How to undermine your own argument.

From City AM:

Plans have been drawn up by the Treasury to hit businesses with a £2.7bn tax rise in this month's budget.

Nope. Businesses don't and won't pay any more tax. Business owners will pay a bit more tax when they sell up.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak is set to scrap entrepreneurs' relief, which gives a capital gains tax cut to people who start their own businesses.

Nope. It gives a CGT cut to people when they sell a business - whether they started it or took it over from somebody else. It comes at the end, not the beginning.

The scheme cuts the amount of capital gains tax paid, when they sell the business, from the usual 20 per cent to 10 per cent on up to £10m of lifetime gains.

Those selling now might have started their businesses pre-1998, when we had Retirement Relief. The first £750,000 of the gain was tax-exempt and the rest taxed at 40%, the normal CGT rate at the time. This didn't dissuade people then and upping the CGT rate to 20% won't deter them now.

Entrepreneurs' relief was brought in by Gordon Brown's Labour government in 2008 with the intention of encouraging people to start businesses.

Nope. It replaced - and was less generous than - Business Asset Taper Relief in 2008.

The scheme cost the government £2.7bn in tax revenues in 2018-19, up from £427m in 2009-09.

Ho hum. Is not taxing something really a "cost" and if so, to whom? How is it calculated? Compared to what?

A letter written by 150 prominent business owners...  read: "Other entrepreneurs have sold their business and are now currently considering whether to start a new business or not and the rate of tax is a very important factor."

It clearly isn't, or else nobody would have started a business pre-1998, when the very generous Business Asset Taper Relief replaced the rather stingy Retirement Relief, see above.

The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) also released a statement today, saying that scrapping the scheme would "destroy retirements".

No it won't. Say you get lucky and sell your business for £1 million. Clearly, you'd prefer to pay 10% CGT and keep £900,000; if you pay 20% CGT, you keep £800,000. Not the end of the world.

FSB national chairman Mike Cherry said "The vast majority of those who benefit from this incentive – 38,000 each year – are everyday entrepreneurs, those who see their business as their retirement plan, and who would lose an average of £15,000 each as a result of this change."

Ho hum. That would be a good argument for reducing the £10 million limit down to £1 million (similar to old Retirement Relief), so that 'the vast majority' with smaller gains are unaffected by the change.
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What they should have said:

1. The revenue-maximising rate of CGT is somewhere between 10% - 15%. At that level, people are happy to just pay it. People don't defer sales to defer or avoid the CGT. They don't get involved in other avoidance or deferral schemes, which cause further distortions elsewhere.

2. So by all means, scrap Entrepreneur's Relief as a separate relief and just reduce the main rate of CGT to 10% - 15%, everybody's [reasonably] happy.

3. The good news is, there would be no need for all the legal deferral opportunities either, as very few would want to use them. Hooray, more simplification. And people like me out of a job.

"The Science Is Settled"

No it's not. They can't address the most simple and obvious contradictions and omissions.

It is often repeated by sources such as the BBC that

Solar energy radiating back to space from the Earth's surface is absorbed by greenhouse gases and re-emitted in all directions. This heats both the lower atmosphere and the surface of the planet. Without this effect, the Earth would be about 30C colder and hostile to life.

1. Temperature increases with pressure, gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn get hotter the deeper you are into the atmosphere. Same goes for Venus. The temperature at the height where pressure = atmospheric pressure on Earth is roughly the same as the temperature on the surface of the Earth, having adjusted for distance from the Sun, regardless of what gases make up the atmosphere. Mars has a thin atmosphere and Earth's Moon none at all, which provide counter-examples.

So a large part of that 30C is due to this effect IMHO and only a small part due to the actual composition of the atmosphere (H2O and CO2), but let's go with the 'consensus' that's it's all of it.

2. Of that 'consensus' 30C, how much is due to H2O and how much to CO2?
a) On average, there is 50 times as much H2O as CO2 in terms of parts per million (400 x 50 = 20,000 ppm = 2%).
b) H2O appears to reflect/absorb at many more wavelengths than CO2. See see this table.
So CO2's contribution, relative to H2O, must be infinitesimaly small.

Nonetheless, most people seem to assume that CO2's contribution is about one-eighth of the total. So let's just accept that as well and see where it takes us.

3. One-eighth of 30C is just under 4C. Other sources say 3C.

4. Skeptical Science jumps the shark on this topic:

The question of how the climate would change in a completely CO2-free atmosphere was brought up recently in a testimony to the subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee. An answer was provided by MIT scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen, who suggested that such a hypothetical removal of all the CO2 in the air would translate into a global cooling of about 2.5 degrees, presumably in Celsius...

In the Lacis et al experiments, removing the CO2 from the atmosphere generates a cooling of around 30 C, an order of magnitude difference from Lindzen's answer.

5. Next, I think the logarithmic effect is also broadly accepted, it makes sense. Extreme sceptics say the effect is already saturated and extreme alarmists (e.g. some contributors on Skeptical Science) claim it is close to linear, they cancel each other out.

CO2 concentrations (just under 420 ppm) are 50% higher than pre-industrial levels (280 ppm, which we have to accept as being natural, normal and thus harmless).

So of that 3C extra warmth, considerably more than two-thirds is due to the background 280 ppm and less than one-third is due to the additional 140 ppm, so CO2's contribution to temperature increases over the last 150 years or so is less than 1C.

The figure for average temperature increase since CO2 was at pre-industrial levels (when we were coming out The Little Ice Age) is between 1C and 2C. The implication is that all of this 1C or 2C is due to CO2, rather than less than 1C, which would at least seem plausible (if you ignore all the above niggles).

(Skeptical Science side-step the logarithmic issue by fudging their Y-axis and setting 'radiative forcing' at zero for 280 ppm, which is meaningless. As their chart shows, if you fudge it like this, 'radiative forcing' at a lower CO2 level of 140 ppm would be negative, i.e. it would have a cooling effect.)

6. So you have to ignore several glaring contradictions and omissions to reach the conclusion that CO2 increases have pushed up average temperatures by even 1C , that is at the upper, upper range of the even remotely plausible. (If you factor in items 1, 2 and the logarithmic effect, the impact of CO2 is immeasurably small).
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7. What if Skeptical Science is/are right and a) temperatures really are 30C warmer because of CO2 and b) the effect is close to linear? In that case, average temperatures would have increased by about 10C since the 19th century, which clearly they haven't, even if we pretend that The Little Age was somehow normal and a reasonable base line.

Do they not read what they write and think it through to the logical conclusion and realise how stupid they sound?

Reader's Letter of The Day

From The Metro:

I may be in a minority here but I don't understand the panic about coronavirus. We are told flu kills around 20,000 a year in the UK alone. But the fact is flu attacks the already weak and simply hurries their demise.

I'm not trying to dismiss the tragedy of people dying, but can we please get a grip? Or course take precautions - the blindingly obvious 'wash your hands' - but so far hardly anyone has died after being infected with coronavirus, even in China where less than five per cent of those affected have succumbed.

Paul B, Edinburgh

Yes, but that's the same thing, they're doing double counting.

Another failed debunking-the-debunkers attempt by Skeptical Science:
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Myth: Each unit of CO2 you put into the atmosphere has less and less of a warming impact. Once the atmosphere reaches a saturation point, additional input of CO2 will not really have any major impact.

It's like putting insulation in your attic. They give a recommended amount and after that you can stack the insulation up to the roof and it's going to have no impact." (Marc Morano, as quoted by Steve Eliot)
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The mistaken idea that the Greenhouse Effect is 'saturated', that adding more CO2 will have virtually noeffect, is based on a simple misunderstanding of how the Greenhouse Effect works.

The myth goes something like this:
* CO2 absorbs nearly all the Infrared (heat) radiation leaving the Earth's surface that it can absorb. True!
* Therefore adding more CO2 won't absorb much more IR radiation at the surface. True!
* Therefore adding more CO2 can't cause more warming. FALSE!!!

Here's why; it ignores the very simplest arithmetic...

The air doesn't just absorb heat, it also loses it as well! The atmosphere isn't just absorbing IR Radiation (heat) from the surface.

It is also radiating IR Radiation (heat) to Space. If these two heat flows are in balance, the atmosphere doesn't warm or cool - it stays the same.

Similarly we can change how much heat there is in the atmosphere by restricting how much heat leaves the atmosphere rather than by increasing how much is being absorbed by the atmosphere.

That's the same thing! If more warmth is absorbed then, by definition, less is radiated. You can't add the two together. It's like saying "I earn £2,000 a month and spend £2,000 a month, so each month I earn £4,000."

Daily Mail on Top Form, Nearly

From The Daily Mail:

A dog trainer who once worked for Princess Anne is suspected of murdering his wife at the cottage where Boris Johnson grew up.

John Zurick, 67, allegedly shot his estranged wife Debbie, 56, after he discovered she had a new boyfriend. He then turned the shotgun on himself, friends said yesterday.

Paramedics were called to the cottage, on the Prime Minister's family estate in Somerset, on Saturday afternoon but were unable to save Mrs Zurick...

The Zuricks bought the property, where the Prime Minister spent some of his childhood, from Mr Johnson's father Stanley for £440,000 in 2013.

Stanley Johnson owns the neighbouring 14th century farmhouse on the Nethercote estate with his wife Jennifer. A third house on the estate is owned by the Prime Minister's sister Rachel.

Yes, yes, but what would the cottage be worth now (ignoring the murder-suicide stuff)?

"My advice for Rishi Sunak: superforecasters won’t make your Budget better"

Stephen King, HSBC's Senior Economic Adviser gloriously misses the point in yesterday's Evening Standard:

Rishi Sunak, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, is presenting his first Budget on March 11.  To do so, he'll need some vaguely credible economic forecasts. Without them, the fiscal arithmetic is no more than guesswork. In the bad old days, chancellors simply looked at themselves in the mirror and came up with numbers that best suited their political purposes.  

Gordon Brown kept changing his forecasts to prove there could be "no more boom and bust", singularly failing to spot the looming global financial crisis.

In the late Eighties, Nigel Lawson persuaded himself that Britain was about to embark on a prolonged period of faster growth and lower inflation, conveniently ignoring the housing boom that led to the early-Nineties recession.

He goes on to dismiss the whole idea of forecasts - either they are wrong; politically unpalatable; or they are self-fulfilling prophecies.

And that's ultimately the problem with economic forecasting, particularly in the public realm. Some things just aren't forecast for the simple reason that, until they actually happen, it's easier to pretend otherwise.

In May 2008, midway between the failures of Northern Rock and Lehman Brothers, the Bank of England apparently regarded the risk of recession as very low — in hindsight a seemingly ridiculous conclusion.

Does he not even bother to read what he has written and look for the most basic patterns - to wit house price bubble and credit bubble => house price crash and credit crunch => recession? he gives two recent examples of exactly that. That's all you have to look out for.

To make matters even easier, these crashes happen every 18 years or so (he mentions 1990 and 2008, next one due 2025 or 2026).

The Chancellor has a choice - press on with Home-Owner-Ism and worry about the mess later, or take active steps to dampen leveraged land price speculation.

He can re-adopt 20th Century Georgism Lite (mortgage caps, rent caps etc) or he could do the decent thing and replace as many taxes as possible with Land Value Tax.

Barclays' new "Confirmation of Payee" service.

Email received from Barclays today:

Hi Customer,

What's new?

I'm sure they'll tell me...

A new service called Confirmation of Payee has been designed to help protect your payments from scams, fraudsters and payments going to the wrong account.

From March, when you pay a new person or business using Faster Payments (including standing orders) or CHAPS, we'll match their account name as well as the sort code and account number to make sure you're paying the right person. If someone makes a new payment to you, their bank may do the same.
[and so on]

Your Barclays Business Team

They appear to have learned the lesson from this debacle.

You do wonder, why on earth didn't banks always check the name of the recipient? What was the point of asking for their name if they're not going to check it?

My favourite covid-19 related website

Worldometer publish lots of charts and tables here, it's updated daily on the basis of available information. For most of the graphs, you can choose linear or logarithmic scale.

The underlying info might not be 100% accurate, but let's assume that it's consistently wrong and thus a fair basis for looking at trends.

"It never rains but it pours"

The Guardian appears to be taking this expression literally.

Guardian reader's letter, May 2019:

Weather forecasts are ignoring the drought in England

Paul Brown is spot-on in his criticism of how weather forecasts and presenters ignore the continuing drought (Weatherwatch, 28 May). It is as if they are in a parallel universe where the climate emergency does not exist. Wildlife, gardeners, farmers and all who care about the environment are desperate for proper rainfall, especially in central and southern England.

Linda Lennard, St Albans

Guardian article, Feb 2020:

With every flood, public anger over the climate crisis is surging

Sometimes it has felt as if the rain might never stop. These storms have gone beyond the point of simply being storms now, each blurring into the next to create a strangely end-of-days feeling. Everything is freakishly sodden and swollen, and while the rural flood plain on which I live fortunately hasn’t flooded anything like as badly as some, the rivers are rising alarmingly.

Yet still the lashing winds and biblical downpours keep coming. Suddenly the 40 Days of Action campaign that Extinction Rebellion (XR) will launch on Ash Wednesday (26 February), encouraging people to reflect on the environmental consequences of their actions in a kind of green Lent, feels ominously well named.

So what is it chaps, wetter or drier? (Or would you always have this impression if you compare a month in Spring with one in Winter?)

Oh, surprise surprise, it's neither.

Paul Holmewood summarised rainfall charts for England and Wales 1766 to 2016, and there is no discernible trend, annual rainfall in most years was between 800mm and 1,000 mm:



If you really squint at the ten-year running average, there appears to be a slight upwards trend from the early 1900s (about 850mm) to the 2010s (about 950mm), but most years stayed within the 800mm - 1,000mm range.

As he says himself:

By far the wettest month was October 1903, when 218mm fell. The wettest month in recent years was November 2009, with 192mm.

Again, I can see no evidence of anything unusual occurring in the last decade or so. There is a suggestion, though, that very wet months were not as common prior to the 20thC. This can be better seen by looking at the number of months >150mm per decade. The latest ten years is shown for comparison:


On average, it is fair to say that it is a little bit wetter now than it used to be in the early 19thC. But above all it is the year to year variability which dominates the record, just as it always has.

As to actual 'floods', the chances are these are down to deforestation and dredging/straightening of watercourses upstream; and more urbanisation (building over large contiguous areas, especially in areas prone to flooding) and not enough dredging/straightening of rivers downstream.

[Adjective] [noun] - film titles in the 1980s

Her Indoors was watching Basic Instinct as I drifted off to sleep yesterday, and it reminded me of something that has been bugging me for the last thirty years.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, a lot of film titles were just an adjective and a noun, it was a fashion that came and went. The cleverer ones were where you didn't know what the phrase referred to until somebody told you, or you watched the film.

Here's a list of The 68 Best '80s Movies Ever Made, according to Marie Claire. I have no idea why they chose the number 68, or why they caveat it with "... Ever Made" (clearly, they're not making "'80s movies" any more, but hey.

Their list includes:

Short Circuit
Lost Boys
Steel Magnolias
Evil Dead
Raging Bull
Full Metal Jacket (OK, that's two adjectives)
Blue Velvet
Working Girl
Weird Science
Mystic Pizza
Risky Business
Top Gun
Foot Loose (OK, that's noun-adjective, but it's my list)
Dirty Dancing

That's one fifth of the list.

Other noteables (maybe they are on the above list and I overlooked them) are:

Rude Boy (the Clash film)
Mad Max
Blue Lagoon
Red Dawn
Black Widow (the one with Debra Winger)
Fatal Attraction
Dangerous Liaisons
Legal Weapon

UK television joined in the fun too:
Cold Feet
Silent Witness

The trend continued into the 1990s and then fizzled out again:
Hot Shots
Basic Instinct
Cool Runnings
Broken Arrow
Indecent Proposal
American Beauty

Nowadays, most films are sequels or prequels or part of a series, so they end up with very long and  punctuation heavy film titles like The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2 or Deadpool: The Musical 2, or just about any Avengers film, which are all called Avengers: [brief description of plot].