Last night I had the strangest dream

Last night I had the strangest dream
I ever dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To be stupid and even more
I dreamed I saw a mighty room
The room was filled with men
And the paper they were signing said
They'd wreck the economy more

And when the papers all were signed
And a million copies made
They all joined hands and bowed their heads
And grateful prayers were prayed
And the people in the streets below
Were dancing round and round
And clapping for the NHS
and banging pans and standing round

Last night I had the strangest dream
I ever dreamed before
I dreamed the world had all agreed
To wreck us all for evermore

Apologies to Simon and Garfunkel.

The above song came unbidden to me this morning. Its been a long time since I felt the need to blog but the extra 1.6 billion pounds that the government is going to give to the local councils ( despite cutting and curtailing their budgets by 3% each year for the last decade or more) just makes me aware that this all could be a nightmare that could have been avoided.
How you ask?




The full link can be accessed here (it's for medical professionals only). Well its a free country. Everyone should read it. and then take at least 10000 iu a day.

Fact is that 2000-4000 iu is woefully inadequate to beat infections. Your body will manufacture 20000 iu if you strip off and lie in the sun at midday in June until you turn slightly pink and you have enough cholesterol for the UVB rays to turn into Vitamin D3.

A bottle of 360 x 10000iu ( thats right 3.6 million units costs £25* (* average) might be less if you bought in bulk). The economy, work, everything that has happened in this country since the begining of March, need not have happened. We need not be in lockdown. The government could have spent £2 billion, which is a drop in the ocean to be honest considering how much they are flinging around willy nilly with no thought to the amount of debt that this will cause the economy.

Bought us all a bottle of that 3.6 million units and told us to all take at least 20000 iu a day to make sure we didnt succumb to Covid 19 and to boost our immunity and therefore protect the NHS, cure a few subclinical cases of rickets, stave off MS and a few other diseases and other viral conditions in the process.

It would have saved money and also saved the economy. We could have been in a better situation economy wise than Sweden and we neednt have had social distancing . By the way the deaths in Sweden are mostly from the Somali community who cant make Vit D in Sweden because they are so dark skinned and need five hours in optimal conditions with all their clothes off. And anyone who knows what Somalis wear in the height of a Swedish Summer will know that that doesnt happen. There have been countless articles asking why the BAME community are overrepresented in the death statistics. This is the reason.

I can probably guarantee you that most of the deaths above 65 were on statins. If you don't have enough cholesterol you cant make Vit D3 from the sun, there's simply not enough. Why are we languishing inside and not enjoying this sunny springtime weather? Because the government said so? Let me remind everyone that is reading here that every atrocity in Germany between 1933 and 1945 was legally sanctioned. By its government. The government and the health service if they had their heads screwed on should have made sure no one was Vit D3 deficient, for years. They knew that everyone was deficient. There have been countless articles since 2010.

Oh and tablets for a fat soluble vitamin? Do you see Vitamin E in tablets No you see it in oil. caps So tablets don't work.

The reason that the government didn't do this is because the pharmaceutical companies are losing profits and want to make a useless vaccine. There are coronaviruses every year, that are common colds. They've been working on a patented cure for the common cold since the 1950s . Unfortunately the only thing that actually works is a high level of Vitamin D3, which makes no money for the companies.

We've been sold down the river... Why have we sacrificed our economy when it had a simple cheap solution?

THINK! it could save your life. 97% of people in the UK are Vitamin D3 deficient. Start asking your MP about this document and why this deficiency which is widespread hasn't been tackled in the last ten years.

Killer arguments against LVT, not (56)

Lots of LVT opponents fall back on the rather thin argument that LVT is somehow 'socialist'. Well it's not.

Part Two:

1. Let's imagine - purely as a thought experiment - that we went the whole hog and scrapped the following two groups of UK taxes; those on output, profits, employment and incomes (receipts about £370 billion per annum) and those on land or wealth generally (Council Tax, Business Rates, Stamp Duty etc, receipts about £70 billion per annum). Instead, we'd raise as much as we could from taxes on land values, let's say £350 billion.

2. I can't count the number of times I've heard people say that 'we should reduce taxes on business and replace them with taxes on consumption'. The problem is that the one tax considered to be a tax on consumption, i.e. VAT, is in fact a crude tax on output and is (largely) borne by businesses (i.e. by their shareholders and employees) and depresses output (and hence employment and profits) considerably.

3. As a simple question of fact, what percentage of all privately-owned non-agricultural land is in commercial use? Shall we call it ten per cent in round figures? It's probably less than that by surface area, but shops and offices in town centres tend to occupy the most expensive locations, so maybe it's ten per cent by value, or even twenty per cent.

4. As a simple question of maths, this means that the total tax payable by the wealth-producing sector would be in the order of £70 billion (as against £370 billion under current rules), and the remainder of land value tax, £280 billion, would be on land that is occupied largely for private and personal benefit, i.e. private consumption expenditure (which works out at about £11,000 or £12,000 per 'average' privately owned home)

What's not to like?

UKIP: Talkin' sense until the bitter end

UKIP's summary of their policies relevant to small businesses appeared today. Worth a read, see which bits you like and you don't.*

Meanwhile, a UKIP candidate is in trouble with the BBC for describing Afghans as backward. Well, whoopie-do, that's hardly a minority view, is it? Anyways, UKIP's policy on Afghanistan is withdrawal and I guess them there Afghans would rather suffer mild insults than be carpet bombed. As to 'bombing Iran', maybe those words were ill chosen, but if the Israelis were to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Osirak with fireworks (only a bit further East, obviously), why wouldn't we be cheering them on?

Meanwhile, UKIP's candidate in Medway has said that brothels should be legalised, but, showing that he'd thought this through, "under the condition they were only located in commercial, rather than residential, areas." I'd come to much the same conclusion myself: there's a trade off between a safe journey home for the women who work there (so a taxi rank and/or bus stop nearby would be important, and a built up area is good) as well as anonymity for the paying customers (so siting them in a residential area is a non-starter - the phrase "I'm just popping across the road/to the shops" would take on a whole new meaning).

* Put it this way, I had no input into Section 9.4. Shutting down BERR (or whatever the DTI is called this week) completely, with an annual saving to the taxpayer of over £20 billion might be a simpler solution.

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From The Daily Telegraph:

SIR – Alistair Darling says: "I am confident that the UK will return to growth round the turn of the year." But economic forecasting is not really possible. The existing economic models are relied on only to explain the past.

Mr Darling did not "foresee" the recession till it was well under way, so how can he "foresee" what will happen six months ahead? Did anyone foresee that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? Did anyone foresee that we would release the Lockerbie bomber? Did anyone foresee that tobacco advertising would be given an extra year for Formula 1? We can't even see the Government's liabilities, let alone foresee them.

Until we have open government we will be lucky to see five minutes ahead.

Brian Gilbert, Hampton, Middlesex.

And you thought the Tories won't be as bad as the other lot ...

From Sky News, Sunday Live

CHRIS ROBERTS: Labour at the moment are promising, and there is a big announcement on this coming up I think this week, that every young person aged between 16 and 24 who has been out of work for at least ten months I think it is, will be guaranteed a job.

THERESA MAY: What they are going to do is guarantee them a place in training or in work of some sort for a short period of time. Now what we want to do …

CHRIS ROBERTS: So it’s a con are you saying?

THERESA MAY: Well no, what I’m saying is I hope it won’t be, I hope that what it will be is something that will help those young people then get in to sustainable work.

CHRIS ROBERTS: So what could you guarantee all those 16 to 24 year olds, how many of them, 17% of them out of a job isn’t it, something like that?

THERESA MAY: Yes, well one of the things we’d do for example is introduce a 100,000 new apprenticeships each year, that would be providing opportunities for those young people. We would set £100 million aside as a fund for the NEETs, the young people not in education, employment or training, specifically to be supporting them to get them into the work place.

How on earth is the government, of whatever party, supposed to "introduce apprenticeships"? They seem willing to chuck another £100 million of taxpayers' finest at it, but wouldn't it make a bit more sense to take a step back and look at what caused the problem first?

1. The whole welfare and tax systems are geared up to discourage this sort of employment, i.e. you lose Child Benefit (£13 a week for second and subsequent child) and Child Tax Credits (up to £43 a week) and the Education Maintenance Allowance (up to £30 a week) unless your child is in a certain narrowly defined type of training, which makes the whole exercise pointless for a proper NEET from a low income or workless family.

2. Maybe "apprenticeship" will be on the list of jobs which don't make you lose these benefits - in which case I see massive opportunities for fraud. Why not have apprenticeships in shelf-stacking or table-wiping? If the employer knows the market rate is £120 a week but if they fill in all the forms properly, they can get away with paying £34.

3. The whole PAYE system and Elfin Safety malarkey discourages employers from taking on low paid employees, of course, but for low paid apprenticeships, the actual tax wedge is probably not that big.

3. I suppose we ought to mention immigration at this stage - the wages that e.g. East Europeans are prepared to accept is often lower than what native Brits demand, firstly because they look at the value of those wages in terms of what they can save up for and buy once they return home; and the wages that native Brits demand are inflated by the fact that basic welfare is so generous and so harshly means tested, that as a rule of thumb, you have to earn at least £15,000 gross to be better off taking a job.

4. And right now, the immediate problem is that we are in a recession and unemployment is rising anyway, and until they are prepared to be honest about the root causes of the recession and deal with them accordingly, there's not much point tinkering with "apprenticeships".

Just sayin', is all.

"Retail surge fans rate rise fear"

That's the beauty of the English language!

Every single word in that headline could be a verb or a noun. 'Fans' in turn could mean 'aficionado' or 'ventilator', of course...

It could mean:
a) "Fans of retail surges rate fear of rises" (rate = 'have a high opinion of');
b) "Surge fans available at retail outlets rate fear of rises"
c) "There is a fear that the rate of retail surge fans will rise"; or,
d) "The surge in retail [sales] fans the fear of a rise in [interest] rates" (the probably correct interpretation).

British workers getting poorer (2)

As mentioned a while ago, average wage increases (4%) are slightly less than the increase in the RPI (4.3%), according to yesterday's FT.