Fun Online Polls: How much is your house worth & A Eurocrat scorned

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

What's the current value of the home you live in divided by your household's annual gross income (excl. rental income)?
Less than ten - 63%
More than ten - 37%

In the general spirit of asking leading questions, I set it up so that the results showed up as follows:

Would you be better off if we taxed land rents instead of earned income?
Yes - 63%
No - 37%

Because, ignoring any sort of wider moral or economic questions, it is quite simply the case that most people have relatively little rental income (which is currently lightly taxed and heavily subsidised) compared to their earned income (which is very heavily taxed), and they would all be better off from Day One. The multiple of "ten" just happens to be the mathematical cut-off point between those who would be better off from Day One and those who might have to trade down or get a proper job.

In the long run of course, because of Laffer effects, compound growth, better social cohesion, better town planning etc, everybody would be better off, but people are very short-termist in what they vote for (hence and why Labour is currently ahead in the opinion polls). By analogy, after slavery was abolished, even the former slave owners ended up better off.
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In the comments to a post of a couple of days ago, Bayard asked:

... do the advantages of leaving the EU outweigh the disadvantages of staying? The advantages of leaving a marriage are not the same as the disadvantages of entering into one, as, in the former case, you are likely to have a spiteful and revenge-seeking ex-spouse to deal with.

Hell will hold no fury like a Eurocrat scorned; we should expect the maximum of petty obstruction in all out future dealings with the EU, should we decide to leave.

Fair point, but do we have any examples of countries leaving supra-national organisations to fall back on to try and guess what might happen thereafter? I think we do. Even within living memory: plenty of countries left various empires after the Second World War (most British or Dutch colonies; The Philippines, Vietnam a little later); France left NATO and rejoined (or something or other); plenty of countries left the Warsaw Pact or ceded from the USSR; Czechoslovakia split into two countries; Hong Kong was nominally under British control until 1997; Greenland obtained autonomy from Denmark (and hence the EU) and so on and so forth.

Most of these countries appear to have reconciled post-split, don't they?

The USA and Cuba is a counter-example, that is one stupid spat that they have kept up for fifty years after its sell-by date; as is the India-Pakistan nastiness (but that is largely because of the 'bloody shoulders of Islam', there's no evidence to suggest that there'd be no problems if India as was were still a British colony); South Korea's attitude to North Korea is a shining counter-example. And so on.

So that's this week's Fun Online Poll: "How long would it take relations between the UK and other EU Member States to re-normalise if the UK left the EU?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.