Them Riots

Been a little busy these last few months and Lord knows the faux-Duggan riots has been better covered elsewhere.

But man this idea is coming into it's own eh?

Dem GDP Figures

Yes Chris you still get that shiny fiver once you put in your donate button.

But lets look at these GDP figures closer:

Preliminary figures from the Office for National Statistics showed that in the first quarter the economy merely recouped ground lost from severe snow in December, growing by 0.5 per cent. With value added tax rising 2.5 percentage points to 20 per cent in January, economic weakness was always expected in the first half of 2011.

But the stagnant economy over the past six months will force another downgrade to official forecasts – unless the gross domestic product figures are subsequently revised upwards.

Current UK GDP is £1310 billion, making a 0.5% an increase in £6.55 billion over 3 months.

But compare this to the amount borrowed in March alone according to the ONS:

In March 2011, there was net borrowing (excluding financial interventions) of £18.6 billion, which compares with borrowing of £19.8 billion in March 2010.

£18.6 Billion.

So the government has spent the increase in GDP nigh on 3. times. over. in 1 month.

Yes I know that this isn't an exact comparison; no doubt someone will say the only comparitive is the rate at which we have to pay off the interest on this - life is too short to do those calculations.

But with spending like this, in comparison to the wealth generated cannot be good.

Stop spending our money Osbourne you annoying ass-hat.

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.

There's A Simple Solution To This Too!

In a tale which sounds like it could have come straight from a Yes, Minister script, Digby Jones, the former head of the CBI, reveals this weekend that he was so frustrated that he wasn't allowed to drive a British-built car he even offered to use his own Jaguar.
...
The book, serialised in The Telegraph, also reveals that inward investment opportunities were often squandered because civil servants were slow at responding to requests from businesses that wanted advice.

In one example the Canadian aerospace and engineering company, Bombardier, almost abandoned plans to invest £500m to build business jets in Northern Ireland because it had "heard nothing" from the Government's business department.

Civil service incompetence should come as nothing new to readers of this blog; some may even be aware of the downright insidious behaviour against it's political opponents.

But a question remains; why do we need a BIS? Implementing health & safety legislation could be handled by the Dept. if Sickness, tax liabilities by Her Mag's State Sanctioned Theft & Violence and environmental concerns by the Department of Energetic Zealots for Climate Change or the Department of Environmental Fabians & Rural Turnip Mulchers.

So why not wrap up what appears to be a vehicle for state-gerrymandering in private business, an especially repugnant concept considering that it mandates a third party's involvement in what should be a private agreement between the individuals involved.

Angry At The Wrong People

Fuel prices have fallen since the Budget, but by less than the 1p cut in duty announced by Chancellor George Osborne, UK-wide research has found.

There was a 0.6p average fall in petrol and diesel from Wednesday to Thursday, the survey by Experian Catalist found.

The 1p cut in duty on petrol and diesel took effect from 1800 GMT on Wednesday.

The Retail Motor Industry Federation (RMI) says many garages will delay implementing the cut until stocks of existing, more expensive fuel are gone.

Aunty Beeb getting mad at those evil capitalist bastards not passing on the whole penny of duty our glorious leaders deigned to bequeath us in an act of infinite grace and generosity

And how much was this value?




Based on the above forecast you get the following percentages:

-57.19p duty = 47.7%
-39.85p product = 33.2%
-17.86p VAT = 14.9%
- 5p delivery & retail = 4.2%

Or to put another way 62.2% of the cost of fuel goes into George Osbourne's pockets.

4.2%.

Vs.

62.2%.

That poor chap who gets your late night beer & rizla run order on your way home walking from town takes just 4p from every £1 you spend on fuel through the week; the government takes 60-bloody pence and positively conflates many of the conflicts that are driving the price skyward.

Aunty Beeb should be ashamed of herself.

Thinking Differently On Tax

Tax legislation, measured by the respected Tolley’s ‘Yellow’ handbook on direct taxes, has mushroomed from two to five volumes since Labour took power in 1997, and from 1,800 to a voluminous 18,000 pages.

I have a solution that would concentrate minds bit:

- all legislation which directly remove monies from people needs to be collected in one place (a government codex, like Tolley's, on taxation if you will), including substance of laws, statutory instruments and regulation.

- Legislation put in place stating the tax law and codex should be written in plain English. Tax calculations should be incorporated in tables on the codex; any calculations should be proofed so they can be done by anyone possessing a GCSE in maths (low bar I know).

- The text format should be one font and one standard size, say 10/12pt for main body text and 8/10pt for notes or indices in arial.

- now the important bit- the codex cannot be any thicker than 1 inch when printed on standard printer paper; if the printed codex fails this stress test it has to be rewritten; no caveats, no separate indexes or additional explanatory notes - just one 1-inch document.

Doesn't matter the content; the government has to justify that at the ballot box, but a more useful exercise long term would be to get successive governments to think how they raise their money and justify why special interest groups deserve tax breaks (in both sense of the word "break").

I wont hold my breath; might be cool to petition government to do this - would at least raise some interesting questions about tax in general.

The Whole #Yes2AV/#No2AV Debate In a Nutshell

Really, this is all any electoral arguement boils down to.

A lot has been said about the Alternate Voting system and no doubt more will be said in the near future; there are many pros and cons to changing the electoral system so that everyones votes' counted in a more effective way (not withstanding the fact that the type of people who vote for the Monster Raving Loony party or the Free-Banana party would effectively get multiple votes in AV, but lets not split hairs over this).

But really, when all the choice available to you boils down to a giant douche or a turd sandwich, then it really doesn't matter how you vote for them, but how you unvote for them; currently the only way this happens is if the MP in question:

• Goes to jail for a year or more.
• Resigns of his own accord.
• Dies.

So you catch them in the act of committing crime, you appeal to their conscience or sense of honour or you will them to keel over with all your might.

In no other job in the UK can you earn in excess of a quarter of a million pounds (topped up by a generous expense system and ridiculously long holiday period with no accountability other than a box ticking, glad-handing exercise once every 4-5 years, tickling the bellies of a few, dedicated but ultimately ill-informed and potentially delusional activists in their constituents, the remaining votes coming from people who see it as a tradition for vote for the giant douche or the turd sandwich party's their parents and their parent's parent's voted for, because, you know, "that's democracy an' that".

Our political masters are happy as larry that the only opinion you hold is who has the prettier rosette - arguement over policy never gets to more than the token strawman stage nor is discussing how your selected politico will achieve his aims ever called into question; if they say they will build a mountain of cheese to the moon to set up a space gun to kill martians invading from mars then the cost is not to be mentioned or considered - it just is something no doubt the other party will put a stop to.

No.

Truth is all we do with our current electoral democracy is abrogate responsibility for some pretty crucial aspects of our life: how we will fund our old age, how we will fund our education and that of our children or who we will contract with to take of us if we get sick/have an accident/lose our means of making money. The ones we palm this off to have royally screwed us all over and no AV system will change this.

Nothing short of a revolution in ideology, a veritable waking the f**k up from the comprehensive welfarism we inherited from the past will be enough.

Otherwise someone is going to get stuck holding the cheque for this debacle. People need to learn to be masters of their own destiny, again, and not mere appointees to either a giant douche or turd sandwich to rule over it.

Isn't This A Good Thing?

At the start of a three-part series on the future of the NHS, the Guardian commissioned Kieran Walshe, professor of health policy and management at Manchester Business School and an adviser to the Commons health select committee, to examine how GPs could profit from the reforms. His work shows GPs could more than double their average pay of £105,000 to £300,000 a year as a direct result of the reforms. At present fewer than 3% of GPs earn more than £200,000 – but Walshe suggests such salaries could become the norm.
...
According to Walshe, the most lucrative ventures would see GPs setting up private companies that would turn underspends in their annual budget – in effect, savings on patient spending – into profits. He calculates that individual GPs could net more than £140,000 a year in extra income by saving 5% in commissioning costs. Another £55,000 of income each would come from taking on the responsibility of managing their local population's needs.

So as long as the services they buy for their patients are cheaper than the associated NHS cost, assuming they shop around for it of course, and the government, the ones with the (our) money bags, are saving some money and splitting it with the successful GPs we, the patient, get:

- Cheaper services.
- Faster services.
- Greater control over how the money is spent (no commissars, no health tsars, just you and the GP you choose to use).

Who cares how much the GP earns? There pay will better reflect there ability to organise the individual healthcare needs of their patients, who are entitled to take themselves and their funding elsewhere; civic-minded GP consortia will no doubt set up non-profit groups to appeal directly to this subset of malcontents; followers of the politics of envy.

Personally I reckon an (unintended?) consequence of this will be to encourage preventative measures becoming more prevalent; in general preventative treatments - drugs, lifestyle changes, early identification - is cheaper and more effective than fixative measures - heart surgery, chemotherapy etc.

We shall see - In short I would rather have a medically trained individual I know well choose my providers than some civil disservant in the Department of Sickness.

Somethings Got To Give

Protesters warned of a fuel price ‘crisis’ last night after the cost of unleaded petrol hit £1.40 a litre – £6.37 a gallon.
Campaign group Fair Fuel UK said that the price charged at a BP garage in Kent was the highest so far in Britain.
The forecourt on the M2 near Rainham, Gillingham, was also selling a litre of diesel at £1.44 – about £6.55 a gallon.

This is a product of monetary inflation and the events in the Middle East.

Oh, as will no doubt be pointed out by the various useful leftist idiots, by Osbourne's Declining Rate Of State Sanctioned Theft Re-Appropriation Programme (DROSSTRAP as I'll now refer to it as in the future; in a nutshell taking more from us at a slower rate of increase).

However, I for one see that the DROSSTRAP's only problem comes down to the ideological diarrhoea epidemic at the core of the coalition; how they proselytise on personal freedom yet introduce more regulations than ever before, how they talk about rethinking what government should do then completely botch the so-called bonfire of the QuANGOs, the technocrats expanding such areas of proscription.

I have heard many figures as to the percentage cost as tax for petrol; the figures below are just one estimate taken from here.

Unleaded: 64%
Diesel: 62%
LPG: 63%

Or for ever pound you spend at the pump 62-64 pence finds it's way into the coffers of the state.

Or an effective tax rate of ~125%.

Hands up who think thats reasonable?

More Telling Than He Probably Realised

David Cameron has ruled out 'significant' tax cuts while the Government is cutting spending to reduce the deficit.
...
But Mr Cameron insisted there was no 'Plan B' on the coalition's deficit-reduction strategy and said tax cuts would only undo the work of painful curbs in public spending.

"Curbs" not cuts - the difference should be noted in his phrasing.

I happen to agree with Mr. Cameron; deficit reduction is now effectively a tax on our children and grandchildren - inter-generational state terrorism if you will - we should put the 11% overspending down; that should have been a non-negotiable start and done this year.

The Fabian left and Progressively Labourious would no doubt argue that a vast proportion of the present deficit was due to the bank bailout - and they would be right.

However, when state spending has reached an unjustifiable, nigh on 50% theft of total GDP slowly decoupling banking liabilities makes for a very useful start to cutting the overall tax take.

For a start.

On A Lighter But Still Important Note...

Aunty Beeb is reporting yet another group of malcontents moaning they won't be sucking at the government teat anymore:

More than two-thirds of councils in England are planning major cuts to their bus budgets, it is claimed.

According to the Campaign for Better Transport, which is launching the Save our Buses campaign, some councils intend to end all subsidised services.

The Local Government Association also warned many bus routes would disappear as a result of government cutbacks.

Unfortunately matey what we are seeing here is the realisation of risks and cost of living in isolated areas; the cost can no longer be mitigated against hard pressed groups in urban areas as they are already squeezed from elsewhere - the crunch has put paid to that idea.

Still, you might want to ask about the way bus services are regulated cross-country, or how councils dictate the route and timings in many cases, leading to skewed incentives; same thing goes for National(ised) Rail and train providers.

Deal with these problems of provision, freeing people up to plan the best routes possible and the timing they can afford and see this situation change; even in poor countries we see the markets finding solutions to these issues.

Prediction For Economic "Growth" In The Next Quarter: Someone Should Slap George Osbourne. Hard.

With the economy shrinking in the last quarter, and many Labourite apologists claiming this as a victory for #ukuncut and other bunkum, I felt obliged to try my hand at predicting the economic movements in the net quarter.

This downturn has, in my opinion, quite lazily been blamed on the horrific snow we had over Christmas, which, if so, Lays firmly at the door of the MET office; logic dictates that if the MET office couldn't find their arse with both hands today then how can they effectively predict it's location in 20-50 years time?

Judging from the continued support of this laughable woo-QuANGO by the big wigs in Whitehall I think that they don't even believe that is the full sort.

So, that said let's try my theory.

I work for a large company; in order for it to survive in the good times it's needs to plan effectively and release new products encouraging innovation and growth; new products are planned years in advance with a view to material ordering and customer needs, but with enough wiggle room to adapt to changes in demand and culture.

All good business, businesses that survive downturns, do this.

Now Georgie boy pre-announced the increase in VAT; a good thing (the announcement, that is) - as a result manufacturers thought "demand for our product will drop with rising prices, therefore we cut production, staff and sell up unnecessary capital", banks thought "lots of additional capital on the market; let's sell it to foreign nationals, then rinse our savers so we can get a bonus and retire to our portugese villa. Job done." whilst our politicians engage in a lot of mutual back slapping that they are saving public sector jobs and the EU project with our money.

However, companies would have encoded the VAT rise into their calculations months before; more than likely before even George knew about it- the result? Fewer goods produced locally, fewer jobs, exports and thus a drop in the growth of the economy.

Thus as this has been encoded into good businesses plans now my prediction is that growth will continue to be negative until it bottoms out to meet internal and external demand; in all likelihood the next time this will be a 1% contraction rather than 0.5 (if were lucky.

This is not a call for faux-Keynesian pump-priming of the economy - if anything it prove what geniuses, or as most people will choose to remember them, a devious shit Gordon Brown and Ed Balls truly were was; his strategy of QE and bank bailouts pumped money into the economy when it was in free fall just in time to see Labour coast to a mild loss at the 2010 General Election and put a damp squib on the Tory's already touchy-feely squibishness and chances at a stable Bory-only majority, all in time for the other big two in their happy clappy coalition to reap the rewards of the dead cat bounce.

No if anything it is a call for Osbourne to lead where Euroslime Dave is sore to follow; bringing about real reform to the public sector starting with drawing a line in where it is stable, and currently at over 50% of the economy, stable it aint.

Best economic advice you could give George if you see him in the street? A cold hard slap, telling him to set departmental budget rather than let the cabinet fanny around with them to electoral oblivion.

Theft Is Not A Source Of Income

Danny Alexander: "Might as well leave your wallet on the table and piss off, prole."

Yet again we have our assumed lords and masters getting this accountability thing all mixed up again:

Families were warned last night there was little prospect of a lifeline on fuel prices – despite repeated pledges from David Cameron.
Treasury Chief Secretary Danny Alexander said his department would not ‘sacrifice income willy nilly’ to help out motorists.

Words really do fail me they do; "sacrifice income"? WTF did you do to deserve it?

He did reveal, however, that the Treasury was pushing ahead with a pilot scheme to offer discounted fuel to rural communities in the Scottish Highlands, which could extend to his own constituency of Inverness.

So yes we are all about to be nipple-twisted till they're blue, just as long as those mp's with their mitts closest to the till (or should that be swag bag?) swipe a little extra for their own vested jockanese interests.

The Liberal Democrat minister said: ‘The biggest economic problem facing every household is the deficit. If we come off that deficit reduction plan, the risk to the country would be truly huge, so that has to be the first priority.’

This governments predilection for scapegoats is no less hungry than the previous ones; it us very easy to blame New Labour for the deficit but let's review:

• Does Osbourne's plan see a reduction in public spending? What? Spending increases over this parliament? Moving on-

• Did Cameron, or any other Bory leader for that matter, mount a credible offence against these insane spending sprees in opposition? What? They said they'd match Labour's spending? so no then.

None of the big three parties offered any credible alternative to Labour's spending spree; tapering off the deficit over several years is the equivalent of skinning a man with a potato peeler; better just to cut the damn limb off ad cauterise the wound.

His comments came as Energy Secretary Chris Huhne acknowledged that rising fuel prices could ‘potentially have devastating effects on employment’ – but said fuel duty should be kept high in the long term for environmental reasons.

So when there not responsible for drowning people, destroying their homes & livestock, they are intent on taking extortionate amounts of money with menaces from us in homage to the widely discredited green religion.

Let me be frank: Dave and his merry band of political thieves are stealing your money; if they are not keeping interest rates intentionally low resulting in a transfer of wealth from savers to bankers bonuses and spenders they are dallying around real issues which are quickly destroying their credibility dealing with making life easier (preferably by pissing off out of ours).

Tax should be a means of accounting for negative externalities; if polluting the air from burning fossil fuels is bad then yes charge us, but can you honestly say this externality accounts for 60% of the price?

I can even, grudgingly, accept budget deficit costs being internalized; I'd like that to happen so our generation pays for it's mistakes, then we could see Red Milliband try to weasel out of that and explain why it should be our children.

Actually yeah - I want that tax emblazoned on everyones pay slip monthly in luminous yellow script just to drill the point home.

Just stop taking money for no better reason than because it's a good source of revenue; we don't expect that rationale to apply to burglars and thieves when they get put in prison.

Banker Bonuses: The Wrong Trousers

This arguement & incessant moaning is really getting to me now; am I alone?

Bob Diamond is right - bonuses should be paid and he shouldn't have to argue the toss with MPs who's major concern is pleasing a few bulgar wheat eating sandalistas rather than addressing the real issues surrounding the crash.

But, were it not for The BoE's and New Labour's and now the New Coalitions policy of keeping interest rates at near-zero banks would almost certainly have not been nearly as profitable and wouldn't warrant the bonuses received (BTW: the blog for the linked article will be added to my list soon as I sit down at a computer; would recommend to all having found it yesterday.)

So were it not for Brown jumping the balloon maker, most Banker would now be signing on, not coining in - and the blame rests firmly at the door of our lords and masters at Whitehall.