"Danny Alexander to call for fuel price cut"

From the BBC:

Major petrol and diesel distributors are to be called on by Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander to drop their prices further in light of recent declines in the cost of oil…

"The public have a suspicion that when the price of oil rises, pump prices go up like a rocket. But when the price of oil falls, pump prices drift down like a feather."

While no research supports this, the thought of this effect creates ill feeling, he will say.

To their credit, the BBC give comparative figures for then and now, as follows:

Oil/barrel (159 litres) - $115, $84
$ per £ - 1.72, 1.60
Pump price/litre - £1.36, £1.24

So in GBP terms, one litre of crude oil cost 42p in June 2014 and 33p now, a drop of 9p. Pump prices should fall by 20% more than that = 10.8p. Prices have actually fallen by 12p.

But the Ginger Rodent is addressing the "Highlands & Islands Branch of The Energy Institute". From personal observation, pump prices appear to be inversely proportional to population density*, so quite possibly people in the Highland and Islands are seeing smaller price falls**?

* Because of (in no particular order) higher transport costs; smaller rural garages having to spread the same fixed costs over smaller sales volume; there being fewer competitors. It's quite bizarre. We drove along a five mile stretch of road out of London last Saturday, petrol is £1.20 a litre at one end and £1.26 at the other.

** Richard T in the comments confirms: "If you travel north on the A9 beyond Inverness, you will notice that by some magic of the fuel market, petrol and diesel suddenly become up to 10p a litre dearer once the Dornoch Firth is crossed."

Today I shall mostly be here...

Life copies satire

From The Daily Mash, 20 March 2012:

TAXPAYERS are to receive a detailed breakdown of how their money was spent that is indvidually tailored to their cretinous world view...

Tax offices across the UK will issue bespoke statements that will fill individuals with both righteous anger and the realisation that they are the cleverest person in the world.

A Treasury spokesman said: “... people will see exactly how much of their money is being spent on ‘wacky-baccy-bongs, general poovery and that lazy Bulgarian scrounger who’s trying to fuck your wife’."

From the BBC, 3 November 2014:

The letters show that 24.5% of government spending goes on welfare payments.

"The chancellor is relying on the fact that many people think spending called welfare all goes to the unemployed," said the TUC's general secretary, Frances O'Grady.

From City AM, 4 November 2014:

Ben Gummer, Conservative MP for Ipswich, says...  Tax Statements will help taxpayers challenge their representatives, and candidates from rival parties, with real figures.

“Why am I spending £3,000 on welfare and only £352 on transport subsidies and infrastructure?” – the answer to which may change a vote, or influence an MP. That is good news for politics, and for voters.
--------------------------------------
A few facts:

1. The statements only refer to income tax and Employee's National Insurance. Seeing as these raise about £210 bn a year and the government spends about £710 billion, the totals are misleading. For an average household, you can probably double their income tax and Ee's NIC to arrive at the total amount of tax they pay/bear.

2. Government spending breaks down approx. as follows:
40% is subsidies to and 'procurement' from nominally private sector businesses,
30% is public sector salaries, and
30% is actual cash pensions and welfare.

3. The money paid to private business is a mix of a) legit and b) pure theft/waste.

a) It would be stupid for the police to manufacture their own cars or for schools to own their own forests and have their own paper mill, for example. The NHS sets a good example by haggling low prices for the medicines it buys (NHS prices are treated as reference prices by many bodies overseas), so that's fine. Conversely, government departments do not haggle for a bulk discount for generic software, not so fine.

b) It also includes straight theft and waste, like subsidies to banks, paying advertising agencies to churn out health propaganda, endless failed government IT projects, Housing Benefit payments to 'private' sector landlords… the list is endless.

4. Out of approx. 6 million public sector workers (the official total excludes things like BBC, universities, many quangoes and agencies, nationalised banks etc), one million work in education and another million in the NHS, hooray for them.

Fewer than a million others also do vital stuff (police, armed forces, prison officers, social workers, immigration control, dustbin men, firemen, a bare minimum in tax and benefits offices etc). Heck knows that the other three million do.

5. Out of the 30% spent on pensions and welfare, two-thirds is state pensions, public sector pensions, other pensioner benefits (Pensions Credit, Council Tax Benefit) and one-third is paid to working age people.

6. Of cash 'welfare' paid to working age people, about half is Child Benefit or Child Tax Credits and half goes to the disabled and unemployed.

So for every £352 spent on 'transport subsidies' (whatever that includes), about £597 goes as cash payments to the unemployed and the disabled (the categories overlap), and the headline figure of £3,000 for 'Welfare' is a complete and utter lie.

Actual 'theft and waste' appears to be about one-third of government spending, let's say half of the 40% paid to 'private sector' businesses and half the 30% paid in public sector salaries. Even if every penny paid to the unemployed and disabled (5% of the total) were also categorised as 'waste', it's still only one-eighth of the total 'waste'.

Finbarr Saunders is now working for City AM

From today's City AM (print edition page 3):

Turkish delight as Yilsiz swallows United in record deal

Turkish food and drinks giant Yildiz won the bidding war for United Biscuits yesterday, offering more than £2bn for the firm and beating off stiff competition from Kellogg’s and Burton’s Biscuits.

In case you don't know who Finbarr Saunders is...

Fun Online Polls: EU budget and Angela Merkel throws down the gauntlet

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

How should the UK respond to the EU's demand for another GBP 1.7 billion?

Assume it was a clerical error and ignore it - 19%
Assume it was a practical joke and ignore it - 61%
Other, please specify - 20%

My thoughts exactly. A good turnout with 114 voters, thanks to everybody who took part.
------------------------------
The EU fun never stops!

I've no idea what goes through Cameron's tiny mind, but Angela Merkel has firmly slapped him down. Assuming that she can dictate EU policy and/or that other EU leaders think the same, this has wrong footed Cameron completely.

He now has now run out of excuses for waffling on about doing a bit of renegotiating and then holding a referenudm comfortably far into the future, Merkel has deftly painted him into a corner and he has no choice, morally, but to hold a referendum ASAP.

So that's this week's Fun Onlline Poll, how do you think he will respond (all a bit open ended, really)?

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

BBC on top form

From the BBC:

Germany is now the world's second most popular destination - after the US - for immigrants. And they are arriving in the hundreds of thousands...

And they are being welcomed with open arms - by the government at least - because Germany has a significant skills gap, and a worryingly low birth rate.

"Immigrants are on average younger and the German population is on average older, so immigrants are welcome," says Dr Ingrid Tucci, from the German Institute for Economic Research. "It's important to attract students and highly qualified people. So the government is making it easier for them, trying to invest and put a culture of welcome in place."

That sounds like a fair summary, even twenty years ago the Germans - bureaucracy and people alike - struck me as pretty even handed vis-a-vis immigrants from first world countries (German bureaucrats treat everybody like shit, foreigners and natives alike), but what's this..?

Private papers recently published by the German news website Spiegel Online reveal Chancellor Kohl told then UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1982 that he wanted to halve the number of Turks living in Germany. They did not, he said, "integrate well".

Today they are an established community. Stroll through the Berlin district of Neukoln and you pass hundreds of businesses run by their children and grandchildren.

In the window of one of the restaurants here, a large chunk of roasting meat turns slowly on a spit. Inside, a woman with a headscarf sips tea from a glass in front of a counter stacked with kebabs and and flatbreads ready for the lunchtime rush.

The BBC is merrily conflating "established" with "integrated", methinks.

If you can spot 'their' areas a mile off, then Kohl has been completely vindicated.

See also Northern Ireland: both loyalists and republicans are clearly "established" but you can hardly describe the two communities as "integrated".

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (345)

Dinero, in the comments to #344:

If you want a Tax that captures some of the rental value of UK land how about a tax on banks' motgage portfolios.

It would the most painless. There is something similar, the UK Bank balance sheet Levy.

This is from the "Please go after somebody bigger than me" school of KLNs.

And as it happens, beefing up the bank asset tax to raise £30 billion or so is already in the YPP manifesto. That's a good idea with or without LVT, and a far better way of taxing banks than corporation tax or PAYE as it only taxes the monopoly/rental element of banking (i.e. 'splitting the zero').

But the total rental value of UK residential land is £200 billion, a bank asset tax would barely make a dent in that. Conceptually, the banking monopoly and the land monopoly are two slightly different things anyway.

Don't let the Door Hit You on The Way Out

From the Independent

Comedian and TV presenter Griff Rhys Jones will “probably” move abroad and buy a “massive palace” if Labour wins the next general election, he has said.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Jones, 61, said Labour’s plans to introduce a “mansion tax” on the super-rich would hit him hard as he currently lives in a “gigantic” house in Fitzrovia, London.

He bought the property about 15 years ago when it was a “slum”, he said, and spent the next few years doing it up.

I'm sure Mark already has a classification for these people to go with the poor widows, something like the "restoration justifiers" (someone come up with another name), people who try to pretend that the reasons their homes rose in value is that they got the plasterers and decorators in.

Jones, famous for BBC comedy show Alas Smith and Jones in the 1980s and 1990s and for the Three Men in a Boat series with Dara Ó Briain and Rory McGrath more recently, said he might leave the UK if Ed Miliband led the Labour party to power.

“It would mean I’d be paying the most colossal tax, which is aimed at foreigners who have apparently come in and bought up all the property in London. That sounds about as fatuous an idea as that immigrants are stealing all the jobs,” he said.

Well, no, it's not aimed at that. It's aimed at people who have seen a rise in house prices as a result of a windfall.

“I’d probably live abroad because I could get some massive palace which I could restore.”

Good. Clear off, then. Would anyone miss Griff Rhys Jones at this point? What does he do nowadays? Stands in front of an autocue for that BBC restoration show. Plenty of people who can do the same job.

How can you 'confess' to something which isn't a crime?

From The Daily Mail:

The research found for more than one in seven British people a single glass of wine in the evening is not enough - and they regularly polish off a whole bottle all by themselves.

A further one in three people admitted to drinking at home alone, with 15 per cent confessing to often emptying the bottle on their own...

You 'admit' that you turn up to work drunk and you 'confess' to a drink driving offence.

You don't do either of those for something which is entirely legal and doesn't do any harm to anybody. I don't even think that drinking one whole bottle over the course of an evening is excessive, it's only three or four decent sized glasses.

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (344)

Here's an interesting bit of one-sided non-logic, from the BBC:

A Labour council in London has rejected its party's policy on the "mansion tax", saying the plans would affect its residents unfairly…

It said the policy could result in "many local people being forced to move out of the borough".

I can understand Labour councillors in that borough objecting - they know that LVT will speed up the inevitable process by which lower income people are displaced by higher income people, thus reducing the likelihood that they will be re-elected.

I'm not sure that's a relevant argument, it strikes me as being naked self-interest and fails on the facts - London has a very transient population, from personal experience I'd guess that considerably less than half the people working or living in London are natural born Londoners. The majority are from elsewhere in the UK, elsewhere in Europe or are 'first generation immigrants'. And all people who live somewhere are 'local'. The new arrivals are just as 'local' as those who have moved away.

But if Labour councillors are openly opposing it, by reverse logic potential Tory councillors in those areas ought to be cheering on the idea of higher taxes on residential land values, because that means there will be more high earners in the area who are more likely to vote Tory. In low value areas, the reverse applies, of course.

Anyway, the valid counter argument to all this 'political' crap is to remind ourselves of the natural justice aspect of LVT:

1. There's the traditional argument that land values are generated by, and hence belong to, the whole of society. So the proceeds should be collected and spent on things which benefit society as a whole, and/or spent on universal benefits (be they in cash or in kind, such as health and education).

2. The equally compelling argument - made much less often - is that with income tax etc, those who are forced to pay the most tax do not receive anything in return (in fact, they are less likely to use 'free' state education, the NHS or claim welfare benefits). But with LVT those who are willing and able to pay the most get something very real in return: they get to occupy the nicest houses for a lower price than otherwise and get to keep more of their own income and personal wealth.

Put 1. and 2. together and that seems perfectly just and equitable to me.

So what this Labour council is supporting is Blue Socialism aka Home-Owner-Ism aka Faux Libertarianism. People with high incomes have to subsidise people with low income in high value homes; people on low incomes in low value homes are ignored and people on high incomes who own little or no land are completely screwed on both sides of the equation.