"... well balanced, like any other fine piece of sporting equipment... a pair of matched shotguns for instance."

Here's how they reviewed cars forty years ago, 55 second into this:

More VAT-Brexit-related fuckwittery

From The Guardian:

More than 130,000 UK firms will be forced to pay VAT upfront for the first time on all goods imported from the European Union after Brexit, under controversial legislation to be considered by MPs on Monday.

The VAT changes spelled out in the taxation (cross-border trade) bill – one of a string of Brexit laws passing through parliament – are causing uproar among UK business groups, which say that they will create acute cashflow problems and huge additional bureaucracy.

Labour and Tory MPs and peers said that the only way to avoid the VAT Brexit penalty would be to stay in the customs union or negotiate to remain in the EU-VAT area...

This is a typical spat between incompetent government and hard-core Bremoaners, with long-suffering UK businesses caught in the crossfire.

VAT is the most damaging tax, but all the same, it can be made administratively as painless as possible. Before wading in, it is important to know how it currently works on a day-to-day level. When a UK VAT-able business imports from the EU, VAT is nominally due, but it is not paid up-front - what happens is that the notional import VAT is added to the total VAT payable on the next VAT-return, but the importer can also reclaim the notional import VAT is input tax, so the overall payment is nothing.

This defers the business' cash outflow by a few weeks or months - the apparent proposed new system is to collect VAT at point/time of import (a massive administrative burden) and not to credit it as input VAT until the next return (usually quarterly).

There is nothing to stop the UK government from continuing current practice post-Brexit (in fact, we could do this for most import duties). And despite what 'Labour and Tory MPs' have said, there is absolutely no need for the UK to remain in the Customs Union or the Eu-VAT area to be able to do this - remember that post-Brexit, it is entirely up to the UK government whether or not it imposes import duties, import VAT or even VAT at all.

The recently discovered largest prime numbers continues the pattern nicely...

With thanks to James Higham whose post alerted me to this.

I explained that there appears to be a surprisingly consistent pattern if you plot the number of digits against date discovered back in 2016.

Here's the updated chart:



UPDATE: It turns out I needn't have bothered doing my own spreadsheet, the relevant Wiki article includes a much longer term chart showing exactly the same phenomenon: "The red line is the exponential curve of best fit: y = exp(0.187394 t - 360.527), where t is in years."

Just Because...

I was here today.

This is the ex Rob Walker / Sterling Moss 250 GT SWB

This is the ex David Piper 250 GTO now in the JCB collection

Checklist for UKIP leaders

The current UKIP leader is taking this really seriously, see today's Metro:

Checked flat cap? CHECK

Green Barbour wax jacket? CHECK

Carry large golfing umbrella while giving the distinct impression you'd rather be carrying a shot gun? CHECK

Leave wife for woman half your age? CHECK

You wonder whether the cap and jacket get passed down from UKIP leader to UKIP leader, like a badge of office...

They own land! Give them money!

From the BBC:

UK farmers are to receive the same level of subsidies they get from the EU for five years after Brexit, the environment secretary is to say. Michael Gove was due to tell farmers a new system prioritising the environment will start in 2024, instead of 2022.

The current subsidies - £3bn a year - are based on the land farmers own. Farmers will have an two extra years to prepare for the new payments, which would reward initiatives such as planting wildflower meadows and woods.

Mad, they get paid for doing nothing? I'm with Monbiot on this - scrap the subsidies and impose a flat £20* (or whatever low-ish figure gets the optimum balance) per acre LVT on them instead. Farmers will happily abandon the most marginal sites with the lowest yields and thus escape the LVT. As it happens, the nicest places to enjoy nature - near settlements, along river banks, on cliff edges and hill tops - are the worst places for farming, and vice versa - flat fields in the middle of East Anglia are the best for farming, but it's not much fun tramping across them.

In case anybody thinks I am anti-farming (which I am not, it's tough work and I love food), we could and should just exempt farming from tax altogether as a quid pro quo - no VAT refunds, no income tax or corporation tax on profits (so no capital allowances either), which we already have with forestry, no Business Rates on farm buildings/greenhouses, no PAYE on farm wages (farm workers can pay voluntary NICs to keep up their pension entitlement if they wish). You can nail this down by continuing to tax farm rental income, meaning a net tax saving for owner-occupier farmers, so we could and should exempt purchases of farm land from SDLT as well.

That'd would be more or less a break even from the government's point of view. If there's a net saving, then by all means spend it on rural broadband or rural public transport etc.

As we know from the allotments vs commercial farms example, this would increase the amount of food grown per acre and rural employment.

Everybody wins!

... Meanwhile, a report warns Brexit trade deals could threaten UK food security.

Well, they would say that wouldn't they?

MPs and peers in the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Agroecology (AAPG) say ministers must ensure famers [sic] are not undermined by future trade deals which permit imports of food produced with lower welfare or environmental standards.

Aha, so they don't mean "food security" from the consumers' point of view (the important one), they mean "income security" from the landowners' point of view?

Here's the best bit - five minutes in a TV studio with a YPP candidate last year seems to have worked wonders:

Detailing how the European Union's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) will be replaced after Brexit, Mr Gove will say taxpayers' money should be used to boost public access to the countryside, and be spent on infrastructure and supporting rural communities.

He will say the CAP is "unjust, inefficient and drives perverse outcomes".
---------------------
* OTOH asks: "Why should the LVT be flat? Shouldn't land with a higher value pay more land value tax?"

1. As I have pointed out often enough, the total rental value of UK farmland is so low (1% or 2% of rental value of urban land - hardly surprising as farming is 1% or 2% of UK GDP and employs 1% - 2% of all workers) that it's not really worth collecting anyway, such a tax serves a different purpose: to act as a cliff edge to encourage farmers to leave marginal land to be rewilded/for ramblers to enjoy.

2. Scrapping the subsidies (negative land value tax) will be a big enough shock for the big fat rent-seekers.

3. We do not know what farm rents will be once the subsidies are replaced with a blanket tax exemption. Will probably be lower; might be higher, but still negligible compared to urban land.

4. Urban land is all about location and little to do with the physical qualities of the soil or land itself, so it's easy to value, you can get it 90% accurate in a weekend with spreadsheets and HM Land Registry data. Farmland is difficult enough to value anyway, you've got to go and physically inspect it. Identifying the pure location element is even harder.

5. With farmland, the physical qualities of the soil are - to a greater or lesser degree - dictated by how well farmers have looked after it in the past and are looking after it today, which we wouldn't want to discourage with higher taxes, again, it's difficult to split out what's the naturally occurring element (taxable) and what's down to centuries of careful husbandry/wifery.

Thank God?

This is an interesting poll except it draws the correct conclusion ('members' does not equal 'voters') to misdirect.

Tories are a 'breed apart'. Simple answer from a democrat: "Yes They Are - Thank God." Isn't that a good thing?

Now what are they up to in this guff? Well, if they were actually trying to do anything worthy for our democracy. First tell readers what the total 'membership' of each party is, that your 1,000 member survey is drawn from.

If your party membership falls below 100,000 members, then the views of the Praetorian are going to be pretty marked are they not?

None of that serious discussion of course. It seems to me that the data is being used to show that 'eveybody' holds a certain view of Brexit; in counter point to the Tories.

So add in the SNP figures and it is another: Corbyn 'look mate', Labour must either: ignore, rerun, just pretend Brexit VOTE didn't happen. So the researcher says: "even Labour, which under Jeremy Corbyn is occupying the middle ground over Brexit. Among Labour members, 87% want the UK to remain in the single market, 85% in the customs union, and 78% support a new referendum."

Is the 90,000 Tory, Praetorian membership more reflective of the Tory vote generally than the 500,000 Labour Praetorian Guards and 'members of the line' are of Labour's?

I hope politics, economics and sociology students at the professor's University start with that question and what the serious answers mean for our democracy. Not how we discredit it.

And the 2018 prize for the most economically stupid banner goes to...

From here.

Daily Mail starts the year as it means to go on...

UKIP councillor and British Legion poppy seller appears in court charged with murder of his wife of 30 years at their £400,000 home

They've even saved us the bother of skim-reading the article to find out what the house would sell for by including it in the headline.

Paul Krugman on "Economic Geography"

From The New York Times, the conclusion is this:

Take the (fairly celebrated) example of Rochester, New York. It started as a flour milling center, benefitting from the Erie Canal, then as a center for nurseries and seeds. So it was a resource-based center. Then, in 1853, John Jacob Bausch, a German immigrant, started a company making monocles, which became a major producer of glasses, microscopes, and all things lens related.

So Rochester became a place where people knew about optics, presumably creating the preconditions for the rise of Eastman Kodak, and much later Xerox. This was typical of small industrial cities: even if what a city was doing in, say, 1970 seemed very different from what it was doing in 1880, there was usually a sort of chain of external economies creating the conditions that allowed the city to take advantage of particular new technological and market opportunities when they arose.

Obviously, this was a chancy process. Some localized industries created fertile ground for new industries to replace them; others presumably became dead ends. And while a big, diversified city can afford a lot of dead ends, a smaller city can’t. Some small cities got lucky repeatedly, and grew big. Others didn’t; and when a city starts out fairly small and specialized, over a long period there will be a substantial chance that it will lose enough coin flips that it effectively loses any reason to exist.

That seems to be a fair description/explanation of how things are developing.

The article in turn links to lots of other articles, the one that triggered his article was one by Emily Badger, which describes/explains how agglomeration effects benefit the largest global cities but smaller regional cities are losing out; also the links between global cities appear to be stronger than the links between any global city and its own hinterland/host country.

UPDATE: Now I've thought about it, there's a similar phenomenon with car manufacturing nowadays, which I wrote about here, it's just that large car factories are not concentrated near global cities, they are wherever they are for historical reasons. Most of the hundreds of small factories there used to be have closed down and a few have swollen enormously.

While this is all good stuff, what puzzles me is why anybody thinks these are blinding new insights? They aren't. I'm a land value taxer because I look at the real world and draw real conclusions. I know which factors drive (or depress) land values, and those factors are pretty much the same as those which encourage the growth of global cities and cause the gradual decline of smaller regional cities, in a word, 'agglomeration'.

Replacing taxes on earnings and output with Land Value Tax would ameliorate the effects of all this; it would drive growth in the largest cities; reduce the drag of taxation on smaller cities and 'the regions' (where land values are lowest); and act to redistribute the benefits of economic growth more evenly across the country - an overall levelling upwards.