Here are the bits and pieces I didn't get round to doing a full post on last week:
1. Dave has now taken UK government policies to their obvious conclusion: They don't own land, don't give them money.
2. Nick is indeed an idiot:
The comments were made just hours after it emerged that Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, is secretly planning to axe GCSEs by 2016 in favour of a new generation of rigorous qualifications.
In the most radical shake-up of the exams system in 25 years, it was revealed that around three-quarters of pupils could sit tough tests modelled on the old O-level. Remaining pupils may take more straightforward qualifications styled on traditional CSEs in subjects such as maths, English and science.
Seems fair enough, you might think. Quite which exams any child takes is up to the individual children, their teachers and parents, and not really anybody else's business.
Speaking at the Rio+20 Earth summit, Mr Clegg said it was “not Government policy”.
“An exam system needs to be rigorous and stretching of course but any review of the exam system – and we have already done a number of changes – should always be built for the future not turning the clock back to the past as has to reward hard work and aspiration by all children not just cater for a few at the top. Any exam system and any school system should be for the many not for the few."
The top three-quarters is hardly "the few", is it? Turning the clock back half a century is not necessarily A Bad Thing: for example, if we could turn back the UK housing policy clock half a century that would be A Very Good Thing Indeed. Ditto UK policy towards the Common Market. And exams are not there to "reward hard work", they are merely an official recognition of how good anybody is at passing exams and bear little or no relation to the amount of "hard work and aspiration" involved. It's up to the people who set the syllabus and mark the exams to make sure that as much useful knowledge as possible is picked up in the process.
3. The Daily Mail wonders why Dave didn't criticise Gary Barlow's tax arrangements. And I wonder whether Gary would support a move from taxing earned income to taxing the rental value of land.
4. City AM's editor claims that simplifying the income tax system and reducing the headline rate would discourage tax evasion.
Well yes, that would be a good thing in and of itself, but the incentive to shift earned income offshore and repackage it as e.g. loans (or to ship CDs and DVDs from the Channel Islands rather than from elsewhere in the UK) will always be there as long as we have taxes on incomes and output. And Home-Owner-Ist to the last, he claims that:
We need a flat tax with a wide base, where all income – from labour or capital – is taxed at the same, low rate, with no loopholes. Until we adopt such a system – of the sort outlined by the 2020 Tax Commission, which I chaired – injustices and inequities will remain rife.
As long as we have taxes on income and capital - and little or none on land values - injustices and inequities will remain rife, full stop.
5. I wonder why the UK government is going through the rigmarole of trying to extradite Julian Assange to Sweden, knowing full well he'll probably end up being sent to the USA. The UK government usually sends people to the USA at the drop of a hat, even if they have not broken any UK law or committed a crime on US soil.
6. The local council (or quite whoever was in charge) has spent half a million quid smartening up the facades on Leyton High Road. It does indeed look a lot nicer now, and local traders seem to be very happy.
That's probably money well spent, if the rental value of each of dozens of shops goes up by a few thousand quid a year and Business Rates go up accordingly, then the taxpayer gets his money back fairly quickly. This is the sort of thing which would just never happen if you waited for dozens of landlords, owners and occupiers to unanimously agree to do it.
7. Niall Ferguson reckons that young people should welcome "austerity" because they are the ones who'll be paying off the deficit in future.
He's only half right because he's only looking at half the picture.
Sure, since the "financial crisis" deficit spending has morphed into straight forward kleptocracy and ought to be reduced or eliminated. But the debts have been racked up, and it only seems fair to repay them, as the people lending the government money were not the same people as benefitted from it.
Niall Ferguson's big mistake is to assume that existing debts will be repaid out of taxes on future incomes; i.e. those that pay them off are a different generation to the one which took the money or had the money spent on it. It would make far more sense to repay those debts out of money collected from those who benefitted most, i.e. the large landowners, bankers and Baby Boomers generally, which could be achieved quite simply by taxing the rental value of land.
In extremis, a one-off windfall tax on the capital value of land and buildings of about twenty per cent would be sufficient to pay off the UK's accumulated government debt, and pay for a sizeable fund out of which to pay future public sector pensions.
8. Kate Middleton probably genuinely thought that those children she visited on a camping trip were disadvantaged. Turns out, they weren't.
