No wonder many remain concerned that we are heading for being Singapore-on-Thames. The rhetoric used suggests that the fear is justified.

Someone’s going to have to remind me what’s so terrible about Singapore on Thames though.

A distinctly richer place, with a better health care system, a government that can actually produce the housing the population needs, with a bit more inequality.

The problem being?

The Gini coefficient – which measures income inequality from 0 to 1, with 0 being most equal – fell to 0.452 last year, lower than 0.458 in 2018 and the lowest since 2001, according to the Department of Statistics’ Key Household Income Trends report released on Thursday (Feb 20).

Government transfers and taxes reduced the Gini coefficient further to 0.398.

About the same level of market inequality of incomes as here, the outcome being a little more post- tax and benefit inequality.

Shrug. That a deal you’d accept for a 50% pay rise?

The reasons should be obvious. Coronavirus would not be the issue it is in economic terms if we did not have such an interconnected world, where supply lines are stretched to their limits so that many companies are at risk from the slightest disruption to their systems, which coronavirus is already creating, and which could get much worse.

Far better to have entirely local economies. So that when the local farmer drops dead then all starve in that area.

Hmm, what’s that? Security comes from having multiple suppliers? Gosh, that’s right! So, having all the world as a potential supplier is safer then, right?

I have blogged throughout the austerity years and made the NHS such an issue at one point that I think I was noted as the fourth most active social media campaigner against the 2012 NHS reforms that increased the impact of market forces upon it.

Those reforms have failed. A healthcare system that was intended to, and did, deliver worse health outcomes in a political environment of hostility towards large parts of the UK population is indicative of a chronic political malaise within government during this period.

NHS England has had more market based reforms than NHS Scotland or NHS Wales. NHYS England has improved outputs better than NHS Wales or NHS Scotland.

One useful proof of this being the absence of reports from the usual suspects crowing about the outperformance of NHS Wales and NHS Scotland. They’d be there if it were true…..

Our new Chancellor should not try to find a new fiscal rule. He should have an economic rule instead. He should target full employment at low inflation. Only government spending can deliver that. Turn it on.

That’s actually what the Bank of England’s target is. One they’re currently hitting.

Whilst its respect for the rule of tax law is not great. Just read Richard Teather’s book on tax havens for them published in about 2005 as evidence of that: it got as close to endorsing the merits of tax evasion as a mechanism for undermining the democratic choices of government as I suspect it dared go.

Both Richard and I would go further than that. One of the merits of tax evasion is that it limits the amount that government may tax – those democratic choices.

So, our polymath notes this:

And comments that:

I presume KPMG did not ask to be associated with this feature from Mark Littlewood of the Institute of Economic Affairs, but as the biggest tax havens operator amongst the Big 4 accountants I doubt they object.

Except online advertising isn’t determined by the publication. It’s determined by you the reader.

The ad companies check up on what you read, see what it is that you might like, then advertise that to you. Different people looking at that same page will see different ads therefore.

Presumably Snippa saw it because he logs in to KPMG in order to fulminate over how much those who were asked to remain with the company after training now make.