That'll save their bacon.

From The Daily Mail:

Denmark is considering a tax on red meat over fears cattle flatulence was causing climate change.

A government think tank said consumers were 'ethically obliged' to change their eating habits in a bid to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The Danish Council of Ethics said cattle accounted for around 10 per cent of the CO2 released into the atmosphere, while food production makes up around another 20 per cent.

Ho hum, the article only mentions cattle and not pigs.

As we well know (having quickly Googled it), Danish pig farmers export nearly half their output, with a value of DKK 30 billion a year (about £3 billion), so this will knock back domestic demand for "red meat" (presumably more likely to be imported) and hence boost domestic demand for pork and bacon.

Win-win for Danish pig farmers!

Short List

Towns in England and Denmark with similar sounding names.

To kick things off: (East) Grinstead and Grindsted

Are Our Maps Upside Down?

I was watching a generic History of Britain - Viking Era documentary recently and one of the throw away lines was that the Norman Invasion changed Britain's orientation from North towards Scandinavia to South towards France.

For various strategic reasons the orientation has stayed that way for a very long time. But Britain, and more so in the best parts (i.e. the stabby northern parts from whence I hail), is not really like France and Spain towards which it is pointed on most maps. Britain is a lot more like the Netherlands (the last successful invader I guess) Germany (the last successful dynastic transplant) and Scandinavia.  

And if you turn the map upside down, the fit seems much more natural, with France and pensioner depository Spain much further away than as are consciously considered. 

I am not suggesting that a guerrilla army be formed to storm every school and turn around maps (hmmm, or am I?). But it is an interesting thought as to how something mundane and arbitrary can shape our perception of the world.

"Four Lions"

From Wiki and The Guardian:

Four Lions (2014) is a British dark comedy film following two lions and their two cubs from Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England. The lions become radicalised and hatch a plot to carry out suicide bombings at a zoo in Copenhagen.

They are Omar (Riz Ahmed), who is deeply critical of Western society and imperialism; his dim-witted friend, Waj (Kayvan Novak); Barry (Nigel Lindsay), a bad-tempered and extremely rash convert to Islam; and the naive Faisal (Adeel Akhtar), who just likes eating freshly slaughtered giraffes.

The lions successfully infiltrate the lion enclosure and Barry recruits a reluctant fifth lion, Hassan (Arsher Ali). Unfortunately for them, their plans are thwarted when the Danish zoo kills them all to make way for Hassan:

"Because of the pride of lions' natural structure and behaviour, the zoo has had to euthanise the two old lions and two young lions who were not old enough to fend for themselves," Copenhagen zoo said.

"The two youngest lions would have been killed by the new male lion Hassan as soon as he got the chance."

"Tax it" is always the answer and a sure fire cure ....

Parents are warned to steer clear of sugar-filled 'healthy' drinks

Parents' efforts on healthy eating 'undermined' by marketing campaigns and lack of government interest

Read Alex Renton's report on sugary drinks

A special in today’s Observer, with Alex contributing an article as well as his report.

"But the campaign group Sustain, which leads a consortium of organisations campaigning for legislative action on children and sugar, told the Observer that the government had shown no interest. The Treasury refused to comment on Sustain's January report, which set out the case for taxation of added sugar in food and drink, while the Department of Health merely referred its copy on to the Treasury, saying the issue was "not within its remit".

"Parents' best efforts to encourage their families to eat healthily are undermined by cynical multimillion-pound marketing strategies that present sugary drinks as fun and fashionable," said Sustain campaigns director Charlie Powell. "As government chooses to ignore the science that clearly classifies sugar as toxic, it's no surprise that public health policies fail to protect children."

“Some 67 health charities, medical royal colleges and public health bodies are asking the government to consider a health tax on sugary drinks, along the lines of those already successfully introduced in France and four other European countries”.

This “health” aka “sugar tax” is to combat the “diabesity epidemic”, and as Alex points out such a tax has been “successfully introduced in France and four other European countries”.  No mention of the Danish experience though, for some reason …

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (301)

UK Liberty at Liberal Conpsiracy, rebuts the baseless claim that there would be endless appeals and/or that [relative] valuations are impossible thusly:

On valuations, some figures from Denmark, where they have LVT, property tax, and service tax:

5m inhabitants
43k sq km
1.9m properties
valuation staff:
Central office - 16
8 regional offices - 150 total
7 regional appeal boards - 20 total
7 appeal secretariats - 25 total
= 210 staff

appeals of 2002 valuation:
39k appeals or 2.05%
6k to regional board or 0.31%
310 to national board or 0.02%
10 to court system (can only do this on questions of law)
- Development of Danish Land Valuation PPT

See also Property Valuation and Taxation in Denmark
http://ida.dk/sites/ddl/Documents/08_valuation_and_taxation.pdf
-----------------------------
Or, closer to home, the UK has Business Rates, which is a lot like LVT but the valuations are more complicated because they take the bricks and mortar into account and Council Tax, which is/was a fairly crude banding exercise. :

The work of the VOA encompasses:

• compiling and maintaining lists of rateable values of the 1.7 million non-domestic properties in England, and the 100,000 in Wales, to support the collection of around £25 billion in business rates; [that's an average Business Rates bill of £14,000]

• compiling and maintaining the lists of council tax bandings of some 23 million domestic properties in England and 1.3 million in Wales, to support the collection of around £26 billion in council tax;

According to page 66 of their Annual Report 2011-12, they have just under 3,000 employees keeping all those valuations up to date.

Under proper LVT, valuations for commercial land and buildings would be a lot simpler but valuations of residential would have to be a bit more sophisticated because there would be more bands (at least twenty or thirty), broadly speaking the workload wouldn't change much (it can all be computerised, everything can be indexed up from year to year, and so on).

The VOA's total running costs including salaries, IT and so on are about £200 million a year, i.e. 0.4% of tax collected; and only about two or three per cent of Business Rates and Council Tax go uncollected. That's not absolutely brilliant, but far, far better than for any other taxes (collection costs approx. 1% and evaded and unpaid taxes about 10%).

The Valuations Tribunal deals with appeals against Business Rates and Council Tax valuations. There were 180,000 appeals against Business Rates valuations in 2011-12 (that's one-in-ten valuations, but three-quarters were agreed within the year) and 2,040 appeals against Council Tax bandings (that's one-in-twelve thousand bandings), see page 7 of their Annual Report 2011-12. The Tribunal employs about 80 people.

Well duh

From The Guardian 2 July 2010:

The evaluation concludes that, since the law [which makes it a criminal offence to pay for sex in Sweden] came in to force in 1999, the number of women involved in street prostitution has halved, whereas neighbouring countries such as Denmark and Norway have seen a sharp rise...

From The Daily Mail 12 November 2012:

Denmark is scrapping its tax on foods that are high in saturated fat after it emerged people were travelling across the border to Germany in search of unhealthy snacks for less.

Home-Owner-Ism in Denmark

Spotted by Kj at bt.dk (this is a Google translation so may be a bit ropey):

A pruning of the interest deduction may be part of the government's tax reform presented Tuesday. Mortgage Association is open to cutting the mortgage interest deduction.

Homeowners are likely to have reduced their interest deductions when the government on Tuesday presented its long-awaited tax reform. A lowering of the interest deduction in play in SRSF the Government's proposal, learn Berlingske.

However, only with effect from after 2015. At first impair the value of the interest deduction to the time avoids the government to break its promise from the government program to 'the government will keep residential taxes and mortgage interest deduction at rest in the current parliamentary term'. And when the term expires by 2015, hoping SRSF so that it is less vulnerable to criticism about broken promises.

Already it is a fact that the tax value of the interest deduction is lowered gradually from 33 per cent. to 25 per cent. in the period up to 2019 for amounts exceeding DKK 100,000 in interest expense for married couples and 50,000 for singles. It was one of the elements from the previous Liberal government's tax reform in 2009, which annually brings more than four billion.

And from the blue corner: "We oppose any measures which will cost homeowners money," said Liberal Party (the main opposition party) tax spokesman Torsten Schack Pedersen.

????

Whatever the maths are, if you scrap the interest deduction that increases the tax base, so to collect the same revenues, the headline rates can be reduced by a few percent, it can't take more than five minutes to work out the impact if you have the data to hand.

The people who would benefit from this are proper home owners (i.e. those with small or no mortgages) and people who intend to buy a home in the near future (as well as tenants, of course) as they'd all pay less tax. All things being equal, house prices would come down if the interest deduction were scrapped, but would also go up slightly if income tax rates were reduced, the net impact is hard to judge.

So on the face of it, the short term losers are those with large mortgages, and in the medium and long term, the biggest losers would be the banks (who siphon off half the subsidy via higher lending volumes). Overall, its quite possible that owner-occupation rates increase, so this measure is about as far from being an 'attack on homeownership' as you can get.

OECD, IMF on top form

From International Business Journal:

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development released a report on Tuesday calling on Germany to raise its property taxes dramatically and reduce taxes on labor. The group, whose membership is made up of 34 of the world's leading market economies, also made similar recommendations for Denmark, Norway and the UK over the past month.

For Germany, the organization recommended tripling its property taxes, while reducing its wage taxes and social security contributions, which currently make up 64 percent of total tax revenue, compared with the OECD average of 52 percent, according to the German language Immobilien Zeitung. Property taxes, meanwhile, amount to only 1 percent of total revenue collected, against an OECD average of 3 percent*. The group also called on Germany to reform its assessment mechanisms, as many properties are valued far below their true market worth...

The International Monetary Fund also made a similar recommendation to Norway this month...

The OECD has been a strong proponent recently of land value taxes, which date back to Adam Smith but were most vigorously promoted by 19th century economist Henry George. He promoted a land value tax—which is assessed on the unimproved value of underlying land, not penalizing intensive development like many property taxes today—as a replacement for all tariffs and levies, however the OECD has settled on a more moderate position, instead advocating a shift in emphasis away from other taxes and towards the land value tax.

Land value taxes can be tricky because of practical difficulties in estimating a plot's value, especially if it is a unique piece of land, or if land parcels like it do not change hands very often. Newer computer-assisted methods of land appraisal have made this job easier, though, and many countries around the world have adopted the tax.

The responses..?

The two groups' advice, however, was rebuffed by Norway's minister of finance, Sigbjorn Johnsen, who said at the press conference on Wednesday: "I have no plans to increase housing taxes."**

Denmark was subject to the same advice last month, with the Nordic Labour Journal reporting that the OECD advised the country to cut income taxes and increase property taxes. The Danish government plans to incorporate some of the OECD's recommendations into its 2012 tax reform, but a property tax hike will not be on the table. As the NLJ writes, "[t]his is because property taxes were ring-fenced in the coalition agreement covering this parliamentary term."

* In the UK, we have a quasi-Land Value Tax on commercial land and buildings (called 'Business Rates') which alone raises over 4% of total government revenues; we also have Council Tax on residential land and buildings, which is a mixture or Poll Tax and a modest property value tax, which raises another 3.5%.

** That'll be no surprise to Kj, I guess.

Lars Knutzon aka Bent Sejrø

Birgitte Hjort Sørensen aka Katrine Fønsmark

Sidse Babett Knudsen aka Birgitte Nyborg

Short Lists

In the comments, DBC suggested: "Which common British bird,featured in popular song, is known for its addiction to marijuana?" and Bayard suggested "Queens of England that were born commoners?"

Fair enough, you can be getting on with those, but, having spent a lot of time staring at maps and railway timetables while on holiday, my suggestion is "Towns in different countries with similar sounding names". To get the ball rolling, how about:

Friedrichshafen (Germany's most southern port) and Frederikshavn (Denmark's most northern port)

Epping (outer suburb of London) and Eppingen (outer suburb of Heilbronn in Germany)

Kempton (town where they do horse racing) and Kempten (town in Bavaria)

UPDATE: Bayard submits Burgau (Germany), Burgau (Austria) and Burgau (Portugal).

Joseph Takagi submit Bayreuth (pronounced Buy-roit) and Beirut.

I spotted another corker this afternoon while explaining to my sisters where we'd been on holiday: Hereford, England and Herford, Germany.
--------------------------------
I'm not aware that there are any other towns named in honour of women's breasts, but if you know of one, please leave a comment!

UPDATE: Wolfers submits Brest (excellent) and Bristol, but that doesn't count because Bristol City is rhyming slang and the town is not called after its own football team.

Anon submits Nork.

Expat submits Titiwangsa.

We can harvest these from Google Maps, actually. There's Boobery, United Kingdom and Bubry, France, which would thus qualify for the first short list as well. See also Titisee, Germany, Tytsjerk, Netherlands, Mammari, Cyprus.

Something is spot-on in the state of Denmark

Allister Heath's editorial in today's City AM explains how they are sorting out the banks in Denmark.

I'm not cutting and pasting the highlights because it is worth reading in full, all 568 words.

Why depositors are powerless and why bank bail outs make things worse.

Two related issues came up at post-film discussion yesterday where people's thinking appears to be a bit confused, so for the benefit of anybody who's interested:
---------------------
1. There is a theory that if a lot of depositors ganged up and all withdrew their money from a bank on a particular day, then if more than ten per cent of deposits were withdrawn, they could bring the bank to its knees (in which case depositors would demand, what? Higher interest rates on their savings?), see e.g. Cantona's Cashpoint Revolution.

Most people ignored Cantona, but what if they hadn't? Well, it would have been a good old fashioned bank run like on Northern Rock, and the government would have just stepped in and lent the bank(s) the spare cash.

Remember that people would have to withdraw their savings in cash (merely taking it from one bank account and putting it in another achieves very little), and a bank note is just an interest free loan that you are making to the government (it is your financial asset and the government's financial liability).

Therefore the government can easily provide loans to banks which are equal to the cash withdrawn. Before the depositors' strike we have this position:

Banks -> owe £ billions to - > people with cash in the bank

And afterwards, we end up with the following:

Banks -> owe £ billions to -> government -> owes £ billions to -> people with 'cash under the mattress'.

If people are too worried about being burgled, they will put their saving in the safest place possible, i.e. the government-run National Savings & Investments, which makes the picture even clearer.
----------------------
2. Why don't savers demand higher interest rates? Well, they do, I suppose, but the banks aren't offering them and that is the end of that. It is a cartel which has most successfully managed to widen its profit margins after the downturn, because the banks know (or have good reason to believe) that if they can't get enough money from savers or bond investors, they can borrow it cheaply from the government (and they have done, in spades).

I mean, why would a retailer bother paying a supplier £100 per unit if the government were offering them for £50 each?
----------------------
3. As I tried explaining before, the politicians claim that they are bailing out the banks to 'protect savers' money' which is hokum, of course.

The analogy I used was a bit left field, so let's assume that Farepak is a bank and they have managed to lose four-fifths of their savers' money, or £400 per saver.

Now, let's assume that the government had previously enacted a law saying that Xmas club savings accounts were guaranteed by the government/taxpayer, and Farepak went *pop*. Does it make more sense for the government to:

a) Give the savers directly the £400 they lost (or whatever higher or lower amount an individual saver lost) and have done with it (chasing Farepak and its directors for any shortfall), or

b) Give or lend all that money to Farepak on the condition that they fulfil their pledges and promise to play nicely in future?

I'd submit that (a) makes more sense but in most cases, governments around the world have chosen (b). Very few governments allowed banks to collapse and agreed to pay some compensation to savers (method (a), which worked a treat for Iceland) and other countries who are a bit more clued up (and not in cahoots with bankers) have asked their banks to sort themselves out via debt-for-equity swaps (Denmark, and rather bizarrely, Northern Rock in the UK after three years' wrangling), but these examples are few and far between.

Obviously, the government doesn't guarantee your money if it's with a Xmas club and you might not agree with the law guaranteeing your money up to £85,000 if it's in a bank, that's a separate issue.
---------------------
4. So there we have it. There is precious little we can do because the government will thwart us at every turn, using our money to do so.

And the underlying reason why 'they' have us by the short and curlies is because they know and we know that the only way to keep house prices at double their true value is by continually pumping in money via the banking system, so while we curse and swear at bankers and their bonuses, this is about as much use as Catholics complaining about priests abusing children.

Until we abandon this thinking that high house prices make us richer, there will always be bankers and politicians ready to exploit this for personal gain, and as long as there are Catholics who believe in their church as an institution, there will be people who abuse that trust, end of.

[Amagerbanken] Denmark shows us how to do debt-for-equity swaps

Spotted by GolemXIV at Bloomberg:

Denmark is dealing with Amagerbanken under regulations introduced in October designed to ensure taxpayers don’t have to meet the bill when lenders fail. The bank estimates its assets amount to about 59 percent of liabilities, meaning that creditors, including holders of senior unsecured bonds on which a government guarantee expired Sept. 30 and depositors with more than the insured maximum in their accounts, will face write-offs of about 41 percent.

“The bank hasn’t collapsed and gone into bankruptcy like the Icelandic banks, but has been selectively bailed out with a transfer of assets and a partial transfer of liabilities,” said Simon Adamson, an analyst at CreditSights Inc. in London. “Normally when this happens, senior debt and deposits are protected, such is the sensitivity around them, but this is bank resolution with debt and deposit haircuts, rather than a simple liquidation.”

OK, this is slightly harsher than a normal debt-for-equity swap*, as it's not clear whether the bondholders would share in any upside if it turns out that the bank's assets actually turn out to be worth more than the current estimate, but hey. Denmark, like Iceland, has shown idiots in the USA, UK, Ireland etc how to do things.

* In an idealised version, bondholders give up part of the nominal value of their bonds (a repayable claim on the bank's assets) in exchange for new shares (a non-repayable claim), which if done properly leads to nobody losing (or gaining) money at the time of the swap (the market value of the new shares handed out = market value of the bonds cancelled), but hey.

Swedish people not totally stupid: shock

There's evidence, and then there's evidence. From a CiF article supporting a Swedish law that makes it illegal to pay for sex (but appears to make it legal to receive money for sex):

The evaluation concludes that, since the law came in to force in 1999, the number of women involved in street prostitution has halved, whereas neighbouring countries such as Denmark and Norway have seen a sharp rise; that there is no evidence of an increase in off-street prostitution; and that, despite a significant increase in prostitution in the neighbouring countries during the past 10 years, there is no evidence of a similar increase in Sweden*...

The law has strong public support among the public in Sweden, has led to a significant positive change in attitudes, and acts as a deterrent for potential buyers. A 2008 study found that only 8% of Swedish men had paid for sex, compared with 13.6% before the law came into force**.

* What is not stated is how many of the additional prostitutes working in neighbouring countries are actually from Sweden.

** It is not stated how the study arrived at this conclusion. Did they perhaps ask a sample of Swedish men?

Health Scare Story Du Jour

The BBC have pulled out a corker:

Women who drink during pregnancy may be damaging the future fertility of their sons, research suggests. In a study of almost 350 young men, sperm levels were a third lower in those whose mothers had drunk more than four drinks a week during pregnancy compared with teetotallers.

The Danish researchers told a fertility conference these men may have a harder time getting their partner pregnant. UK experts said alcohol may not be the issue, but a marker for other factors...

Those Mohammed cartoons...

This whole debate has kicked off again, they weren't even that funny...

The most infamous one is this:

Yeah, like these terrorist masterminds would blow themselves up? They use young and impressionable, or indeed mentally handicapped people to do their murdering for them. Further, if depicting Mohammed is forbidden, how would these buggers recognise the man in the picture?

Anyway, no doubt, they'll start bombing my foreign embassies tomorrow, or boycotting this 'blog or something.