Say "Yes" to George

For some gloriously garbled landlord special pleading, have a look at Say "No" To George, spotted by Thomas Hall.

As Babs says on the Contact page:

I think some of the arguments need to be developed further before significant traffic and inconsistencies need to be checked. For example, in some parts, you say that house prices will drop, and then for first time buyers the argument says that house prices will not drop.

An example of their Doublespeak from the Landlords page:

EVERY OTHER BUSINESS IN THE LAND IS ALLOWED TO OFFSET THEIR TOTAL COSTS AGAINST THEIR INCOME BEFORE BEING TAXED (ON THEIR PROFIT). IF YOU BELIEVE THAT YOUR PROPERTY INVESTMENT IS TO BE TAXED UNFAIRLY THEN JOIN THE PETITION!

So is being a landlord a "business" or is it "investment"? For tax purposes, those are two quite separate concepts:

If it is a "business", then yes, they would get a full deduction for the costs of furniture and interest, but rents would be liable to VAT and net profit liable to Class 4 NIC as well as income tax.

And if it is "investment" then there would be no deduction for any costs whatsoever, the same as dividend and interest income.
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I left the following comment on their Contact page just now (15.30 pm, 12 Aug). Let's see if they publish it.

I'm old enough to remember the good old days, when landlords were taxed at much higher rates; rents were capped/controlled; there was plenty of social housing as an alternative to private renting. And for good measure, landlords paid higher interest rates than owner-occupiers and owner-occupier mortgages were capped at two or three times income. And we had Domestic Rates (and before that Schedule A taxation on owner-occupiers as well).

The result of all this was that the number of private renting households fell from 90% at the start of the 20th century to less than 10% by 1990 - with an equal and opposite increase in owner-occupation. This increase in owner-occupation levels was always heralded as a Very Good Thing indeed, and nobody mourned the demise of private landlords as a class. The knock-on effect was a more equitable distribution of wealth, a smaller and more stable banking system and a much smoother economic path.

Having been a landlord and a tenant in my life, I can honestly say that landlords serve absolutely no useful purpose whatsoever and provide nothing of value - as evidenced by the fact that a lot of tenants end up buying the home they were renting and absolutely nothing changes. If landlords were actual businesses (like a hair dresser or a car mechanic or a farmer) then we would not be able to just cut them out of the loop. I can't cut my own hair, fix my own car or grow my own food, but I am perfectly capable of calling the plumber, doing a bit of DIY and sorting out the insurance on my own home.

I suspect that you will hotly disagree with this :-)

Nice bit of DoubleSpeak by our PM

From the BBC:

David Cameron is to praise the record of Tory local authorities in cutting waste and delivering "best value" as he launches the party's campaign for English council elections.

He will say ministers have frozen council tax for two years, made town hall pay more open and given councils more freedom over their finances.

On the facts, it does appear that Tory run councils are slightly less wasteful than Labour-run ones, but how does he square "ministers freezing council tax" with "giving councils more freedom over their finances"?

Mr Cameron will tell party supporters that the Conservatives "run the best-value councils in the country" and have been "leading the way" - as the largest party in the coalition - in helping freeze council tax bills for the second year in a row...

More broadly, he will say the government's decision to raise personal tax allowances for more than 20 million people, increase the state pension by £5.30 a week and cut corporation tax means "every single person" has a reason to vote Conservative.

Yes, "every single person", apart from the teensy tiny insignificant minority who pay National Insurance or VAT. Or does he mean "a reason" singular as opposed to the dozens of reasons for not voting Tory?

Interesting choice of two different words to describe the same thing...

Another instalment of "We Own Land! Give Us Money!" over at The Telegraph:

Home buyers who need mortgage help may be forced repay state... hard-pressed home buyers who have paid their taxes for years but then fall on hard times may wonder why a country that can house political extremists from overseas cannot afford to help victims of the credit crisis closer to home.

So let me try and get this straight:

When the government, for narrow political ends, gives land owners money/soft loans, that's called "help", and when land owners are asked to repay these soft loans, they are being "forced"?

What about the third leg of the transaction, when other taxpayers (many of whom are not land owners) give the government money to pass on to people who have over-extending themselves in leaping on the Ponzi scheme and expect a free ride? Are these taxpayers "helping" or "being forced"?

And what relevance does the bogey man "political extremists from overseas" have to do with it? That's what we politely refer to as 'totally irrelevant'.

Via Quiet Guy at HPC.
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UPDATE: Interestingly, The Daily Mail gleefully reports that "More than half of us - 54% - think unemployment benefits are too high up from 35% in 1983". Let's not forget that "homebuyers who receive Income Support (IS), income-based Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA), income-related Employment and Support Allowance (ESA), or Pension Credit (PC) may be entitled to help towards their mortgage costs, known as SMI and paid direct to the mortgage lender."

So do the Homeys want 'mortgage help' (paid to banks on behalf of unemployed people, as defined) to be increased or reduced? Or do they want IS, JSA and the like to be reduced and 'mortgage help' to be increased? Or what?

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, POVERTY IS WEALTH

The Daily Express takes a leaf out of 1984:

This morning they called for lower interest rates:

An 11 per cent increase in sales reflects the enormous benefits to the economy of our record low interest rates, a point that should not be lost on the Bank of England.

A property-owning middle class has been one of the foundations on which our economic success over the past 30 years has been built. Those who urge that interest rates should go up would do well to reflect on the damage it would cause to home-owners and businesses.

Ho hum, that's their opinion. But yesterday they were arguing exactly the opposite when they offered their readers the keys to unlocking letting's rewards:

WITH first-time buyers continuing to struggle to get a mortgage and the number of properties to rent in high demand it’s no wonder the market is booming.

New figures from LSL Property Services show the average asking price for rents reached a record high of £696 in May after four successive months of rises, while the National Landlords Association (NLA) suggests as many as one in five households will rent privately before the end of this decade...

I suppose the only way to square this apparent contradiction is to assume that they envisage a world where the 'middle class' own all the housing and the 'working class' pay rent, which doesn't seem like a 'property owning democracy' to me - I though that democracy means that everybody has an equal say, which applied to land must means that everybody has an equal share - which could only be achieved with a Georgist tax/redistribution system.

And I know it's easy to make fun of The Daily Express, but this kind of Home-Owner-Ist DoubleSpeak is widespread. Remember: if you own a real asset like a TV or a car or if you have valuable experience or qualifications, you are no worse off if others also have such assets*, but there's only an advantage to 'owning' land if there are others who are excluded - or else there'd be nobody forced to buy or rent your land from you, natch, and land would have no value.

So land 'wealth' can only exist if there is an equal and opposite land 'poverty, and land 'ownership' is a zero-sum game at best and a negative sum game in practice.

* if the roads get too crowded, we can build more roads; and provided we have the right mix of experience and qualifications, we are all better off

Adding insult to injury ...

"We are pleased that both Ms Blake and her daughter are well and healthy." said a spokesman for Leicester Royal Infirmary, who refused to send an ambluance when Ms Blake went into labour, as a result of which she gave birth on the pavement in front of the hospital, having had to walk there.

"This offensive behaviour is not only shocking but intolerable and completely unacceptable"

Guess who said this about whom:

a) Caroline Spelman, on the subject of Matthew Lewis, who engaged in a spot of McCann baiting at a New Year party (of which I am not entirely innocent), or

b) Matthew Lewis, on the subject of Caroline Spelman, who paid for her private nanny out of her MP's staffing allowance?*

* Please note, I accept that it is difficult for mothers of younger children to carry out their MP's duties. If a law were passed, openly and honestly, that female MPs with children under a certain age were entitled to an additional allowance (yeah, like a salary of £63,291 a year won't cover it), then so be it.

Well do they or don't they?

From the BBC's report on the chap who claims to have run a $50 billion Ponzi scheme:

France's BNP Paribas estimated its exposure to be more than $460m... "While BNP Paribas has no investment of its own in the hedge funds managed by Bernard Madoff Investment Services, it does have risk exposure to these funds through its trading business and collateralised lending to funds of hedge funds," BNP said in a statement.

I'll take that as a yes, basically.