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Tim Worstall

No, don\’t like this at all

Yes, I know that the RSPCA has these powers:

A POLICE dog handler who allegedly left two German Shepherds to die in a car on one of the hottest days of the year is to be prosecuted by the RSPCA.

The Nottinghamshire officer, who has yet to be named, was suspended from duty after the animal charity decided he will be charged with causing unnecessary suffering to the dogs.

No, I\’m not happy that the RSPCA has these powers. Seriously now, which fuckwit decided that a private organisation should have the power to make criminal prosecutions?

Statistics, statistics

I\’m not convinced that this tells us what they think it tells us:

Lawyers who entered the profession in the 1990s typically grew up in families with incomes 64 per cent above average. Those starting out in the 1970s came from homes with incomes 40 per cent above average.

We\’ve been told, endlessly, that the distribution of incomes changed between the 70s and the 90s. That it became wider, more unequal. Depending upon how much wider, how much more unequal, it became, that 64 to 40 percent change might mean that lawyers are being drawn from higher up the income scale, the same place or even lower down.

On its own, that number tells us nothing in fact.

Aaaaaargh!

What? Is Larry Elliott seriously suggesting this?

he could prevent corporate tax avoidance by taxing companies on their turnover rather than their profits;

What? So high volume low margin businesses pay more tax than low volume high margin ones?

Erm, don\’t we actually want high volume low margin businesses? You know, more efficient ones? Ones that make less in profit per unit of sales? That\’s what is good for us, the consumer, isn\’t it?

Jeebus, there are some cretinous ideas out there……

Lordy, Lordy, what an idiot

Jonathan Freedland that is.

Yes, let\’s bring back the anti-usury laws.

In the US last year, 1.2 million people filed for bankruptcy, hardly a surprise in a society where consumer debt has increased by 733% since 1980.That year is significant. Until then, anti-usury laws were still on the US statute book, as they had been since 1776, capping the amount lenders could charge.

Might have been worth mentioning that inflation had meant that real interest rates were negative, driving the entire US Savings and Loan industry (the Building Societies, essentially) into bankruptcy, no?

Now, nearly 300 years later, it\’s surely time to put the cap back on. It can\’t be too much to ask that banks which currently borrow from the Bank of England at a rate of 0.5% lend it out at no more than 8%: they\’d still be charging customers 16 times more for money than they had paid for it.

Err, there\’s a few things that need to be added into that calculation. The overheads of the banks of course, all those lovely buildings and people have to be paid for somehow. Plus the costs of making the decision to lend: and the costs of getting the money back. Plus we need to add the default rate into it and of course inflation.

Erm, no, fixing the maximum interest rate at 8% is an extremely silly idea indeed. Barking mad in fact.

I do wonder you know

The News of the World made payments to its disgraced royal editor Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire after the two men were jailed for phone hacking, MPs were told today .

Now let\’s assume that what has been accused is true: that people knew all about this hacking. That people were, while on contract, breaking the law.

So, they get caught, tried, convicted. What is the management supposed to do? Cut them off without a penny? Or stand by them?

Interesting little conundrum, no?

Sorry?

The planned rises also failed to tackle the increasing problems that many consumers faced when paying their bills, with many people in so-called \”water poverty\”. The Citizens Advice Bureau told the committee that it dealt with 57,000 people who had struggled to pay their water bills last year. The charity described the current system of support for poor customers \”as like something out of the nineteenth century with a set of highly restrictive rules administered at companies\’ discretion\”.

The MPs agreed that thousands more customers needed help, with either wealthier customers picking up the extra cost, or taxpayers – both of which could resent the higher bills.

Look, yes, we do need to help those with insufficient money to survive in our society. You can call it a moral duty or a simple defence against being strung up in the street by a rampaging mob. But the right way to do this is through the tax system (assuming that we\’re not going to rely upon charity).

We don\’t and shouldn\’t insist that the purchasers of expensive cars subsidise those who cannot afford transport, we don\’t insist that those purchasing caviar subsidise baked beans and we shouldn\’t insist that those with large water bills subsidise those who cannot afford theirs.

One of the more important reasons for this is that we want transparency in all of this: sure, the poor should be aided, but we want to know by how much they are being aided as well, how much is it costing us to do so.

Hiding such aid leads to horrors like, at the extreme, the American system of poverty reduction. They spend hundreds of billions every year on aid to the poor: the EITC, Medicaid, housing vouchers, food stamps. The amounts have been rising substantially in recent decades as well (yes, even George W Bush raised the spend) and yet it is possible, as many do (John Edwards for example) to point to the poverty level, which has hardly budged at all.

This is because the Americans have this insane system whereby all the things that are done to alleviate poverty are not counted when calculating the poverty level. They count how many would be in poverty without government help: then they ignore all of the help that is offered, the EITC, housing vouchers, food stamps and Medicaid and then say, \”Whoa! Aren\’t there a lot of poor people!\”

Yes, I know it sounds insane but it is in fact true. You thus get two responses to such spending: from the right, hey, we\’re spending all of this money and it isn\’t reducing poverty so it\’s all wasted. From the left, we\’re spending all this money but there is still poverty so we must spend more. Both entirely missing the point that the resaon the spending isn\’t reducing poverty is because you\’re not counting the money you\’re spending on trying to reduce poverty.

This isn\’t directly applicable to the cross subsidy of water bills I agree: it\’s just an example of what can happen at the extreme if you start hiding the numbers. You want the poor to have their water bills subsidised? Fine, argue your case and raise the taxes necessary to do so. Don\’t hide it in the minutiae of the water rates.

Polly on inequality

…the incomes of rich and poor families have drawn further apart.

Let\’s take that as true (for households it definitely is in fact).

Why?

Seems an interesting question really. The answer is, at least in part (I would argue in large part but don\’t have the figures to prove it) assortative mating.

We match up, marry, have children, later than we used to. Nearly a full decade later in fact on average. We tend to meet our mates through our work these days (not an unlikely thing for those hitching up in their late 20s). This is rather different from the matching up when marriage ages were lower.

So, now, we tend to match up with those following a similar life path to our own, rather than simply with someone from the same geographical or extended familial networks. This leads to the rise of the two professionals marriage, something that was really rather rare in decades past.

Who are those households at the top of the household income distribution? The two professionals households.

One of the reasons (and as above, I would argue, one of the major ones) for the divergence in household incomes is simply a change in the mating habits of the population. Professionals tend to marry professionals, non-professionals non-, much more than used to be the case. So we end up with households with two professional incomes and households with none, where we might in the past have had two households with one professional income each.

As I keep trying to emphasise here we\’ve got to try and work out why certain things happen if we\’re ever to have any hope of correcting perceived problems: or, indeed, of deciding that that why means that the result is not a problem.

Now, if it is true that assortative mating is behind the rise in variance of household incomes, what in buggery could we possibly do about it? Insist that accountants marry proles?

Institute of International Trade in Kolkata

An interesting definition:

Mercantilism, which is the precursor of capitalism, originated in Rome and the Middle East, during the early middle ages. Mercantilism can be defined as the process by which goods are bought at one place for a certain price and sold at another place at a higher price, in order to realise a profit.

That\’s not mercantilism, that\’s trade…..possibly \”being a merchant\”, but that\’s not what mecantilism means.

Strangely, the rest of the briefing paper about capitalism is reasonably (note, reasonably) fair.

However, the point of noting this twittery is here.

Ashton is also eager to conclude a trade deal with India. A draft of the accord that she wants the New Delhi government to sign would spell disaster for the 5 million Indian women and 15 million men that depend on dairy farming as they would struggle to compete with lavishly subsidised imports from Europe, according to a new analysis by the Institute of International Trade in Kolkata.

Yup, David Cronin, our idiot in Brussels, approvingly quotes from an institution that is responsible for such silliness.

Snigger

Guardian editorial in praise of the dacha.

You know, those second homes in the country that the city dwellers visit for a couple of months a year only, thereby pushing up prices so that locals cannot live in their own villages, creating those \”ghost towns\” that so disfigure the British rural areas.

Hyperbole

The last week has been one of the bleakest for equality in Britain.

That\’s a slightly excessive reaction to some catfight amongst bureaucrats, isn\’t it?

It also seems to be rather confusing Trevor Phillips and the EHRC with the real world.

Eh?

Dr McConnell added: \”Children whose parents perceived their lives as unpredictable, uncontrollable, or overwhelming had increased risk of new onset asthma associated with traffic related pollution and maternal smoking during pregnancy.

If there\’s a link between asthma and in utero exposure to tobacco then how in hell has asthma incidence been rising as smoking rates have been plummeting?

I\’m beginning to think that smoking as a cause for this disease or that disease is simply added to the list like spam in the Monty Python cafe.

Sounds sensible to me

Tens of thousands of failed asylum seekers will be able to obtain free health care following a Government rethink, it has been announced.

Yes, yes, I know, Johnny Foreginer freeloading…..but there are public health implications. We do want everyone to get their vaccines, get treated for communicable diseases, don\’t we?

Fun and games

Demos has a new game for us all to play.

Here.

Answer some questions about why you are on the left.

I did so: properly, not in jest, pointing out that I\’m a liberal, a radical and even a progressive. Of course I\’m on the left. Just because I\’m not a statist doesn\’t mean that I\’m not concerned with liberty and the rest.

Polly on being a leftist

Life on the left means trusting that the better side of human nature can prevail against selfishness and greed.

Bollocks.

Those who trust in human nature don\’t pass laws to insist that people will redistibute their incomes, pass laws to insist that education, health care, taking care of the elderly, are done by compulsion via the State.

People who trust in human nature will, you know, trust in human nature, will leave people alone and leave it to those very people to voluntarily live up to that better side.

You only compel people when you don\’t believe they\’ll do it.

On internet business models

Twitter is fun and all, but the now public internal discussion about justifying the investment to the venture capitalists shows that yes, at some point in her life, every big-titted fat girl needs to be told flat out that she\’s nothing more than a big-titted fat girl.

Scum, just scum

In the Islamic Republic it is illegal to execute a young woman, regardless of her crime, if she is a virgin, he explained. Therefore a \”wedding\” ceremony is conducted the night before the execution: The young girl is forced to have sexual intercourse with a prison guard – essentially raped by her \”husband.\”