The Alternative Vote: A Flawed Guide

Course their is a flaw with this explanation, in that all your really choosing is between varying qualities and flavours of dog turd.

How Many Can We Do For HMRC

HMRC: Harmful Malpractice (of) Reducing Compensation.

Any more?

Presumed Value

First a quote (emphasis mine):

The real message of the conservative pro-life position is that we're in favor of living. We consider people--with a few obvious exceptions--to be assets. Liberals consider people to be nuisances. People are always needing more government resources to feed, house, and clothe them and to pick up the trash around their FEMA trailers and to make sure their self-esteem is high enough to join community organizers lobbying for more government resources.

- P J O'Rourke

The above quote not only illustrates part of my own beliefs in the pro-life debate but also links in to the next bit below.

I had a tweet exchange with Mr. Murphy on the subject of the minimum wage that went something a little like this (*cues piano*):

Today's announced increase in the minimum wage of 2.5% to 608p is considerably less than current rate of inflation. bit.ly/f1a0H7 (Retweeted by Mssr Murphy)

ME: @RichardJMurphy @Peston yes - where are employer[s] supposed to find the extra money to pay their employees?


@tjerubbaal @Peston if u r paying min wage your staff costs r already state subsidised massively - how much state sub do u need?

This comment came as odd, alien even; on top of enforcing higher rates of pay from employers was the government also subsidising this? How?

To this day I still await an answer from Mr. Murphy, accountant extraordinaire; but, using the magic of twitter, stream of consciousness that it is, I delved into the vast knowledge and "wisdom" of my "zealous" following to invite an answer from further afield.

It appears that being on minimum wage attracts additional "subsidies" in the form of housing benefit and tax credits to make up the shortfall; like Gordon Brown's splurge of tax credits for the middle classes down this seems to me like robbing Peter to pay Peter and Paul a moderate sum back the difference going to paying Humphrey's wage and giving him paper to shuffle, the effect here being to raise the amount of income to an "acceptable" level for those on minimum wage; below is the breakdown of what is available to the average singleton on the new £6.08 minimum wage:

So on a 37.5 hour week at minimum wage of £11856, £483.30 is added as the bare minimum, making their wage up to £12339.30.

Course you then have to take of the tax for that first:

So on an after tax income of £10,424.44 they add £483.30, making the amount those hard-pressed minimum wage earners working under the jack-boot of a top-hat wearing capitalist is £10907.74.

This gets to you by first taking off £876.20 from your wage annually only for you to get a fraction back from the state.

A few things.

Lets accept that we can (not should) guarantee a minimum wage - lets ignore the fact that the labour theory of value has almost certainly been proved a nonsense since it was first mooted (a one word answer as to why it is a nonsense: eBay) - are we really going about it the right way when we tax the pay of those we consider to require subsidy?

Further if we are admitting that the minimum wage doesn't cover the basics, something I'm naive to think if we are going to have should be a pre-requisite, then why bother with it in the first place? Why would you tax any of it? I means that like admitting it should be lower isn't it?

In fact if we are going to buy in full time to the charade that is the state subsidy of workers wages then why not abolish all benefits and fold them into one benefit system?

In a negative income tax system, people earning a certain income level would owe no taxes; those earning more than that would pay a proportion of their income above that level; and those below that level would receive a payment of a proportion of their shortfall, which is the amount their income falls below that level.

Now it could be said that eliminating minimum wage legislation and initiating a Negative Income Tax benefit system doesn't eliminate the possibility that employers will attempt to milk the subsidy for all its worth in order to reduce pay below what they would offer for that role, and you would be right; if employers can reduce wages at another's expense then they will (look at how health and safety legislation and regulations favours the incumbent, larger established businesses, dissuading new entrants to the market); likewise what is to stop someone from doing no work at all and just collecting their pay whilst staying at home? This is of course a dilemma that we face today but with the myriad benefits system, albeit currently the system dissuades people from entering work altogether

One model was proposed by Milton Friedman, as part of his flat tax proposals. In this version, a specified proportion of unused deductions or allowances would be refunded to the taxpayer. If, for a family of four the amount of allowances came out to $10,000, and the subsidy rate was 50% (the rate recommended by Friedman), and the family earned $6,000, the family would receive $2,000, because it left $4,000 of allowances unused, and therefore qualifies for $2,000, half that amount. Friedman feared that subsidy rates as high as those would lessen the incentive to obtain employment. He also warned that the negative income tax, as an addition to the "ragbag" of welfare and assistance programs, would only worsen the problem of bureaucracy and waste. Instead, he argued, the negative income tax should immediately replace all other welfare and assistance programs on the way to a completely laissez-faire society where all welfare is privately administered. The negative income tax has come up in one form or another in Congress, but Friedman opposed it because it came packaged with other undesirable elements antithetical to the efficacy of the negative income tax. Friedman preferred to have no income tax at all, but said he did not think it was politically feasible at that time to eliminate it, so he suggested this as a less harmful income tax scheme.

I would perhaps make it less restrictive on how you retain the advantage offered by your tax-free income, as I laid out here.

And can anyone really claim this would be more expensive to implement? Switching from 50+ benefit systems to one would save money in the long run.

That is of course unless you are a civil servant intent on a little empire building, less interested in what actually works rather than what gets you more unbridled power over the people you deign to serve.

If We Are "Immune" To Our Own Incompetence

Ye God's I hope this isn't true (the highlighted bit that is):

A woman on the way to pick up her terminally-ill elderly mother for a hospital appointment was subjected to a nightmare ordeal by police who put her in a cell on suspicion of stealing petrol.

It was six hours before officers realised they had made a mistake because the theft was in fact carried out by two men.
And by the time they returned law-abiding grandmother Beverley Bennett to the spot where she was arrested, her car had been stolen.

When Mrs Bennett, 58, complained about her treatment, police said she could not take action against them because they were immune from prosecution in negligence cases.

If your boss was elected by the people he served, I doubt this would be a problem.

In Defence of AV

Having nearly given Mrs. Tomrat an embolism by asking her if it were ok for me to stand for local elections I embarrassingly withdrew at the first hurdle (having also asked LPUK isf I could stand under their banner); the strain on my personal life and time did not stack up against cowtowing to the vast horde of ingrates that currently occupy my particular ward.

The date for the local elections also happens to be the date when we get to choose how we will vote in the future for our mps'; I've covered my thoughts on this earlier post, and whilst my view hasn't changed - electoral reform to the way in which our mps are elected is a poor substitute for improving the ways we un-elect them - I do think my view has evolved somewhat.

Lets assume that the referendum passes and the next election is decided by AV; this graph from an Aunty Beeb Radio 5 phone in discussion and experiment on a mock election under AV shows just one potential result:

As you can see even with several rounds leading to Nulabourious and the Watermelons coming 1st and 2nd neither group obtain the pre-requisite number of votes to be declared the winner, and as Guido pointed out this result would be declared void.

You see, as I pointed out in this post, the biggest party in any election result is probably the NOTA party; that group of people who, whether through ignorance or apathy, are simply not interested in taking part in our political system - to me this seems to be a gross injustice, in so much as the few grant the power over so many; left leaning zealots, moochers and and looters dictate the election because the NOTA party, that group of people who do not want their life divied up by politics or simply don't care who does the divying, rightly figuring that there vote wont matter; democracy is merely a tool legitimising theft.

If AV has the potential though to remove this legitimacy - by voiding the result - then this is at least part way there to effectively calling time on the whole stitch up; plonking in candidates who will tow the party line, cowtow to the whip or sell out their constituents for vested interests and professional lobby groups will get shown the door, all of them potentially.

This is a. good. thing.

Ultimately I think I may even partake in this referendum in favour of the #Yes2AV camp; if anything it cant detract from the FPTP system - you can still vote for only one candidate, just that if they poll the lowest in the group they are eliminated; how is that really that different ito your candidate losing in FPTP? The left will ultimately opt for any quasi-marxist/maoist/stalinist loon who will keep the funding faucet running and who will never sit well with the majority of the electorate.

Ultimately people are working out the scam being presented to them by the elitist clique, this can only add to that.

I've Got An Alternative Suggestion

A couple who disguised their £500,000 home as a hay barn yesterday lost a four-year legal battle to save it.
...
They tried to outwit council planners by disguising their house as a windowless barn and surrounding it with farmyard machinery.
...
The saga began in 2001, after Mr Beesley was granted planning permission from Welwyn Hatfield Borough Council for a building to be used as a barn on green belt off the M25

He claims that he had no intention to live there, but changed his mind after a spate of burglaries in the area. So he altered plans to relocate the large barn door and built extra doors and lighting, which were never approved by the council.

He and his 37-year-old wife moved into the house in August 2002 – without planning permission.

In 2007, the couple applied for a certificate of lawfulness, which would allow them to remain in the barn legally after four years.

So a couple buy a plot of land and build a home on it, in a land in which house prices are going through the roof and are sustained by monopolies in planning permission, where many people considered themselves to live in an "over-populated" land despite the total UK land developed being 10% with housing taking up less than 2%.

And for their trespasses they are being evicted, their child being made homeless and their beautiful home destroyed.

No doubt there will be attacks from both left & right: the horror that someone would try to get on the property ownership ladder and ignore the governments every attempt to prevent all but the very rich and the governments favoured clientele doing this goes the cry of the Watermelon left; the nerve of building your own mansion-like home for half a mil when you could buy our crappy 2-up, 2-down in crime-ridden commuterville for the same price pops the colonel blimps of the Tory right.

I say sod them all; stay put in your house mate and let them drag you and your family kicking and screaming from it; salt the earth all around and make sure nothing grows there again ever.

You do not owe your allegiance to a state that will happily throw you off your own land because it doesn't fit into their neat little pigeon holes.

And before anyone engages in flippantly raising straw-men all over the place about allowing polluters to strip the green belt clean and destroy this answer this; has anyone pointed out that this is what he has indeed been doing? Has his presence somehow led to the greenbelt becoming less green? Is he hurting anyone or disposing of his rubbish on public land? Are these the issues he is being evicted over? No - he is being thrown out because he took his life in his hands and risked 100s of thousands of his own money to build his dream home and dared his local jobsworths to tell him he couldn't.

If 6 Were 9

Remember back when the coalition still hadn't markedly pissed off anyone? You know it was sometime in October/November; Osbo had just told us all calmly that DROSSTRAP would be the order of the day - the brakes going on for getting more indebted, with a view to a second term setting a plan to handle all those IOUs under the carpet - Zippy as business secretary was chatting up journalists and briefing against businesses his lefty constituents didn't particularly like; Cameron courageously and heroically arguing down the amount of our government money handed over to an increasing EU budget in this new age of austerity.

This last point, Cameron's first of many backtracks on the EU, thus tune being to push for a halt in it's budget or potentially a decrease, led to a 2.9% increase: equating to roughly £440 million extra in our contribution.

Man, those were the days weren't they?

So what has this budgetary increase now become?

[EU budget increase: £0.45Bn] + [Irish Bailout: £7Bn] + [Portugese bailout: £6Bn] = £13.45 BILLION in additional money's going to the Eurozone.

If £0.45Bn = 2.9% increase that equates to £0.225Bn per 1%; therefore £13.45Bn/£0.225Bn = a 59.77% increase in our net EU contributions.

Looked at another way the average cost of the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning "Joint Strike fighter" - those jets we have had to cut the majority of our order of to make up budget cuts - come in based on the Wikipedia pages' figure at about £85 Million a piece.

So we've just given up a potential 158 brand spanking new and shiny fighter jets bailing out the unaccountble Eurozone colleagues an their ambitions for a single currency.

You still glad we got "cast-iron Dave" at the helm? More like pig iron; will crumble at the slightest hint of pressure onto a bed of taxpayers money.

You Got It All Wrong Mr. Martin..

This is a good thing:

MPs broke up yesterday for the start of a series of holidays that will see them in Parliament for just 17 days over the next two months.

As part of what is being dubbed the Great Westminster Shutdown, they will not return from their Easter break until Tuesday, April 26.

Even then they will only be in the Commons for three days before they get time off for the royal wedding.

When they return to work on May 3, they will only be sitting for three weeks before they have another fortnight off for Whitsuntide.

Taking into account the Fridays they are away as a matter of course, it means that in the two months from now until June 7, MPs will only sit in the Commons for 17 days.

I might run an experiment from now to June 7 and monitor the effect on the FTSE and the non-appearance of our MPs; would it be wrong to posit a theory that their absence is matched by the market doing better? We will see.

Can We Not Call Time On This Already?

David Cameron vowed to hand hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money plus vital military secrets to Pakistan yesterday to make amends for offending the Muslim nation last year.

The Prime Minister pledged to invest £650million in Pakistani schools at a time when the education budget at home is being cut.

Britain is also to give highly sensitive military technology to combat roadside bombs to the Pakistani security services, which are widely blamed for funding and arming the Taliban.

Notwithstanding the humongous amount of money simply mulched up by our own local authorities on beano's to far away lands*, I think giving aid money bungs to hostile, submarine and nuclear-weapon-totting savages is an appalling use of our money by our increasingly vainglorious Euroslime Dave.

If it is worth giving aid to Pakistan (and I'm sure it is), there should be no need to compel taxpayers to do it; it'll come naturally by the charitable sector, and as we see from the revealed preferences of all those calling for more government spending (H/T to Tim Worstall) they are unwilling to back up spending plans which involve giving money to other nation's governments.

After all isn't that really the ultimate test for the left's desired spending habits: not their desire to give to Oxfam or UNICEF, but cutting checks to give directly to those governments responsible for the people concerned? If you are unwilling to give to corrupt third world politicos in places like Libya, Pakistan or Umbongo, why should the government be able to?

David Willetts: Douchebag*.

Universities minister David Willetts said middle-class pupils from good schools who get straight As at A-level have not achieved 'something exceptional'

Poo-pooing the efforts of the children of your core vote doesn't sound like a particularly wise course of action now does it?

And what pray tell did David "two-brains" Willetts do at school and beyond?

Willetts was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, and Christ Church, Oxford, where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics.

King Edwards?

King Edward's School (KES) (grid reference SP052836) is an independent secondary school in Birmingham, England, founded by King Edward VI in 1552. It is part of the Foundation of the Schools of King Edward VI in Birmingham, and is widely regarded as one of the most academically successful schools in the country, according to various league tables. It was ranked 7th for A-Level results[1] and 20th for GCSE results,[1] out of all schools in England in 2004.

So, by the fuzzy logic of two-brains Willetts, whereby a students educational achievement is inversely proportional to the success of his school in churning out more tax-drones this puts him on the level of...: Homer Simpson.




That someone with a crappy start in life goes on to succeed and do great things is to be celebrated, but the mindset that says the middle classes should pay for the party because their own success is implicit in their upbringing is as asinine a suggestion as any I've heard and should be challenged. Daily.

David Willetts: Douchebag*.

Universities minister David Willetts said middle-class pupils from good schools who get straight As at A-level have not achieved 'something exceptional'

Poo-pooing the efforts of the children of your core vote doesn't sound like a particularly wise course of action now does it?

And what pray tell did David "two-brains" Willetts do at school and beyond?

Willetts was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, and Christ Church, Oxford, where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics.

King Edwards?

King Edward's School (KES) (grid reference SP052836) is an independent secondary school in Birmingham, England, founded by King Edward VI in 1552. It is part of the Foundation of the Schools of King Edward VI in Birmingham, and is widely regarded as one of the most academically successful schools in the country, according to various league tables. It was ranked 7th for A-Level results[1] and 20th for GCSE results,[1] out of all schools in England in 2004.

So, by the fuzzy logic of two-brains Willetts, whereby a students educational achievement is inversely proportional to the success of his school in churning out more tax-drones this puts him on the level of...: Homer Simpson.




That someone with a crappy start in life goes on to succeed and do great things is to be celebrated, but the mindset that says the middle classes should pay for the party because their own success is implicit in their upbringing is as asinine a suggestion as any I've heard and should be challenged. Daily.

Quote Of The Day

60 years of the Welfare State and 14 year olds are shooting 5 year olds. That's progress? God, I hate Politicians. They make awful parents. Perhaps Lee and I have more in common than I knew.

- Old Holborn.

Those New Rules Governing Nuclear Power In Full

Following Sarkozy the Wunder-midget's call for tougher rules governing the use of nuclear power I thought I would posit a few potential minimum standards for operating them - here goes:

1. Nuclear Power Stations must be built to withstand at least a devasting natural disaster such as an asteroid the size of Yorkshire directly colliding with it

The only way we can prevent any chance of a massive natural disaster from ever causing devastating radioactive leaks, or worse, ANOTHER CHERNOBYL, irrespective of the mind numbingly high improbability of the latter happening.

Bad, but can you imagine how much worse it'd be if it hit a nuclear power station in YOUR town?

2. Nuclear power operators must be ex-army artillery experts.

Why, I hear you ask? I have 3 words for you: Godzilla and Mothra.

Library images. Imagine that glass building was ACTUALLY A NUCULAR* POWER STATION for an idea of the worst case scenario.

Oh you may laugh, you may say "Tom you realise that's some dude in a suit fighting a papier mâché moth right?", to which I can only point the following:

Maybe that's what the Japanese want you to believe to avoid the international outcry about the unsafe working practices of running nucular* power around rampaging monsters; after all that radiation in Japan is well documented to cause animals to grow to monstrous levels irrespective of the massive physiological impossibilities they represent. Doesn't that make more sense? Doesn't it?

3. An international tax to mitigate the effects of environmental impact of nucular* power.

"What environmental impact?" I hear you cry? The one few people have really considered but potentially devasting nonetheless; I am if course talking about those 3 little words so feared by our leaders concerning the safety of our planet: Unstable Inter-dimensional Portals.

Coming to a highstreet near you.

Hollywood, TV and video games may glamorise these abominations of theoretical physics but the reality is a lot more mundane but nonetheless dangerous: radiation and nucular* accidents tends to go hand in hand with interdimensional rifts opening up.. Aside from the obvious danger associated with interdimensional alien and demonic invasions hellbent on enslavement or playful amusement in torturing human kind, the prospect of adverse conditions causing a radioactive leak are too much frightening to contemplate.

Some scientific commentators even believe nucular* accidents could be attributable to manbearpig breaching one of these portals.

So there are just 3 of my valuable contributions to potential rules that should be used to combat nucular* power.

Let us not split hairs on this: the relatively few survivors left in the area after just one of the above scenarios, the ones not immeadiately killed off, enslaved by interdimensional space aliens or demons or who become collateral damage in the ensuing firefight with either Mothra or Godzilla may be exposed to radiation scientists believe is safe, potentially leading to CANCER in later life. Provided none of the above kills them.

* = yes I'm aware I've not spelled nucular; it's unlikely anyone will notice as the p is silent. ;-)