From The Torygraph article: Under Government-backed plans to restart the housing market, councils would sell £2 billion-worth of mortgages to tens of thousands of people hit hardest by the credit crisis.
Erm, what about potential first time buyers - they've been kept off the ladder by rampant house price inflation, and now that there are signs that prices are returning to their long run average (i.e. about half where they were last year), they're going to be slapped with higher council tax bills* in order to keep house prices higher then they otherwise would be?
In any event, the whole thing is, best case, absolutely circular: Higher Council Tax tends to push house prices down and cheap loans tend to push prices up. It's almost as mad as calling for a windfall tax on North Sea companies and giving people fuel vouchers ... oh, I see.
See also:
HousePriceCrash: This should not be happening.
Tim W: Council Mortgages.
Harry Haddock:"Government to nationalise housing market, but only the shit unprofitable parts"
* Agreed, in the long run, higher council tax will depress rents, as a tenant's total housing budget is shared between the two.
Thursday, 21 August 2008
"Home loans by town halls could push up council tax"
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5 comments:
It's one of the most insane things I've ever seen from this government.
And that's saying alot!
How many estate agents have been lobbying for this, the way that they got the hots for HIPs when they thought it was to their advantage?
....
Oh, btw, the recyclers came today. This time they took everything but the metal. I put out tempting rubbish for them; nicely shredded paper and green waste in a special sack, a magic bag of squashed bottles, a thick newspaper sandwich, a salad of cool green glass and glittering shoal of squashed beer cans in a net. They sniff the buffet and pick what they want to eat, chucking the rest back on the pavement. It's worse than squirrels. If I track them back to their natural habitat I might be able to crack the key to their patterns of behaviour.
WOAR, what did they chuck back on the pavement?
You have to split your raw materials into their most basic constituents to establish whether e.g. they rejected the tasty newspaper sandwich because it is tainted with those awful crunchy staples; or whether maybe they rejected the valuable waste steel in the staples because it was wrapped in newsprint with negligible nutritional value.
They didn't like the metal - mostly Tetley's tins. Maybe they just disapprove of our drinking habits.
You have to be careful about your recycling here. Once, I only had a single wine bottle because the rest had gone to the recycling station at the weekend. Rather than leave the lonely bottle at the end of our path, I slipped it in with next door's what I must say was an impressive pile of bottles, considering it's only the two of them. Looking out of the kitchen window I saw the neighbours go past their recycling and angryily start pulling it out and saying 'Who's put their frightful bottle of antifreeze in with our chateau neuf du pape? Who would do such a thing - what will the recyclers think. As if we'd drink that'.
It's just possible the Tetley's cans don't meet the required social standing. Maybe Adnams would?
WOAR you are making a fundamental recycling mistake here. Your modern highly educated Bi-organic Industry Nurturers or BIN men for short, take waste based on chemical formula.
Otherwise its pointless sorting it.
So always put your Polyvinyl Chloride with your Polytetrafuoroethylene and keep your Polyamide from your Isoprene.
Hope that helps.
Oh, and only put out Acrylonitrile-butadiene-styrene on every second Wednesday. You don't want to get a fine.
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