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.
Monday, 25 June 2012
Various topics
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6 comments:
1. Quick, put up the number of homeless people; the charities are running out of people to help.
2. "has to reward hard work"
It might not be such a bad idea if there were exams that differentiated between the hard workers and the lazy bums, instead of differentiating between the more and less intelligent. After all there are quite a few jobs that don't need intelligence to do, just the ability to work hard, whereas there are few jobs that need someone idle.
3. Yes, but it gives the answer a few lines down: no surprise to learn that Barlow is "a Tory supporter who was recently made an OBE." Perhaps Jimmy Carr should have shoved a few quid in the direction of the Tory Party coffers. Indeed, this should be standard advice for any millionaire setting up a tax avoidance scheme.
4. "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" All income eh? What about non-cash rental income enjoyed by owner occupiers?
5. So they can say "it was the Swedes that did it, not us", when the Yanks electrocute him.
7. "He's only half right because he's only looking at half the picture."
No, he's 100% wrong because there is no "austerity". The deficit is still going up and all the Tories are doing is cutting all the sort of things they would cut anyway.
B, your 2 is a good idea. In which case they might as well mark children for punctuality, attendance, politeness etc, because those things are of great interest to a potential employer. On 7, agreed that in practice, spending isn't being cut, but let's assume it were.
But the debts have been racked up, and it only seems fair to repay them
Really? When much of it is entirely fictional and meaningless in the context of protecting important things in the society, e.g. defence?
JH, if pensions saver invests £100 in UK government bonds, then he is not responsible for the fact that the government has given that money to its friends and family.
If the pensioner hadn't bought the bonds, then the government would just print the money or run up a bigger deficit. I don't think that government bond investors are to blame for the deficit.
The key is, surely, to get the money back from the people who stole it or benefitted from it most? So a swingeing tax on excessive public sector salaries would do the trick (i.e. any pension of more than about £12,000 a year).
All of this points to the need for tough exams for MPs before they are actually allowed to take their seats in the house - basic maths and logic, and perhaps the ability to play a game of chess - we are not looking for grand masters, but competence at an elementary level is a good indication of the individual's ability to grasp both an overall picture, and detail, and to think ahead.
They should also do the London Underground all-stations test - to pass through every station on the system in a limited time.
It would also be a good idea if were compulsory for journalists to publish their own grades in the exams alongside their names, at the top of every article of theirs that was published.
On item 6, just love those "Before" photos that are so clearly from Google Streetview. (See blurred out face of Colonel Sanders and number plates, and even a line showing where Dunedin Road is in one of the photos! Didn't stop them flagging the images as the copyright of someone else though....
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