Shit (not to mention pointless and unworkable) ideas of the week

From The Evening Standard:

The influential Institute For Public Policy Research said Mr Khan and other mayors should be put in charge of chairing health and care management bodies and be given tax-raising powers, as in New York, that could include “sin taxes” on sugar, fats and cigarettes.

Ahem, won't Londoners just do "booze cruises" out to the Home Counties?

From the BBC:

Stamp duty should be a tax on property sellers, rather than buyers, to help those trying to buy their first home, a major UK building society has said.

As OnTheOtherHand said when emailed me the link...

... imagine the simultaneous conversation that couples A, B, and C all bidding for the same house in London have after the law is changed:

"Now that the seller is paying £13,171 stamp duty, let's take that money we deposited with the conveyancing solicitor to pay the duty on our behalf, and bid £13,171 more for the property to beat the other couples..."

From The Guardian:

So when Bill Gates pitched into the debate last week with a proposal that robots should be taxed, just like human workers are, you can imagine the splutters of outrage from the neoliberal fortresses of Silicon Valley.*

“Right now,” he said, “the human worker who does, say, $50,000 worth of work in a factory, that income is taxed and you get income tax, social security tax, all those things. If a robot comes in to do the same thing, you’d think that we’d tax the robot at a similar level.”

And the money raised should be used to retrain people the robots have replaced, with “communities where this has a particularly big impact” first in line for support. I never thought I’d write this, but here goes: good for you, Mr Gates.

* Wanker. People working for the "neo-liberal fortresses in Silicon Valley" are already paying a super-tax i.e. the very high rents they have to pay to be able to live within commuting distance of a well-paying job.

To be fair, the rest of that article was a bit more nuanced that the knee-jerk Luddite "tax robots" meme that has been doing the rounds recently and which I intended to take the piss out of.

Gates actually said "you'd think we'd tax the robot at a similar level [to the worker]", which is nothing more than saying that corporate profits (from the automation) and wages (from not automating) should be taxed at the same level, rather than taxing wages at double the rate of corporate profits, which is of course a good idea for many other reasons.

No idea what the "retraining" nonsense is all about, pay people welfare while they're unemployed and pray that new businesses grow and develop and take them on is all you can do.

FakeCharity and Quango Festival

If you'd like the opportunity to see the following speakers:

Martin Narey, Chief Executive, Barnardo's
Ivana La Valle, Director of Research, Evidence and Evaluation, National Children's Bureau
Yvonne Roberts, Senior Associate, the Young Foundation
Simon Antrobus, Chief Executive, Addaction
Debbie Scott, Chief Executive, Tomorrow's People
Kathy Evans, Director of Policy, Children England
Liz Railton CBE, Director of National Programmes, Serco Education and Children's Services
Cllr Brian Connell, Cabinet Member for Economic Development and Family Policy, Westminister City Council
Hugh Thornbery, Strategic Director of Children's Services England North, Action for Children Lisa Harker, Co-Director, ippr (Chair)

... and to rub shoulders with these sorts of people:

Regeneration officers
Senior management: heads and directors of services
Social services: adult, children, education, family and mental health services
Voluntary sector organisations involved in the whole family agenda - children’s charities, homeless and substance misuse fields
Parenting and family support organisations
Youth Justice Board and Youth Offending Teams
Drug and alcohol support services
Probation and ex-offender officers and managers
Children’s centre practitioners
Civil servants and policymakers
Clinical psychologists
Connexions partnerships
Primary Care Trust / Mental Health Trust representatives
Regional Development Agencies
Trades unions
Education sector
Employment service providers
Academics and think tanks
Adult learning and skills providers
Media,

... then sign up to this shindig hosted by the Institute For Public Policy Research. Don't forget to take some plastic cutlery with you to prevent serious injury should you be overcome by the urge to stab someone (or indeed to stab yourself).

FakeCharity, FakeStatistics

There was a news item on Radio 4 this morning, saying that 'children's charity' Action For Children had asked a few people whether they thought there was more child neglect than a year ago. A majority replied 'Yes', which AFC took as solid evidence that they need more cash. That three-minute advert on Channel 4 yesterday (which was as dull as ditchwater) must hve cost them a pretty penny, for example.

That's the fakestatistics, here are a few numbers from their 2008 accounts:

Total income (page 48) £209,568,000, of which £189,107,000 is from 'Charitable activities', with the largest income stream being 'Early years and family support' at £85,045,000. The notes don't go into further detail, but what it means is that local councils subcontract some social work to them, as explained in their 'objectives' on page 22:

Working to ensure we recover the true cost of services on our Children's Services contracts with local authorities. This is what we achieved: we significantly improved the viability of our contracted services and achieved a position close to sustainable cost recovery (other than in Scotland and Wales, where national policy caps our ability to recover full costs slightly below the actual cost). This continues to be a challenge as we strive to deliver the some levels of quality across the UK

Before you start feeling too sorry for them, the charity had also built up a nice cushion of £53,126,000 in investments, just to tide them over (page 59).