would claim moral and logical superiority for myself not only because I am indeed Tim Worstall but also because I am aware of this oddity, something I seriously doubt M\’Lord Glasman et al are.
A piece of Worstallian analysis makes it into the New Statesman.
Although most of the left won\’t accept it, there is a reasonable discussion to be had about the effect of the minimum wage on youth unemployment. The Low Pay Commission, the body that advises ministers on the subject, recently noted \”evidence that in difficult economic circumstances the level of the minimum wage may have had an impact on the employment of young people\”. International experience suggests that a minimum wage that is 50 per cent of the average wage is harmful to employment. But the rate for 18-20 year olds (£4.08 an hour) is currently 65 per cent of the mean wage and the rate for 16-18 year olds (£3.68) is 76 per cent.
I think it\’s fair to say that the commentators don\’t like it.
At a G20 summit in Mexico in two days the EU will plead for increased IMF contributions by non-euro countries to help shore up a eurozone \”financial firewall\” seen as vital to protecting Spain and Italy from Greek debt contagion.
The IMF will refuse to make extra cash available to the EU and will threaten to pull the plug on its contribution to Tuesday\’s €130bn bailout of Greece unless the eurozone creates a €750bn fund, a move opposed by Germany.
Umm, are we actually sure that the euozone can create a €750 bn fund?
Can they leverage their own credit ratings enough to do that?
I wrote earlier today about the arguments now going on in the EU about introducing country-by-country reporting for the extractive industries.
I have to say I am not objective on this issue since I created the concept of country-by-country reporting in 2003,
Gosh, the world is bending to his mighty will!
Umm, here\’s what the Publish What You Pay campaign has to say about their genesis.
In December 1999 Global Witness published a report called A Crude Awakening, an exposé of the apparent complicity of the oil and banking industries in the plundering of state assets during Angola’s 40-year civil war. It became clear that the refusal to release financial information by major multinational oil companies aided and abetted the mismanagement and embezzlement of oil revenues by the elite in the country. The report concluded with a public call on the oil companies operating in Angola to ‘publish what you pay’.
It was clear however that the lack of transparency in the extractive industries was also a significant concern in other resource-rich but poor countries. Therefore in June 2002 Global Witness along with other founding members, CAFOD, Open Society Institute, Oxfam GB, Save the Children UK and Transparency International UK, launched the worldwide PWYP campaign, calling for all natural resource companies to disclose their payments to governments for every country of operation.
Oh. It all started in 1999 when Ritchie was still advising luvvies on tax dodging at Murphy Deeks Nolan.
And the campaign was fully up and running in 2002, a year before Ritchie came up with the concept!
I\’m off to patent the wheel: just because it already exists doesn\’t mean I cannot invent it, does it?
So high in fact that you don\’t want the long term unemployed even for free.
And no wonder there\’s so many unemployed given what it costs to employ someone.
At the ASI.
We don\’t actually care that digital copying might be killing the record companies.
Targets always tempt statistical massaging, but the extremity of this cheating means no waiting-list figures can be trusted.
Indeed they do. Central setting of targets is always subject to gaming by those at the front end. This is exactly what people are complaining about about the banks. That hitting a short term target boosts the bonus of the banker at risk to the larger company, the bank, and possibly the financial system as a whole.
And this is wat Polly is complaining about in the NHS: that these centrally set targets are subject to such gaming.
What amuses is that Polly then makes the leap to an insistence that central management by targets must be continued.
And as for this:
Just to survive, the NHS always needs 2.5% above inflation,
Yes, we know, Baumol\’s Cost Disease and all that. But that\’s why we\’re trying to change the system from a centrally planned monolith to a market based (even if tax funded and free at the point of use) system., Precisely becuse total factor productivity increases faster in market based rather than planned systems. We\’ve the evidence of the entire 20th century for this.
And yes, higher tfp growth is the solution for a higher inflation rate. They\’re actually the sides of the same coin. A higher inflation rate is evidence that tfp is growing more slowly than elsewhere in the economy. To which, of course, the answer is to try and encourage tfp growth in this sector of the economy as well.
It may well be that Baumol means we\’ll never get tfp in medicine up to hte rate of, say, manufacturing. But this doesn\’t mean that we shouldn\’t at least do the best we can.
The resulting depletion in retained profit, traditionally the biggest source of corporate investments, has dramatically undermined these corporations\’ abilities to invest, further weakening their long-term competitiveness. Therefore, I concluded, unless we significantly restrict the freedom of movement for shareholders, through financial reregulation, and reward managers according to more long term-oriented performance measures than share prices, companies will continue to be managed in a way that undermines their own viability and weakens the national economy in the long run.
Oh dearie me. Oh dear, oh dear.
The assumption is being made that the health of the national economy depends upon the rate of reinvestment by extant companies. Only if those companies which already exist reinvest the profits they make will the economy grow and we all, in aggregate, get richer.
But this is not a sound assumption. The health and growth of the national economy is much more about the availability of capital for the starting of new companies. New ways of doing things, new entire fields of business, entirely new ideas.
Given this, that investors are paid out their profits from past investments via dividends and share buybacks so that they can then invest anew in new ideas, new companies, is much more important for that growth and health of the economy.
In this reading it\’s the existence of AIM, angel networks, OFEX (now called something different), VC funds, heck, CrowdCube, where an entrepreneur can raise £50k to £50 million to try out some whacky new idea which is much more important than the retention of profits inside a multi-billion £ corporation.
In fact, we\’d rather like those multi-billion profits to be paid out exactly so that they can be recycled back into the new investments in the economy.
And this is much more important in an economy at the technological frontier than it is in one which is still playing catch up. That is, it\’s much more important in an economy like the US or UK than it was in South Korea during Professor Chang\’s formative years. Playing catch up can require, or at least benefit from, capital accumulation in those large corporations. Because that\’s largely what catch up is, that capital accumulation. But the inventing of new things, that\’s very different indeed.
In short, the paying out of past profits and their reinvestment fuels the creative part of the creative destruction that is capitalism.
GE paying out profits which are then invested into Facebook does more for the economy than say Apple\’s retention of $100 billion in cash on the books does.