Mr Cameron said he wanted to put the tax status of parliamentarians “beyond doubt”.
“I think it is time to pass a law that says that if you want to be in the Houses of Parliament, if you want to be a legislator, you need to be or be treated as a full UK taxpayer,”
Oh aye. And when will the same apply to MEPs?
Never has it been so hard to argue that there is such a thing as progress and that it is represented by liberal capitalism….
Sigh.
Liberal capitalism and its offshoot globalisation (essentially, the extension of liberal capitalism places that were formerly neither liberal nor capitalist) has led to decreasing global inequality and the largest reduction of poverty in the history of our species.
I call that progress: I\’d be interested to hear from anyone who thinks that it isn\’t…..
Eighteen new MEPs whose seats have been created by the Lisbon Treaty are to receive full pay, perks and an allowance worth an annual £300,000 each despite being unable to start work for up to four years.
The rebuttal to the outrage this will cause is already known.
But this has happened before, it\’s entirely normal! This is the way it works in the EU!
And the rebuttal to that is also already known. Yes, quite, we know this is the way the EU works you deliquescent little cocks. Why do you think we want to leave?
One of the greats:
Paul Samuelson, whose work helped form the basis of modern economics, has died at his home in Massachusetts after a brief illness. He was 94.
This is probably trivial for someone who knows how to do this.
For me it\’s impossible (given the help you don\’t get from google itself).
Over at the other blog I\’ve a problem with getting Google Adsense to run.
This blog, a number of blogspot ones and a couple of Typepad ones all run off the same Adsense account, even though there are several channels.
Adsense is still running here and on the blogspot blogs. So it\’s not that I\’ve so offended Google that they\’ve pulled my account as a whole.
However, Adsense is not running on the Typepad blogs.
Typepad have lifted the code which is on those blogs and inserted it into another blog. It works there.
But ads simply do not show when the code is where it should be.
It\’s not my computer or anything, for I can see from the logs that the ads are not showing on the Typepad blogs.
So, that\’s the problem. Ads from the account run on other blogs, the code itself seems to be fine as it will run elsewhere but the code will not serve up ads on my particular and specific Typepad blogs.
So, anyone actually know enough about the interaction of Adsense and Typepad to sort this out? It\’s not like it makes a huge amount of money but it\’s a decent dinner out for two each month…..
Someone really needs to sit Tom Friedman down for a little chat about economics.
His piece today is about how amazingly productivity is rising as a result of new gadetry. But it\’s not producing any jobs:
The bad news is that credit markets and bank lending are still constricted, so many companies can’t fully exploit their productivity gains and spin off the new jobs we desperately need.
But, err, rising productivity doesn\’t create new jobs. Never has done.
Rising productivity destroys jobs, always has done.
Take the example he uses of a sofa making company. It used to use 20 hours of labour to make a sofa. Now it takes 3 hours. That\’s rising productivity of labour.
So how has this destruction of 17 hours of needed labour created jobs? It hasn\’t of course.
Those who used to do this 17 hours now have to go off and find something else to do with their time.
And they will do something else with their time. Wipe the baby\’s bottom, cure cancer or just enjoy the leisure of sitting on the stoop.
As a society we like rising productivity for the result is that we get both a sofa and a wiped baby/cure for cancer/more leisure.
But it doesn\’t create jobs, it destroys them.
On the subject of a Tobin Tax:
It isn\’t even true that the City pays its way in other taxes. Revenue from the financial sector in the last five years of the boom amounted to around £200bn. The cost of the bailout is currently estimated at £850bn.
Bollocks.
Tax revenue was as stated. The cost of the bailout is currently estimated in the £10-£20 billion range.
They\’re comparing the absolute (or nett if you prefer) revenue from taxation with the gross amount at risk in the bailout. But the gross amount at risk is simply not the same thing as the \”cost\”. That would be the nett amount. After the loans have been repaid, after the shares have been sold.
Now, you can in fact say that the \”cost\” is going to be £850 billion. But that assumes that none of the banks ever pay back any of the loans, that all of the toxic assets that have been insured fall to a value of zero and both RBS and Lloyd\’s go bankrupt entirely, meaning that the Govt\’s equity stakes in them are worth nothing.
But you would be near insane to think that all of that is going to happen….and we\’d all have rather larger problems if it did than whether bankers were opposed to a Tobin Tax. We\’d be using shotguns to get the last pallet of baked beans out of the Tesco warehouses if that happened.
But the biggest problem with this editorial? Nowhere does it mention tax incidence. It simply assumes that a Tobin Tax would be paid by \”the bankers\”. Which is absurd.
\”People do not quite realise the scale of the issue,\” added Bevan. \”This is one of the most serious problems that science has ever faced.\” In Britain the lives of hundreds of thousands of people will be threatened by food shortages. Across the globe, tens of millions – if not hundreds of millions – will be affected.
Ooooh, serious!
In Britain, a global food shortage would drive up import costs and make food more expensive, just as the nation\’s farmers start to feel the impact of disrupted rainfall and rising temperatures caused by climate change. \”If we don\’t address this, we can expect major destabilisation, an increase in rioting and potentially significant problems with international migration, as people move to avoid food and water shortages,\” he told a conference earlier this year.
What is it that will cause all of this?
Strangely, no, it isn\’t climate change. That\’s a very minor player here. Similarly, it\’s not population growth, we can handle the sort of growth that\’s likely to happen with the sort of productivity growth we\’ve already got (for example, just bringing African farming up to 50% or so of first world productivity would solve that entirely).
So what could possibly cause such problems?
\”We can certainly do it, although it won\’t be easy,\” said Bevan. For a start, farmers will have to increase yields using greatly reduced amounts of agro-fertilisers because their manufacture is energy-intensive. Some 3% of the world\’s energy is used in the manufacture of fertilisers and in a post-Copenhagen world, dominated by renewable energy, such carbon consumption is likely to be prohibited.
That\’s what\’s going to cause the problem. Fertiliser is pretty much made from natural gas through the Haber Process. Now if we\’re going to be stupid enough to ban people from doing this then of course we\’re going to have problems. But note that it\’s not climate change nor population pressure that\’s causing this. It\’s our reaction to the threat of climate change.
And of course we have choices about how to react to that threat. And the most obvious and basic choice is not to make choices which are worse than the climate change itself.
Hundreds of millions short of food as we ban artificial fertilisers which account for 3% of energy use? Or carry on using the energy and have 3% of the predicted climate change? And 3% of the damage of the predicted climate change?
As a purely personal opinion I think you\’d have to be entirely insane to ban fertilisers on this basis. But then again, purely on that same personal basis, I\’m convinced that a lot of what we\’re being told we must do about climate change is indeed entirely insane. Huge numbers of people seem to have missed the point that there are always trade offs and there are some trade offs that we really don\’t want to make.
Like, perhaps, starving hundreds of millions to avoid a 0.12 oC temperature rise (which is what 3% of a 4 oC rise would be).
Avatar is a computer-effects-heavy 3-D space fantasy, set 125 years in the future, about a disabled US Marine, Jake Sully, who is sent to Pandora, a moon of the distant Centauri star system, to find supplies of \”unobtainium\”, an energy-rich mineral.
So, that\’s us having to find a new synonym for weird and wonderful metal then.
I think, as least as far as around here is concerned, \”unobtanium\” was coined by the Remittance Man. Make sure you get your invoice in to Mr. Cameron, won\’t you?
You live in a state where the most severe criminal punishment is life imprisonment. Someone proposes that since armed robbery is a very serious crime, armed robbers should get a life sentence. A constitutional lawyer asks whether that is consistent with the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. A legal philosopher asks whether it is just.
An economist points out that if the punishments for armed robbery and for armed robbery plus murder are the same, the additional punishment for the murder is zero–and asks whether you really want to make it in the interest of robbers to murder their victims.
People in industrialised nations are now 4in taller on average than in 1860.
Every extra month helps Lord Ashcroft\’s (probably non-dom) money to do its worst in the marginals.
Nice little snipe there.
Of course, if you understood tax law you would know the following. Non-dom or dom makes no difference if you bring the money into the UK. Once you\’ve brought it in then it\’s taxed the same way. It\’s only if you keep the money abroad that non-dom helps.
Whatever money Ashcroft is spending in marginals comes either from him in the UK (for foreigners cannot contribute to political parties) or from a UK registered company (for foreign companies cannot contribute to a political party).
Thus dom or non-dom makes no difference here.
But is is a nice dig at him, that has to be said.
Geoffrey Lean notes that:
Within two decades Denmark could get all of its electricity from renewable sources
And then goes on to tell us how it\’s all amazing and to do with the wind.
Then at the end we see the kicker:
More fundamentally, the wind – as critics often point out – does not blow all the time. That is not too much of a problem when there is not much wind power, but it becomes really serious when you are as dependent as Denmark, whose turbines can go from generating 3,100 megawatts (the same as three big power stations) to absolutely nothing in just a few hours.
The problem was solved by linking up with Norway, which has plenty of hydroelectric power – which, unlike the wind, can be stored. When the gales are blowing in Denmark, it supplies electricity to Norway, which turns off the generators in its dams. When the wind drops, the Norwegians let more water flow, to help their Danish neighbours.
Such a system, experts increasingly say, may allow Britain – which has more suitable winds than Denmark – greatly to expand its offshore wind capabilities, too.
The kicker being of course that there ain\’t enough hydro power in the whole of Europe to power the UK (note well that Norway and Denmark are both about 5 million people each). Which means that we cannot rely upon such a system.
We would need back up generation of some other kind. And for back up generation it really has to be natural gas turbines as these are the only things you can turn on and off fast enough.
We could, it is true, go for wave or tidal power. But if we installed enough of that to provide the power we would need when the wind wasn\’t blowing (and it would have to be enough to power peak demand, for we have indeed seen that those frosty winter days when demand is at its peak are those when the entire country is bereft of wind) then we wouldn\’t need to install the windmills at all.
Which leads to, either a double generation system, gas and wind, or no wind at all. Which really isn\’t quite the same as the wondrous stories we\’re told about what wind can do for us.
The Chancellor suggested that biometric passports, which carry the same information as ID cards, would be sufficient.
In an interview in The Daily Telegraph today, he said there was “probably no need” to “go further” than the new passports, paving the way for ID cards to be scrapped. Although he claimed later that he wasn’t going beyond existing plans, his intervention could spell the death knell for the project.
It\’s still the National Identity Register which is the problem isn\’t it?
Or does that not matter if you don\’t actually have to have a passport?
It\’s been so long that we were all getting enraged about this I\’ve forgotten some of the details…..
Leah Wickham, a young woman from Fiji, broke down as she told the conference she will see her homeland disappear beneath the waves if we do not act now.
The two most important islands are Viti Levu and Vanua Levu. The islands are mountainous, with peaks up to 1,300 metres (4,250 ft), and covered with thick tropical forests.
Now have EU protected status.
I\’d never actually heard of Cornish sardines, had to go and look it up.
Ah, you mean pilchards then?
A new forecast for 2010 predicted it will be almost 1F (0.6C) higher than the long term average of 57F (14C) across the globe as a result of natural weather patterns and global warming.
The figures, presented at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, come as scientists released a statement claiming global warming is “unequivocal” following ‘Climategate’.
That\’s our own Met Office that is.
Entirely ignoring the point that they keep making themselves that climate change is not measured on annual variations, which tell us almost nothing, but by the trend over decades.
And all to make a nice announcement at a conference.
Most scientific of them don\’t you think?