I’ve always wondered about this
Long ago, Richard Nixon unleashed the politics of hate with his “southern strategy”, aimed at exploiting animosity toward President Johnson’s civil rights legislation to convert the South (i.e., the Confederacy) from Democrat to Republican.
What’s wrong with a politician reflecting the wants and desires of voters? Isn’t that rather the point?
A taxman who believes tax is legalised extortion?
I’m happy with that. Other’s aren’t:
I have to admit that I have form with Ed Troup, the executive chair of HMRC. As the Guardian has noted this morning, it was me who drew attention to his 1999 article in which he described tax as legalised extortion just before he appeared before Margaret Hodge at the Public Accounts Committee in 2013.
I said in 2013, and I repeat now, that if that is his opinion then he is not suited to the job he holds. That requires a person who believes that tax is rightfully owed, and not just for legal reasons but because the state has a proper claim on a part of a person’s income as a result of the role it plays in society from which the individual benefits in partnership with government. Without a person having that understanding I do not see how anyone can do the job Troup does in the way that society would want him to fulfil that task.
I’m overjoyed with having a taxman who sees tax as legalised extortion. On he grounds that acknowledging reality is a useful attribute in any of our servants.
Religious bodies in Kerala are doing away with displays of fireworks during temple festivals
in the wake of the fire tragedy that killed more than 100 people at the Puttingal temple in Kollam district on Sunday.
Interesting….
Steel imported from China, amounts of which are very limited, has little to do with the predicament of the UK’s steel industry. In both volume and value, steel from China makes up only a fraction of the UK’s total steel imports.
In 2015, for example, of the UK’s 6.66m tons of imports, only 11pc, or 760,000 tons, were from China. If put in value, that was $457m, only 7.6pc of the $5.98bn total. Moreover, steel products from China are mostly low value-added, such as ordinary steel rods and plates, which Britain no longer makes and would have to import from other countries anyway.
Therefore, imports from China have no impact upon the British steel market.
Don’t know how true it is, my industry knowledge runs out rather before this point. But seems reasonable at least.
I used to be very superstitious until I realised it’s bad luck.
The difference between this and a Yogism is that Lineker knows.
Shock! Horror! Religious people believe their religion!
Half of British Muslims want gay sex to be made illegal, according to a new poll.
The survey for Channel 4 found there was a “chasm” between views among the British Muslim community and mainstream opinion in this country.
It found 52 per cent of Muslims said homosexuality should not be legal in Britain.
Of more than 1,000 British Muslims polled by ICM, 39 per cent agreed “wives should always obey their husbands”, and 31 per cent said it was acceptable for a man to have more than one wife.
I’m pretty sure that all flavours of Islam believe the following three things:
1) Homosexuality should be illegal.
2) Wives should obey their husbands.
3) A man may have more than one wife.
The finding is thus that people who believe in a religion believe in a religion.
As to what we do about it we ignore them. Just as we do the Jews about not mixing meat and dairy, the Jehovah’s Witnesses about not having a blood transfusion and so on.
I’d forgotten this
The gagging order imposed over the “celebrity threesome” case has descended further into farce after a Scottish newspaper published full details of the mystery couple behind the controversial injunction.
This is one of the areas where Scottish law is different, isn’t it? Didn’t this happen before? Someone needed to have taken out an injunction in the Scottish courts as well as London but didn’t so all was revealed?
Quick tax question
So, you get dividends from a UK company, you pay special low rate of income tax to cover fact that corporation tax has already been applied. Not quite, but the economic effect is such.
There’s a lovely complex system for with holding taxes on foreign dividends too.
OK, now, offshore fund, no corporation or with holding tax. Do you pay the lower UK income tax rates for dividends or do you pay full whack income tax?
Timmy elsewhere
The Panama Papers actually show how overblown the estimates of offshore tax loss are:
And all of this is quite the most interesting thing that the Panama Papers have revealed. Yep, there’s lots of money floating around offshore. However, very much more of it is paying tax where and when it should than the campaigners have been telling us. Far from the Mossack Fonseca revelations showing us what a problem offshore is they show us the opposite. They show us, contrary to those more hysterical claims, quite how much of that offshore money is paying all the tax due. It’s all thus a very much smaller problem than normally claimed.
As absolutely everyone now agrees neither Ian nor David Cameron dodged any tax at all. Thus we cannot go around assuming that all that offshore money is dodging tax, can we? And as far as we can see, both from the Swiss banks example and from these more recent revelations most offshore money is paying tax just as it ought to. Thus offshore tax dodging is a very much smaller problem than we have been led to believe. And isn’t that interesting?
Err, how?
It’s not all hardship, though. The prime minister’s own party supports him where necessary, the returns reveal. Expenses met by the Conservative party have varied between £5,105 and £13,149, which have been declared as taxable benefits. They cover travel, clothes and other associated expenses for Cameron and his wife.
When the PM next berates Jeremy Corbyn over a shabby suit, the Labour leader will be able to reply that, unlike Cameron, he isn’t receiving a taxpayer subsidy for it.
What taxpayer subsidy? It’s declared as a taxable benefit….it’s taxed.
Timmy’s still right
Mr Gupta, executive chairman of commodity group Liberty House, quickly came forward as a potential white knight, with a plan to return it to profit in months. His aim is to replace the Port Talbot blast furnaces – which make steel from raw materials – with electric arc furnaces that melt scrap, a process he says will be more efficient.
And there’s more of course. He won’t take on the environmental nor pension liabilities. Wants a break on energy prices. And it’s not obvious that he’s willing to pay for the arc furnaces, seems to be angling for the government to provide that cash.
But that basic contention, that it’s all about the blast furnaces, does seem to be true, doesn’t it?
Elton John watches Billy Elliot The Musical with husband David Furnish
The Telegraph does like to do this, doesn’t it?
The cretins are going to have fun here, aren’t they?
David Cameron
10 Apr 2016, 12:01am
Cameron in line to avoid inheritance tax of £80k
It’ll be extremely fun in fact. Because they’re all going to say that it is Cameron avoiding. But it isn’t, is it? It’s his mother’s estate which is avoiding. The tax is incident on that estate. We keep being told inheritance tax is on the estate, that’s the joy of it supposedly. Who better to tax than dead people?
The moment we all start shouting that it is Cameron avoiding then one of those justifications for inheritance tax itself disappears. Not that anyone’s going to be that consistent.
Timmy in Iranian
The original English text was:
Today, Iran is at about the level of economic wealth that England was in 1880, Sweden in 1925 and China in 2000. Those countries have all become considerably richer since those dates, China alone near doubling in just 16 years. There is no reason why one of the oldest civilisations on the planet should not be one of the richest: all that is necessary is that Iran follow the correct economic policies that allow growth.
Adam Smith told us that “Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.”
We might be a little more sophisticated in our language these days but the important point is that growth is not something which is caused by government policy. It can be prevented by it, most certainly, and there are certain things, like that administration of justice, which are necessary for it to occur. But economic growth is something that happens because people cooperate to make it happen, not because they are told how to do it nor that they must do it. Leave people the space and that natural desire for a better life can be allowed to, and will, work in growing the economy.
The performance of China over recent decades needs to be understood in these terms. Yes, there’s still a Communist Party claiming to control things, there’s still state owned industry and enterprises. But what has really happened is that said state, said Communist Party, has withdrawn from trying to manage swathes of the economy: and it is in those swathes where that control is absent that the growth has been occurring. The same can and will be true of any other economy. Relax the direct control and the planning and allow the green shoots of the market economy to grow up around it.
Whether one would prefer a high tax, high welfare, state of the Scandinavian social democracy kind, or the more minarchist vision of Hong Kong or Singapore, is a secondary question. For the thing those places have in common is that they score remarkably highly on the usual measures of economic freedom. Who may trade with whom, in what, how and where, is almost entirely unregulated in any manner in any of those places. That one system then taxes the resultant wealth to redistribute, the other does not, is that second order decision. There must be that economic freedom there for the wealth to be generated in the first place.
My and our best wishes for the New Year and my and our point in a nutshell. Nowruz will continue to get better and better into the future the more that economic freedom is allowed to exist.
Tim Worstall
Senior Fellow Adam Smith Institute, London.
This is in the Iranian New Year edition of Tejarat-e Farda, Iran’s most-circulated weekly magazine.
No, I have no idea why they asked me but…..
So here’s a good question for Tom Watson
Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, called on Cameron to pay back money that “morally belong[s] to the exchequer”.
OK Tom. So, let’s you sit down and work out how much that money is. And we’d like to see your working. What tax was avoided? A firm number in £ and p please. What is that number?
How dare Bill Clinton shout over Black Lives Matter protesters?
Err, because the people had come to hear Bill Clinton speak?
This Libor defence is interesting
It being that “everyone knew so doing it wasn’t acting dishonestly”.
Hmm….
Oh isn’t this fun?
The Labour MP has been one of the fiercest critics of tax avoidance by companies such as Starbucks, Google and Amazon. However, she is likely to face questions over the limited tax paid by Stemcor, the steel trading company in which she owns shares and which was founded by her father and is run by her brother.
Analysis of Stemcor’s latest accounts show that the business paid tax of just £163,000 on revenues of more than £2.1bn in 2011. However. it is not known whether the company – which made profits of £65m – used similar controversial tax avoidance measures criticised in the past by Mrs Hodge.
Stemcor’s tax bill to the exchequer equates to just 0.01pc of the revenues it booked through its UK-based business. In accounts filed with Companies House, Stemcor revealed that despite generating about one third of its revenues in Britain, its UK tax contribution made up only 2.7pc of the tax the company paid globally.
Stemcor was founded by Mrs Hodge’s father Hans Oppenheimer more than 60 years ago.
I think I know why, seem to recall that it had bad losses last year or the year before.
But it is still fun, isn’t it?
That plus the fact that the only named individual we have who used the Luxembourg Disclosure Facility was one Margaret, Lady Hodge…..
Pretty pathetic argument
Sajid Javid has drawn up secret plans to sack up to 40 per cent of his department’s staff despite being locked in a battle to save British steel from extinction, documents leaked to The Telegraph have revealed.
Detailed proposals from the management consultancy McKinsey suggest firing more than 4,000 civil servants over the next four years to save money.
The cuts are a major escalation to those outlined by George Osborne in last year’s spending review which demanded a 17 per cent decrease in spending by 2020.
The revelation that Mr Javid, the Business Secretary, is considering such deep cuts while facing accusations the department is failing to cope with the steel crisis will likely cause embarrassment.
That steel crisis needs perhaps two people working on it. One to shout that the blast furnaces are going to go whatever, the other to shout that there’s a line of people wanting to buy everything except the blast furnaces.
Job done.
And that’s before we consider the point that we shouldn’t actually have a business department…..