I have, for example, no idea how or when politicians get time to think because their schedules are always too packed for them to ever have the chance to do so. That’s good explanation for why they are so event obsessed and so often way behind where the public are on issues of importance.
That from the man who wants the unthinking to have ever more power over our lives.
Donald Trump announces Sean Spicer as his new press secretary
Spain’s Socialist party may have lost two general elections in the space of six months, ousted their leader and found themselves eclipsed by the anti-austerity Podemos party, but the past 12 months have not been without at least one small victory.
On Thursday, the Spanish Socialist party (PSOE) announced that staff at its Madrid headquarters had won a share of the country’s €2.3bn (£1.96bn) Christmas lottery, El Gordo (the Fat One).
Stalin’s grandson, who blasted Vladimir Putin as ‘brainless’ while defending his own murderous grandfather has been found dead in a Moscow street.
Yevgeny Dzhugashvili, 80, son of the tyrant’s eldest child Yakov, was found close to his Moscow home.
Lawyer who was thrown off JetBlue flight for accosting and screaming at Ivanka Trump flees the airport
And that’s an adult, someone who has actually finished college…..
Labour have accused the Treasury of failing to fully tackle tax avoidance as it claimed to have identified a £2.6bn black hole created by downgraded revenue forecasts.
John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, said that information buried in the small print of last month’s Office for Budget Responsibility report showed that three tax avoidance measures were now expected to raise significantly less than when they were first announced.
Which is that there’s less tax avoidance going on than some think….
Appearing on the Kremlin-funded channel last month, Mr Hedley said: “It’s very clear in our rule book, we’re in an antagonistic relationship with the managers and with the bosses. We want to overthrow capitalism and create a socialist form of society.”
The lack of historical awareness is just astonishing.
And consider the different reaction to someone saying that that Benito had the right idea….hmm, actually, that’s Spud isn’t it?
The Berlin attack proves Tunisia, the single success of the Arab Spring, is yet to overcome its past
RORY MCCARTHY
There was a murder in Britain last week. This does not show that the country has yet to overcome colonialism.
Some of the failings found at MSI have no implications for safety. The batch signing of abortion forms, for example, has no clinical significance – it is simply a legal requirement that all women have their abortion request legally authorised by two doctors.
Flagrant breach of the law isn’t a problem.
The sum total of these facts leads to a very troubling conclusion.
President-elect Donald Trump is a traitor.
Very special little snowflakes.
Spud notes the Telegraph stating that there’s a magic money tree:
The well repeated line that “there is no such thing as a magic money tree” is heard almost everywhere. Even Prime Minister David Cameron has uttered this phrase.
But it’s completely untrue. If the will exists, the central bank can issue unlimited amounts of currency.
And then goes on to note that:
So why the continuing lie about the magic money tree? There is only one possible explanation. That is that its use to fund investment to meet real need, like housing, or to boost productivity by investing in infrastructure and so promote earnings growth, or to boost our green future and so provide hope,
Yes! Spud insists that the magic money tree should have been spent on real assets!
That is, he entirely misses the next couple of lines of the Telegraph piece:
So when people say there’s no such thing as a “magic money tree”, it would be far more accurate to say that there is no such thing as a “magic resources tree” or a “magic value tree”.
There certainly aren’t enough resources in existence to satisfy every demand for them. This is the problem of scarcity, and addressing it is the key thing that economics sets out to answer.
But that’s what Murph is insisting there is, a magic resources tree.
A new economic policy which says that:
More is not always better
Enough can be sufficient
People, and the quality of their lives, matter more than things
Education is of value for its own sake
Money is our servant
Having the time to be is the greatest goal of humanity
Most of our current economy is designed to stop us getting to that goal.
Hmm. Except for that last – where the truth is that our modern economy is the most efficient method anyone’s ever found to get us to that penultimate line – these are all things in standard neoclassical and even neoliberal economics. Which makes me wonder why he’s so dead set against those two. Presumably it’s because he simply does not realise that all of those are already incorporated.
Things can indeed have negative marginal utility. That first litre of water a day has a very high marginal utility, most of us like being able to use a few hundred gallons a day and none of us wants 5,000 gallons flooding the basement. We all satisfact meaning that we do agree that enough can be sufficient, quite right people matter, we’re the only people here. If you value education for itself then good luck to you, amenity, value and utility are, by definition, personal things. Money is indeed a servant, it’s just a better one than barter and it’s really not at all an odd observation that as people get richer they take more of that wealth as leisure.
It really does seem that he’s just ignorant of what the subject he wants to critique already says.
A growing group of artists is hitting back against Ivanka Trump, with some even demanding the president-elect’s daughter take their work down off her walls.
Buckley said India’s “absolutely transformational” forecast was also driven by technological advancements that have led to the price of solar energy falling by 80% in the past five years.
We never did need to change the structure of our economy. We just needed to make non-fossil fuel generation cheap. Since we’ve done so, we’re done.
3) as things stand, and applying the reasoning of the Employment Tribunal decision, Uber seems to be making VATable supplies to passengers of transportation services. And those services are standard rated. In practice, this means that, of every £100 charged to an Uber customer, Uber would have a so-called ‘output’ tax liability of £16.67 (being the VAT on such sum net of VAT as, when VAT is added, gives you £100). And it would need to hand that sum over – less any ‘input’ tax – to HMRC;
OK, seems reasonable. Easy test – does Addison Lee pay VAT?
But then there’s this:
(4) output tax is the VAT you charge your customers. And input tax is the tax you are charged by your suppliers. It’s the difference – the tax on the value that you add – that you hand over to HMRC. But does Uber have any input tax? Your employees don’t charge you input tax. Uber might have some external costs on which VAT has been charged – but not many. On the assumption (see (1) and (2) above) that the VAT reality of Uber’s business is that it is engaging drivers and supplying transport services to passengers, the vast majority of its expenditure will be the money it pays to drivers. But (with perhaps a tiny number of exceptions) drivers don’t charge Uber VAT on their fares. Indeed, they are incentivised to earn less than the VAT registration threshold. If they earned more, they would have to hand over 16.67% of their profits to HMRC in VAT;
Err, no. If it is, as a whole, a Vatable supply then as soon as a driver goes above the registration threshold then they must charge it to Uber. It doesn’t come from their “profits”, which is their labour income anyway.
Aren’t we lucky to have a system where a journalist needs to explain this to a tax QC.
Labour productivity isn’t rising very much. Training budgets appear to be falling. So, the Spud tells us:
If you want an explanation for the first graph it’s in the second. We just don’t invest enough in people in this country.
Hmm, perhaps we could devise a solution? What if we reduced the taxation of returns to capital so that people invested more capital so as to raise labour productivity?
But then Spud is the one calling for a 23 percentage point rise in the taxation of returns to capital (NIC on investment income) isn’t he?
So the Graun needs to do less pratting around breathlessly with leaks; stop writing lies like Though there is nothing untoward about this directorship, it has not been reported before; and instead hire some competent journalists who, whilst not actually sourcing their stories to wikipedia, are at least capable of doing basic research, unlike idiots like “Luke Harding and Hannes Munzinger”.
Diane James says leading Ukip was like banging head against brick wall
The Guardian – 57 minutes ago
Diane James now sits in the European parliament as an independent MEP. Photograph: Chris Radburn/PA. Rowena Mason Deputy political editor.Diane James: Why I quit as UKIP leader after 18 daysBBC News
Former Ukip leader Diane James reveals story behind awkward kiss with Nigel Farage Evening Standard
That’s from the entertainment section mind you.
The murder of notorious criminal John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer, who knew the secrets of the Hatton Garden gang, is still baffling police who say there are 16,000 potential suspects.
Islamist terrorist fanatics and the west’s ascendant populist right are now working in tandem. They are feeding off each other. They are interdependent. Their fortunes rise with each other.
More than a bit of projection there, no? Owen seems to be recalling that old revolutionaries’ insistence that the worse capitalism got then the closer the revolt against it. So, let’s make it worse….