Your Tax Money At Work

Under the now-doomed 1947 Town and Country Planning Act,

Huzzah etc.

MacKenzie Scott is donating her billions much faster than her ex Jeff Bezos

The person who made the money might give it away a little more slowly – knowing how difficult it was to make in the first place.

That difference between private spending and that from taxation…..

The special and lower minimum wage for the disabled. Sleepy Joe will abolish it.

The question is, why? Who gains from this?

What makes this all so difficult to understand is that no one, no one at all, gains from this abolition of the special rate. With the usual electoral buying of favor and votes at the taxpayers’ expense, we can moan about it, but at least we can see the point, the purpose. But there is no one at all gaining from this, so what’s the point? Why try to screw over the one piece of independence these unfortunate people have?

I regard this specific proposal as being truly evil and am, therefore, against it as you might have gathered. But what truly confuses me is why? Whose votes get bought by further damaging the lives of the disabled?

Nearly a million public sector workers will be given inflation-busting pay rises as a reward for their efforts during the coronavirus pandemic.

Teachers and doctors will see the largest pay rises at 3.1 per cent and 2.8 per cent respectively, which the government said is to recognise their “efforts on the frontline during the battle against Covid-19”.

Teachers have, largely, been doing sod all. They’ve been at home on furlough.

For this, a pay rise?

Labour warns UK recovery plan could end up wasting public money

Let’s elect Labour and make sure!

Bumbling Stasi agents made up reports and put lovers on payroll

Sounds rather competent to me.

You’re already boinking someone and you manage to get the bureaucracy to pay for them rather than having to settle for – and then only possibly because she may or may not – Ilse from the typing pool?

This is incompetence?

British elite ‘being groomed by China’

Presumably this means I’m not classified as part of the elite. But, given that they’re talking about a group that Heseltine belongs to neither are they talking about the elite.

Man had to buy his own furniture for goodness sake.

Still, presumably he who shall not be named here will soon be singing the praises of rule by Pooh. He’s not failed to chase any other grant after all.

Boris Johnson will on Tuesday promise a “New Deal” for the British people to rebuild the post-Covid economy with a plan borrowed from Depression-era America….

After all, the New Deal didn’t…..

We have programming peeps around here. How bad is this as a mistake? Is it take the person who designed the calendar part of the system out the back and shoot them? Or is it execute them in front of all pour encourager les autres?

The Department for Work and Pensions has abandoned its lengthy legal battle to avoid fixing a “perverse” design feature in universal credit that has left thousands of working claimants hundreds of pounds a year out of pocket.

The minister for welfare delivery, Will Quince, told MPs he accepted that the DWP must correct the feature, which has resulted in serious budgeting problems for some claimants who are paid at the end of the month.

The issue currently affects claimants whose wages are paid two days earlier than usual when the month ends on a weekend or bank holiday. The system assumes they have been paid twice in a single universal credit assessment period, and none in the next, meaning their benefit payments fluctuate wildly.

I have absolutely no idea of course, this being both technical and hard. But I do assume that someone, somewhere, in some sort of computing system somewhere, has already solved this problem. So, why is it in this system here?

Hmm:

A survivors’ group has secured a total of more than £46m compensation for 1,340 people who suffered “horrific” abuse in children’s care homes that were infiltrated by paedophiles over several decades.

The highest individual payment to date has been £245,000, and with 620 applications still to be reviewed, and more survivors coming forward daily, campaigners believe the overall compensation bill could double.

The money has been paid to people who were in care over a period spanning from the 1930s to the early 1990s, living in homes predominantly run by Lambeth council in south London.

Well, yes:

Detailed testimony provided to SOSA by former residents has led Stevenson to believe up to 120 paedophiles were abusing children over a 60-year period.

“It was almost as if the baton was being passed on, that was the most scary thing. Paedophiles were spreading the word.”

That’s how it does work. As we’ve seen from the Benedictine schools. Ealing and Ampleforth were badly infected and it lasted for a long time at scale. Worth and Downside were not – or mildly and for a short time perhaps. As with any other infection except it’s once it’s seen it is possible in the one place then that attracts those who wish to do so.

Supports that old line that there’s nothing so likely to produce abuse and a subsequently shitty life as going into the care of the state. You know, most of those victims of the grooming gangs were “in care” too.

Still, look on the bright side, this was Lambeth, not Islington. So there’s nothing for Dame Margaret, Lady Hodge, to apologise for.

That’s light entertainment entirely buggered then, isn’t it? That’s not had as low as 8% representation since Lord Reith was checking underpants arrangements. Further, a claim that 8% of the population is LGBT is a bit over the top. 2 to 3% is more like it unless the B part is to include everyone who ever tried a same sex fumble.

Still, they’ll get down to it easily enough. Just stop employing Philip Scofield.

The health minister in the Lords, Lord Bethell, has revealed the failed NHSX COVID-tracing app has cost the taxpayer £11.8 million.

That’s only one thousandth the amount Blair et al pissed away on just the one NHS contract.

Sleeping problems are on the rise because energy-efficient homes are too warm at night, a Government study has concluded….

Of course, that then puts the idea of fuel poverty into a bit of a corner.

For if keeping a home as warm as those standards insist is injurious then we don’t want to insist on people being able to do that, do we?

We are told that it’s just appalling, entirely terrible, that the British Government paid off the slave owners back in 1835. £20 million was paid to the owners of slaves back then and not a penny offered in compensation to those who had been enslaved

A grandmother who defrauded the state out of more than £1 million over 15 years, making her the UK’s single biggest welfare cheat, has been jailed.

It’s only tax cheats who rip off the public, innit?

In the past four decades, the cost of policing in the US has tripled and is now $115bn, according to a recent analysis. That steady increase comes as crime has been consistently declining.

Well, yes, but it is necessary to work something out. Has the police budget been rising despite the crime rate falling or has the crime rate been falling because the police budget has been rising?

It’s a fairly important distinction.

Claim by former MI6 head that coronavirus was Chinese invention is ‘spurious’ say experts

MI6 being the foreign intelligence bods.

It’s usually the anti-spy spies who go nuts though. That whole mindset of having to spend a career thinking that anyone – everyone – has been turned or was an enemy to start with leaking into a more general paranoia.

Teachers have paid a heavy price. Robert Costrell of the University of Arkansas has calculated that the nation’s school districts spent an average of $1,312 per student for teacher retirement benefits in 2018, up from $530 in 2004, an increase of some $39 billion or nearly $12,000 per teacher. If that money went into teacher salaries, the average U.S. teacher’s pay would increase by nearly 20 percent.

Your pension is part of your pay. That is, teachers’ pay is already higher by that 20% that is the pension.

Ministers must avoid throwing billions of pounds at infrastructure projects to create a stimulus for the post-Covid economy, according to a construction industry veteran.

Keith Clarke, the former chief executive of engineering firm Atkins, says the Government can create a better legacy for the construction industry with investment upgrades to schools, hospitals and other projects.

Not that we particularly want to create a legacy for the construction industry, we want to deploy our resources to provide the greatest benefit for us.

But that this is best done by spiffing up what we’ve got rather than creating anew has merit. The problem being that politics doesn’t work that way. The benefit, the incentive, to the politician who signs off on it is the cutting of the red ribbon, the laudatory press pieces. Which sorting out the sewers, maintaining the schools, doesn’t produce. Something new – a new train set – does. So, we get more new stuff and not enough maintenance and upgrading.

That’s just how the incentives work.

The latest evidence:

Alarm in Cabinet that Boris Johnson’s decision to back Dominic Cummings could cost lives

This being nothing to do with any rules about lockdown or anything. Rather, a significant portion of the establishment doesn’t like him. He wants to upset the cosy apple cart. Which is a threat to said establishment, that’s the point. So, something, anything, to get rid of him. Any story that’s even vaguely believable that enough people will coalesce around.