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September 2019

This is just going to sweep those Northern seats, isn’t it?

Jeremy Corbyn will scrap controls on immigration and hand foreign nationals the right to vote in future elections and referendums if Labour wins power.

The Labour leader will head into the next election promising to extend freedom of movement to migrants around the world, along with abolishing detention centres, under plans approved on Wednesday.

TBP doesn’t have to do a Tommy Robinson to be able to appeal to that voter base either.

Not actually an issue of time, money or budgets…..

Midwives failing to check babies’ heart rates during labour is the biggest cause of birth blunders in NHS, an investigation has found.

An analysis of “devastating” cases which ended in brain injury found that seven in ten involved a failure to properly monitor the foetus.

And in almost two thirds of such births, at least two errors were made, with repeated missed chances to prevent death and avoidable injuries.

The research, which examined 96 births, follows official figures which show that almost £5bn of negligence claims were lodged against the NHS in 2018/19.

Half of this – almost £2.5bn – involved claims relating to alleged blunders in maternity.

The investigation also calls for urgent changes to ensure babies were properly monitored during labour.

Incompetence in a state organisation though…..

Some nutter will want to legislate here

Atransgender man who attempted to create legal history by having his baby become the first to legally not have a mother has lost his High Court fight, with the presiding judge citing the “basic facts of life”.

Freddy McConnell, who was born a woman but later transitioned to become a man, took the Government to court earlier this year for refusing to let him register as the “father” on his child’s birth certificate.

The Government argued that he must be the “mother” because he gave birth to the child, who has a “right to know the identity of the person who carried him or her”.

Handing down his decision in the High Court today, the President of the Family Division, Sir Andrew McFarlane, sided with the Government, telling Mr McConnell that he must appear as “mother” on the birth certificate.

In his written judgment, Sir Andrew “looked back on earlier times” to draw upon the common law definition of a mother “prior to the mid-20th century, when conception and pregnancy other than through sexual intercourse was unknown.”

Because it’s such a common thing that a woman insisting she’s a man gives birth. And then wants the birth certificate to read that the child doesn’t have a mother.

But there will be that call for legislation because rights……

So, you see, the Green New Deal won’t pay for itself, it will be expensive

And such are the likely real margins inside many economies that nothing like the Green New Deal could be done by simply using government injection of funds without there being a superficial demand for additional tax payable, and quite possibly in significant amount if inflation was to be avoided. There are spare resources in the economy, but not that many.

We will lose what we would have had if we’d not had the Green New Deal.

The first relates to the necessary reallocation of resources to create the capacity for something as radical as the Green New Deal, because let’s not pretend that this will happen with all existing activity within the economy coexisting beside it.

Yep, there’s an opportunity cost to the Green New Deal. It’s expensive that is.

Eh?

My proposal that pension fund and ISA savings be used to finance the Green New Deal should be seen within this context. Let us not pretend that these do not change aggregate demand within the economy. First of all, by providing tax subsidised savings mechanisms they do distort demand by diverting financial resources: this in itself has an impact upon the real economy. And, secondly, any argument that they merely create stocks of notional financial assets with no real impact is far too limited a perspective. The fact is that massive amounts of resource are actually reallocated by this savings process this process and this has a very real current impact upon resource allocation within society, both in consumption and investment terms, and both have real consequence.

But Snippa’s entire rant is that mere savings don’t have any impact upon that real economy.

So, what I have done is link the need for change in aggregate demand to the tax reform that has promoted current resource misallocation and have

Which is exactly how real economists have said we should tackle climate change. A carbon tax.

These people can’t even count, can they?

LA levels of homelessness were once unthinkable in the UK. Not any more

Gosh.

For the past five years I’ve lived in Los Angeles, where thousands of destitute people call the streets home on any given day. In part due to spiralling rents, LA has an astounding homelessness problem (recent figures revealed a 16% jump in the city to more than 36,000 out of a population of just under 4 million) in a country where “tent cities” have been normal for some time.

That’s terrible.

The statistics are bad. An official estimate reported a 165% jump in rough sleepers in England since 2010 – a total of 4,677 people on a single given night in autumn 2018.

LA has 0.9% of the population rough sleeping. The UK has 0.007%. This is the same is it?

The arts graduates not realising that two orders of magnitude different really is different?

Crowd sourcing on Brexit

So, I’ve a request to do a column for the Americans on Brexit. Where we stand, what can be done, what will be done.

Anyone any ideas?

My last piece over there included the cunning plan of making the Queen’s Speech include “We’re leaving, Goodbye” so that either the House passed it or that’s a lost vote of confidence so therefore an election. Or, the House has 14 days to create a new government, then election.

But what else to say today?

But Joe and Hunter should be investigated

Donald Trump is to face a formal impeachment inquiry as Democrats claimed he violated the US Constitution.

Mr Trump has accused Democrats of another political “witch hunt”.

So what happens next?

What are the allegations against Donald Trump?
A whistleblower in the US intelligence community has made an internal complaint.

He – it is a man – alleges that Mr Trump, in a July 25 phone call, urged the leader of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden, and his son Hunter Biden who sat on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.

Why have the Democrats launched impeachment proceedings?
The Democrats claim Mr Trump’s alleged actions show he violated the Constitution by inviting help from a foreign power in a domestic election.

The thing being that Hunter’s up to his neck in it as is his father. They should be investigated.

Still, partisan politics, eh?

Err, well, no, Senior Lecturer

In the case of reducing rates of corporation tax a number of deeply destructive consequences arise. First of all, tax revenues fall. I do, of course, know all the arguments based upon modern monetary theory that suggests that tax is not needed to fund the government expenditure, but as a matter of fact a sum total of tax has to be raised within any system, including that described by modern monetary theory, to counter the effects of inflation. In that case, and as a matter of fact, if companies pay less tax then someone else will have to pay more: modern monetary theory does not change this logic. And as such what Boris Johnson is seeking to do is to shift the burden of tax from capital onto someone else, which will inevitably be ordinary people.

That assumes that corporation tax falls upon capital. Something which isn’t true, not in the slightest.

How much it doesn’t, even why it doesn’t, is argued over. But that it doesn’t is just a well known piece of reality.

In 1998 the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development began a programme to attack what they described as ‘harmful tax competition’. That program was misguided. That was because the clear implication of its title was that there might be a benign form of tax competition. There is absolutely no evidence that a benign form of tax competition exists. All of it is harmful.

No.

Think theoretically for a moment. There are bad forms of taxation. Or perhaps there are types which are worse than other types. Equally, we could say that there are harmful levels of taxation – type and level being distinctly different points here.

A place that uses the good types at not harmful levels does better than that the bad at harmful. This is obviously tax competition. The outcome of which will be that the bad is outcompeted by the good and thereby replaced by it. If only becuase people start to mutter, well, bugger me, hadn’t we better start doing it that way?

Do note that this doesn’t depend upon what we say is good or bad taxation, nor what the judicious level is. On that second places which don;t tax enough, thereby failing to produce enough government, would equally be found out.

So, is it possible for there to be a good form of tax competition? Sure there is.

The Senior Lecturer is therefore wrong. But then we knew that…..

Not 100% convinced myself

Scientists and archaeologists have analysed slagheaps left by the copper mines in Edom, an area encompassing parts of what is now southern Jordan and Israel. They found signs that mines in different parts of the region made the same advances in smelting techniques at the same time in the 11th century BC, just before the age of the biblical Kings Saul, David and Solomon.

You know, knowledge being a non-rivalrous and often enough non-excludable good.

Sure, being part of the same political organisation will aid in the spread of such knowledge. So, for example, the turn of the 19th/20th century saw advances in gold extraction from ore. Likely this did spread through the Empire, from S Africa to Oz perhaps, faster than it did to Siberia or the US.

But not entirely convinced that you’d be able to measure that speed from slag heaps……

Greta love, do try to look at the science

This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be standing here. I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you all come to me for hope? How dare you! You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!

In the science of climate change we have some facts. Even some models of what will happen. Just to keep this simple for a non-specialist teenager.

In RCP 8.5 we don’t beat climate change. In RCP 2.6 we do beat climate change. In RCP 2.6 we have more – much more – economic growth than in 8.5.

Economic growth is not a problem in beating climate change, it’s the cause of doing so.

A slight problem here

“This whole country is a strip club. You got people tossing the money and people doing the dance.” So proclaims Jennifer Lopez’s wily stripper turned con artist, Ramona, in Hustlers, which raked in $33.2m (£26.6m) in the US on its opening weekend, making it J-Lo’s biggest opening weekend for a live-action movie.

Hustlers is a pretty decent film about a pretty indecent proposal – namely that Ramona and her colleague, Destiny (Constance Wu), drug and steal from their moneyed clients in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis.

But it’s also something else: proof that, until now, praise of J-Lo’s acting talents have been confined to a few standout performances, such as her acclaimed role opposite George Clooney in Out of Sight (1998). For every triumph (see also her 1997 turn as the Mexican-American singer Selena), Lopez has been served up a total stinker of a role by Hollywood, from Gigli (a film the Guardian described as “catastrophic”) to The Back-Up Plan, a film so by-the-numbers that they may as well have projected mathematical formulae on to cinema screens. She has often been confined to perfunctory romcom territory, cliched Latina territory or both (see the sub-Pretty Woman action of Maid in Manhattan).

I’m under the impression that actors get to choose the roles they’ll do. Thus the complaint should be that Lopez – and or her advisers – choose stinkers.

Not sure this is quite the right word really

Duchess of Sussex’s historic moment as she tells South Africa ‘I am here as a woman of colour’ in heartfelt speech

Coloured” means something a little different in South Africa, doesn’t it?

I’ve even got the impression – quite where from I’m not sure, just something vaguely in the back of the head – that coloureds are considered by some of the more excitable Black power types to be interlopers themselves.

Not a manipulated young girl at all, oh no

Greta, 16, who began the “climate strike” movement encouraging children to miss school to protest on Fridays, also launched legal proceedings against five countries on Monday, arguing that they did not prevent climate change despite being aware of the damage it does.

The Swedish campaigner joined 15 other teenagers from countries including France, India, Germany and the Marshall Islands to file the suit at the UN.

“The petitioners do not seek compensation; no amount of money could compensate for the harm children are and will be suffering from climate change, both now and in the future,” the suit reads.

Instead they want the five countries – Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany and Turkey – to accept their mistakes, and pledge to do better in the future.

The five were chosen for being the biggest polluters of the 45 countries that ratified the third optional protocol to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The UK, USA, China and Australia have not signed.

No, no, don’t look behind the curtain there! No one’s directing this at all¬

Soapy Joe complains

The thing is, it’s not difficult to find out where he lives.

A London barrister plans to spend up to £750,000 on the restoration of a historic Sussex windmill.

Jolyon Maugham and his wife Claire bought the Grade II* listed Jack windmill at Clayton for £1.1 million last year and have submitted plans to the South Downs National Park Authority for a “massive” restoration project.

And if that disappears own the hole there will still be the application for tax funds to help make the repairs…..

Fun with blogging

This from BiG has just become the crux of a piece that someone will pay me for:

r, US pricing of insulin is a classic example of regulatory unintended consequences. It’s regarded as a drug in the US, but because of the nature of the product it is impossible to produce a “generic” insulin. In Europe it is regulated as a biological product (which it is), opening the way to demonstrate that “generics” (biosimilars, technically) are as good as without demonstrating they are identical at the molecular level. In the US that route is not open to “generic” competitors to the 3 big insulin manufacturers.

The FDA will catch up with the rest of the world next year and you will see sensible insulin prices in the US from around 2021/2022 onwards.

I guess beer is owed…..

Calling BiG – Isn’t this like Fen Fen?

A landmark trial over one of France’s biggest healthcare scandals will begin on Monday after a weight-loss pill was believed to have killed up to 2,000 people and left many more injured for life.

The trial for manslaughter and deceit will attempt to lift the lid on France’s massive pharmaceuticals industry.

Servier, one of France’s biggest and most powerful privately-owned laboratories, is accused of covering up the killer side-effects of a widely prescribed drug called Mediator. The French state drug regulator is accused of lenience and not acting to prevent patient deaths and injuries.

There’s certainly some commonality. Weight loss drug that causes cardiovascular problems. Would be interesting to know whether it’s actually the same drug, or a slight derivative?