Messrs Ten Per Cent

Dave don't got no clue (2)

According to today's Metro (article not available online), Dave The Chameleon has surpassed himself in the f***wittery stakes:

"All homes should have meters which measure how much electricity they are using, he said. Similar systems worked well in countries such as Germany and Holland, the Tory leader added"

Jumping H F***! Doesn't he know that we already have electricity meters?! And he wants to be Prime Minister?

Devious, conniving shits (1)

A few days ago, we were talking about important things, like whether we should have a referendum on the EU Constitution/Reform Treaty (as voted for by MPs in early 2005), a valuable first step towards the inevitable break-up of the EU, for which read, 31,000 corrupt, self-serving self-appointed civil servants* in Brussels trying to run every last facet of the lives of nearly five hundred million people, on behalf of various industry-funded lobby groups, with blatant disregard to The Law Of Unintended Consequences**.

Now, the UK political class*** has diverted attention to the relatively trivial question of whether the Inheritance Tax nil rate band should be £1 million per individual estate or £600,000 per couple's estate****; and whether non-dom's should pay a flat £25,000 or a flat £30,000 per year in tax.

Can we, er, get back to what we were talking about before you started calling each other phoney, you devious, conniving shits?

* Plus ten times as many funded by their largesse in the 'Member States'. £1.9 million for 'Chalk and Cheese' in the South West? The words 'fuck' and 'off' spring to mind, in exactly that order.

** Hat tip, The Purple Scorpion

*** You can tell them apart by their matching dark-blue suits, white shirts, pale-blue ties, parting on the left and chopping hand gestures.

**** Neither. Inheritance Tax should be scrapped completely and rolled into Land Value Tax.

Dave still don't got no clue

I watched a bit more of his speech last night, and frankly I was appalled.

The phrase "we will give people more power over their own lives" makes me sick. The f***ing government shouldn't have taken it away in the first place. Why do these weasels have so much power over us in the first place?

I'm waiting for a politician to stand up and reel of a long list of laws that he or she will repeal. Starting off with smoking ban, hunting ban, EC Act 1972, Human Rights Act 1998 and so on. And whatever laws there are that make drugs or certain aspects of prostitution illegal. And suggesting some modifications to the Highway Code, like scrapping traffic lights and scrapping speed limit on motorways, while bringing it down to 20mph for residential areas*.

A politician who ain't prepared to do all this is not one who wants to give us "power over our own lives".

* Apart from violent crime and theft and so on, the only thing that ought to be illegal is people playing loud music in their homes or in their cars. I bloody hate that.

Tories still haven't got a clue

According to this evening's London Lite, the Tories are going to allow non-working spouses to transfer their personal allowance to working spouse to save up to £1,000 tax a year.

Well whoopi-f***ing-doo!

It was the Tories who got rid of joint taxation about twenty years ago, that was a terrible thing to do. So they can start off by apologising for that.

And, as I have gone to great lengths to explain, as a result of the way our tax/welfare/tax credits system works, a couple with children can boost its benefits income by £9,000 or £11,000 a year by pretending to live apart.

Further, an unemployed single woman improves her net weekly income after housing costs by £67 for the first baby and another £49 for the second. This compares with an extra £20 and an extra £4 for a single-earner couple, where the working partner is on an average wage.

So this is a nice gesture, but absolutely meaningless in the grander scheme of things*.

The only thing that will sort this out is a Citizen's Income/flat tax system (for political reasons I'd give people a choice between claiming the Citizen's income or having a much higher personal allowance, but that's just fine-tuning). If we moved to that system (which is broadly fiscally neutral), a single-earner couple with one partner on an average salary and two children would be about £6,000 a year better off.

* Even more ironic, this will have to be paid for by increasing taxes elsewhere. But as single, unemployed parents, the real villains of the piece, don't pay tax, the people who will have to pay for this are single working parents and people without children, so this is totally unfair and misses the point.

** It's on the BBC website now. I like the idea of front-loading child benefit - did they lift this from my Bow Group report, Proposal 6? The other suggestions are pretty crap though.

One more reason to hate Dave

Dave is reported as saying that "Action to reduce the pay gap between men and women is a 'vital part' of this family agenda" in today's FT.

Dave, you complete idiot, a few facts of life:
1. The last thing businesses need is more 'action' i.e. regulation and inspection.
2. This equal pay stuff is more of less unenforceable.
3. The main driver for lower pay for women is because they take a few years off to have children. Women who never have children earn roughly the same as men.
4. This could be sorted out very easily by increasing child benefit (non-contributory, non-taxable, non-means tested) to £30 or £40 per child per week (and scrapping all the tax credit nonsense), payable directly to the mother* which would make a mother's net disposable income much the same as a man's.
5. Finally, and this is the killer logic that the Oxford-educated twat overlooks, if you forcibly increase women's pay, you'd have to drive men's down. So my wife would win and I would lose. But as we basically share all income and expenses, it'd make bugger all difference to us (as a married couple). The people who would benefit most would be working unmarried mothers. So actually this equal-pay doolally discourages marriage/cohabitation**. And I thought the Tories were 'pro-marriage'? At least they should be.

Dave, I am starting to really despise you for the vacuous knob that you are!

*Which all ties in neatly with the Citizen's Income approach to welfare reform.

** An even more hard-hearted argument is that if women earn a lot less than men, they are less likely to want to be single mothers, but a married woman is more likely to have children, because the fall in household income is not so big. But let's not go there.

"Cameron hits out over bank crisis"

"Flails arms petulantly and stamps foot on ground" more like.

Take a note of this Dave:

1 - NuLab are overspending massively, but apart from the fact that they don't include future public sector pension liabilities in official government net debt, I am afraid to say, that the official debt-to-GDP ratio is lower than ten years ago, altho' it is rising again*. I wish they'd wasted less and paid off more debts, but there you go.

2. - There is no particular correlation between government borrowing and private borrowing. If anything, you'd expect there to a negative correlation - if government borrows, then it pushes up interest rates, so you'd expect there to be less private borrowing. In any event, what does government borrowing have to do with the Northern Rock collapse?

3 - Yes, there has been a massive expansion of private debt. That's called a credit bubble. And, what's the other half of a credit bubble? An asset price bubbble. And which assets are we talking about? Residential properties. As soon as credit tightens a bit, then *pop*, there's your house-price crash. Are you, as Tory leader brave enough to point out that everybody's house if massively overvalued? Nope, I thought not.

What do they teach them on the Politics, Philosophy & Economics degrees nowadays?

What do they teach them at Eton, for that matter?

*The official figure for government debt is £600 bn-odd. The true figure for government debt would include a further few billion for PFI stuff, and approx. £1,000 billion for unfunded public sector pension liabilities, so it would be two-and-a-half times the official figure, but I do not know what the corresponding adjustments would be to the official figure of ten years ago.