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On Ritchie’s Twitterstorm

This is really quite wonderful.

ritchiesdelusions

ritchiesdelusions1

It’s a series of delusions. The end result of which Our Ritchie is a lone crusader holding out the torch of truth against the lies and dissimulations of the eeeevil neoliberals who now rule our world.

And there’s something of a problem with this. It’s not actually neoliberals who pointed out that companies don’t pay tax. The incidence is upon people, must be. And this is a result that comes from neoclassical economics: it was first pointed out and proven well over a century ago.

And we’ve all repeatedly pointed this out to Murphy. But he carries on insisting that it’s a plot, a plot against his Curajus State, to refer to this well known truth about the universe that we inhabit.

Companies do not bear the burden of corporation tax. Some combination of the shareholders and the workers in the economy where it is imposed do. Without understanding that basic point no one will ever be able to build a reasonable tax system.

Murphy’s problem is not just that he’s wrong, it’s that he’s deluded.

Isn’t Ritchie just wonderful?

Third, the fact that the incidence of the tax may well be on bankers and their bonuses is ignored; a disingenuous claim (admittedly stated with less stridence that usual) is made that unspecified final consumers may suffer is offered instead. This is not a technical argument. Technical arguments would consider possibilities and state them all: this is deliberate one-sided suggestion that the mainstream reader may suffer alone and is therefore mistaken in their simplistic belief in the tax which the assured technocrat author is telling them, in thinly veiled code, might hit their pension. Actually, I strongly believe the reverse is the truth. An FTT will hit the churning which currently denudes many pensions of any increase in value. The fact that this argument is not considered makes clear there is nothing technical about this article.

This is in reaction to this argument:

Finally, as the commission notes, the FTT is likely to be passed on to final consumers. This makes an evaluation of the tax more difficult; whether or not it can be labelled a “Robin Hood Tax” presumably depends on whether it falls on the rich. We are not entirely sure who will really bear the tax, but “final consumers” here certainly include anyone with savings tied up in their pension. If the aim is to introduce a new tax on the rich, then why not simply do that? The best way to tax the rich is to tax the rich – for example, through a wealth tax – not to try to introduce a tax on trading in complex financial instruments, especially when it is uncertain who would actually pay.

Not a technical argument eh?

So the EU Commission itself thinks that the result of the technical analysis is that pensions and consumers will bear the burden of an FTT. Sir James Mirrlees, a Nobel Laureate for his studies of taxation systems, thinks that such a transactions tax will cascade through the economy and the burden fall on consumers. The IFS did a study of who carries the burden of the FTT we already have, Stamp Duty on shares, and concluded that it was both workers and pensioners who carried the burden.

As in, large numbers of very bright people have looked at the technical aspects of this proposed tax. And their conclusion is different from that of Richard Murphy. For technical reasons. But because they don’t agree with the Murphmonster’s prejudices they are not advancing a technical argument.

Ho hum.

Apologies, but shit happens, y’know?

Local residents and environmental groups have reacted angrily to the announcement that prosecutors have decided to drop the charges for responsibility for the crisis at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant.

As Japan nears the third anniversary of the March 11 earthquake that crippled the plant, no-one has been held accountable for the second-worst nuclear accident in history, despite the independent investigative committee set up by the government concluding in July 2012 that the accident was “man-made disaster” caused by shortcomings in Japanese corporate culture.

“Absolutely no-one is taking responsibility for this huge accident and when all these people are suffering,” Aileen Mioko-Smith, of Kyoto-based Green Action Japan, told The Telegraph.

“The investigation clearly stated this was an accident created by humans, not a natural disaster, but the judicial system here has now decided to side with the powers-that-be,” she said.

“The government will be happy with the decision, but it is completely irresponsible,” she said. “And I fear that failing to prosecute in this case will lead to another disaster in the future.”

Even if we accept that it was indeed human error that led to this disaster (something I’m entirely unsure about myself) this does not therefore lead to the conclusion that someone, somewhere, is criminally responsible.

Because, sadly, sometimes shit just happens. And for something to be a crime then the sequence of events has to be at least vaguely forseeable. And, oddly, no one really did forsee the idea of a massive earthquake followed by one of the world’s largest ever tsunamis.

Umm, no Boris, just no

Muslim children who are radicalised by their parents should be considered abused and taken into care, Boris Johnson has said.

The Mayor of London warned that hundreds of children were at risk of radicalisation but that authorities were not taking them into care because of “absurd” political correctness.

He warned that young people were increasingly being “radicalised at their home” and “taught crazy stuff” like the views espoused by the killers of Drummer Lee Rigby.

He said a lack of clarity about the law was making police and social services reluctant to intervene even if the children were being brought up with a “nihilistic view of the world” that could turn them into murderers.

Seriously, where the hell did this Stalinist shit come from? Or Fascist if you prefer? The Junta in Argentina did this: the children of lefties were taken from them and put out for adoption by those with the correct political views. The religious in Stalin’s Russia were sent off to the camps for this very thing, trying to bring their children up in the faith.

Freedom is indeed a messy thing and a free society will inevitably have in it those who hold views derided by the majority. But rather the point and aim of that free society thing is that rather than persecuting those with the odd views we protect the ability of people to have said odd views.

Seriously, this idea is appalling.

Isn’t it interesting watching Tristram Hunt trying to be Labour?

Labour’s education spokesman was last night accused of denigrating hard-working teachers at independent schools by claiming they had an ‘easy gig’.

Privately educated Tristram Hunt also suggested he would sack untrained teachers if he became Education Secretary, and said he would not undo Michael Gove’s school reforms as many were built on Labour policies.

Despite the stupidity of his announced policies I’m afraid that Hunt just brings me out in fits of giggles. It’s well, it’s sorta everything really.

The name, the looks, the voice, the background: anyone less likely to be a Labour MP is difficult to think of. My assumption is that he has mistaken the innate conservatism of the Labour party for being Conservative and is so dim that he actually through he was joining the Tory Party.

Much as I dislike Mr and Mrs Dromey, no, they shouldn’t have to resign

Toby Young claims that the Dromeys must go (should that be Dromies?):

I still can’t quite believe it. But here’s the evidence in black and white. In 1976, the NCCL put out a press release proposing that the age of consent be lowered to 14 “with special provisions for situations where the partners are close in age, or where consent of a child over ten can be proved”. So let me get this straight. If the NCCL had had its way, a paedophile could induce a 10-year-old child to have sex with him and, provided he could “prove” he or she had consented, that child’s parents would have no legal redress?

I’m not, I admit, in favour of men my age being able to have sex with children of 10 years of age. Not, actually, keen on 11 year olds being able to have sex with 10 year olds.

However, I do try to remind myself that the past is another country, they did things differently there. And it was what, a week ago, that we were all saying that while we don’t particularly think that DJs should grope 16 year olds that wasn’t quite the situation in the 70s. The star struck poppets did rather offer themselves up as sexual playthings to those with any modicum of fame.

For mores, especially sexual ones, were indeed different back then. And I’ve a very strong feeling indeed that we need to recall that all of these things were rather different back then.

I’ll grant that those who were most vociferous over the Cornflake also get to be shouty about the Dromii. Also that those, like me, who regard it as difficult, to say the least, to impose today’s morality on the past are at least being logically consistent. But there is a certain Murphyness creeping in here, that if my enemies did it then burn the witches, while if my friends did it then humph, so what?

There is one fair routethat one could take, which would be to ask if Dromia was among those witch hunting those who shagged 16 year olds while also considering, back at that time, that the law should be changed to that they could screw 10 year olds. But that would simply be the charge of hypocrisy and when have we ever expected a politician to be free of that?

So, I don’t trust these memoirs then

Sometimes, it almost got physical, with Healey — an enormous presence and a former beach master at the D-Day landings — aggressively shouting at Hezza to sit down, adding ‘you bastard’ more sotto voce.

Healey was beachmaster at the Anzio landings. Where, I think, he got his MC.

So I think we’ll take the memoirs of Jerry Hayes with a pinch of salt, shall we?

So one in three strippers is an undergraduate, eh?

So one in every three strip club dancers in Britain is an undergraduate.

Given that stripping is distinctly a game for the young (other positions in the spectrum from titillation to can be occupied by those whom gravity has had more effect upon but the waving of titties is indeed for the young) and that some 50% of young ladies these days are indeed undergraduates it would seem that there is a certain under-representation here.

No doubt we need quotas to correct this appalling situation.

Ritchie on Chinese debt

Too good to miss this one:

There are now three credit cards for every Chinese mainlander.

I believe in the need for credit, but I also believe in the control of credit. This looks out of control.

There’s a lot of potential for this to end in tears.

Comment one:

Not sure you are reading that right.

I see number of credit cards to be about 200 m units, so 1 in 6 mainlanders has a cc.

For debit cards then yes it’s 3 for 1

Ritchie’s response:

I am quoting the FT

The FT:

Ten times more of them are debit cards than credit cards (3.8bn compared with 391m), but credit card issuance also rose by 19 per cent in 2013, and Euromonitor predicts credit card usage will grow faster than that of other cards over the next five years.

Wondrous, no?

We all make errors of course but the refusal to even check when one is drawn to attention is what so impresses.

Would Starbucks pass the Fair Tax Mark?

So Ritchie asks us to pitch in with ideas for the multinational version of the Fair Tax Mark:

If anyone wants to suggest methodology they’re welcome to do so but remember the focus is on:

tax policy
transparency about what the business does
tax accounting
disclosing tax avoidance

OK.

And this is appended to a piece that states the following:

Much of Starbuck’s good work building up a positive corporate social responsibility profile over sustainability and support for fair trade products was undone when it was revealed to have paid no tax for 14 out of the 15 years it had been operating in the UK.

Excellent. So. let us consider whether Starbuck’s would gain any conceivable version of the Fair Tax Mark?

I think it’s fairly obvious that they would not given that the entirely manufactured furore about their non-payment of tax is being used as a justification for the existence of the Fair Tax Mark.

However, this is something of a problem as Starbuck’s really was making a loss and their accounts did indeed reveal everything that was necessary to check this. There were really only two things out of the ordinary at all. The first was payment of royalties for the brand name into a Dutch company. This is entirely normal practice, indeed we’ve EU law to tell us that it’s illegal to try and tax such payments at source. Hell, HMRC even reviewed the rate and it was adjusted to one they would prefer.

The second was the payment of a 20% margin to the coffee bean purchasing operation in Switzerland. Again, there’s nothing unusual or even dodgy about this. Some money should be paid as margin to a bean purchasing organisation. Not to do so would of course be manipulating transfer pricing regs. For any arms length supplier would clearly be trying to charge a margin on its services: thus a wholly owned one should as well.

All of this was entirely obvious in the accounts. As was the fact that even if you adder these back in then the UK arm was still making a loss.

Which brings us to an interesting question. If a company that had clear accounts, was not dodging tax, a company like Starbuck’s, would not get the Fair Tax Mark, then what use is said Mark? And if it would get it then how can anyone be using Starbuck’s as an example of why we need said Mark?

A not very well thought out solution to the Ukraine

Yes, yes, we all know, Western, Uniate, Ukranian speaking, eastern, Orthodox, Russian. Fatally divided country etc.

However, Crimea is the one part that is really Russian dominated (a result of the expulsion of the Crimean Tatars by Stalin) and it’s also the one part that has never, historically, been a part of the Ukraine. Only became so in 1954.

So switch Crimea over to Russia. What the hell….the end result being that Ukraine becomes a majority Ukrainian/Uniate/state…….umm, I think. It would actually reduce Russia’s argument about being the Big Brother of the remaining state.

Or perhaps I shouldn’t be doing this realpolitik sorta stuff?

In which we prove that Britain is a Catholic country

The old definition of being a Catholic is that one feels guilty.

Italian men are in joint pole position with their French cousins, with 55 per cent of males from both countries saying that they have had sexual relations with a woman other than the person they were in a relationship with.

British men scored far lower, but were shown to be no angels, with 42 per cent of them saying they had had an affair, according to the survey of nearly 5,000 people in six countries.

Sure, it’s a survey by a married dating site. And the results seem to show that the Catholic countries have more straying than the Protestant. The usual reasoning given here is that in the Catholic countries there’s less divorce but much the same amount of shagging about. It just gets expressed differently: serial monogamy in Protestant countries and affairs in Catholic.

But wait!

About half of British respondents who admitted infidelity said they regretted it, while only 28 per cent of French did.

This shows the opposite. That guilt thing: Britain is a much more Catholic country than France. We Recusants should obviously celebrate even thought this isn’t quite what Cardinal Hume was hoping for hen he prayed for the Conversion of England.

The State is not your friend

The sense of anger is exacerbated by geographical anomalies. Half of pensioners who live abroad – those in France, Spain and the US, for instance – receive annual increases to their state payments.

But others in South Africa, Australia, Trinidad, New Zealand, Canada and nearly every other Commonwealth nation do not.

Some pensioners in these regions in their 90s receive as little as £17 a week; one 102-year-old receives less than £7 a week.

Creating a level playing field is deemed too expensive by the Government. It would cost £590m to “unfreeze” the pensions for the next year.

Yep.

That you’ve paid in for 40 years to a contributory pensions matters not. If they need the money to pay for duck houses then that’s what they’ll do.

Fuckers.

And seriously, there is no justification for this at all other than that they prefer to do other things with the cash. All the explanations they offer are just weaseling around this simple fact.

Ritchie on the IMF paper

This will, of course, be a complete shock to neoliberal economists. The whole logic of their approach is that without the differential of inequality then there is no incentive for growth. This study shows that is not just not true, but that the reverse is true.

Actually, to anyone with an understanding of both human nature and economic reality (neither apparently possessed by neoliberal economists and so absent from the assumptions which automatically lead to the conclusions of their work) this finding is glaringly obvious.

Wondrous. He takes a paper that says that modest action to remove glaring inequality is a pretty good idea and then uses it to insist that therefore we should reduce all inequality.

It’s worth noting that the database used in the paper does not include the Soviet block, either the USSR in the 1920s or Eastern Europe post WWII. You know, when very strong efforts were made to reduce inequality and these had something of an impact upon growth?

It gets better though:

Let’s deal with the economics first. Reduced inequality inevitably means a broader base of ownership for capital. That means more people have access to opportunity to create businesses and unsurprisingly increased growth will follow.

The IMF paper is a study of income inequality, not wealth inequality. Thus access to capital has nothing to do with it at all.

Drivelling cocknobbery

Packets of ten cigarettes will be banned in the UK by 2016 after the European Parliament voted in favour of tough new anti-smoking rules governing the tobacco market.

The raft of new measures also include the introduction of mandatory picture and text health warnings covering about two-thirds of cigarette packs in an effort to reduce the number of smokers by 2.4 million.

There will also be a ban on flavoured cigarettes such as menthol varieties.

And just to show that these people really are drowning in their own syphilitic puss there’s this:

a maximum nicotine-concentration level for e-cigarettes.

Limitations on the most effective known method of people stopping smoking?

And, may I ask, what the hell has this got to do with stopping Germany from invading France again?