Even Guido is on the Bandwagon

Here


And the comments are off.  I wonder why?

The most popular search term on bing.com

Predictably enough

UKIP's Nigel Farage wants return to policy 'normality'

From the BBC

UKIP would cut the number of half-baked policy announcements but would not set an annual target, Nigel Farage said.

The party wants bar room policies to return to "normal" levels, said Mr Farage, with between 20,000 and 50,000 dog-whistle ideas given publicity.

A UKIP spokesman said last week that bullshit populist ideas should be capped at 50,000 a year.

Mr Farage insisted the party had not done a U-turn, but said the public were sick of talk about caps and targets, until they're not.

Short List

"Advisors to English kings in the Middle Ages who were called 'Thomas' and ended up falling out with the king and being assasinated/executed."

Thomas Becket
Thomas More
Thomas Cromwell

John b adds: Thomas Cranmer

An earlier treasonous - albeit probably fictitious - Tom got off lightly.

Gimme Shelter

From The Daily Mail and/or Metrolyrics:

Yeah, a local business is threatening
My very life today
If the planners don't turn them down
Ooh yeah, I'm gonna fade away

The planned new café, children, is just two miles away
Is just two miles away
The planned café, children, is just two miles away
Is just two miles away, miles away, miles away, yeah

"Our goal is a Britain where everyone who works hard can have a home of their own"

Sez Dave Cameron.

But what if we turn that statement round:

"Our goal is a Britain where people who aren't working hard have to trade down into somewhere more affordable, and certainly won't be sitting back collecting rent from people who are working hard"?

How many people would sign up to that?

North Sea oil: tax and subsidies

A few ill-thought out ideas from opposite ends of the political spectrum.

From the BBC:

[Gordon Brown] suggested a number of measures that he claimed could help the industry, including;

* A North Sea reserve to maintain and upgrade essential infrastructure and to provide "last-resort" debt finance for companies who want to keep fields open.
* UK government co-investment through public-private partnerships.
* Government loans.
* Advance purchase agreements.

Yup, nationalise it and subsidise it; he doesn't appear to have mentioned tax cuts.

And from City AM:

Deep tax cuts are the way to go. Nothing less than a double digit cut or the elimination of the supplementary charge will achieve the necessary level of impact. The Basin needs help now, or much of it could disappear if the oil price stays at these levels for a number of years...

Rather reassuringly, the article also tells us that extraction costs are £18.50 ($28.50) per barrel, only half the current oil price, so there's still plenty to play for. Most of his special pleading is hokum, but here's the interesting bit:

And if policymakers want to be really radical, there is always the option of introducing production sharing contracts for North Sea exploration.

The UK is out of step with many other oil producing countries, where these arrangements are a standard alternative to our tax and royalty system. In essence, these contracts between governments and extraction companies guarantee a minimum and maximum return on capital, giving companies more financial certainty and governments more tax revenues.
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In outline, the original 1970s system for North Sea oil taxation was quite Georgist. Capital expenditure was allowed as incurred on a cash basis (none of this capital allowance nonsense), which minimised downside risk - but the corporation tax rate was very high. Norway and The Netherlands have stuck with this, quite successfully.

So oil companies ended up with a fair return on capital and the government kept most of the 'rent' or the 'free gift of nature' i.e. the excess of market price over extraction costs.

Interestingly, both Brown and the vested interest guy are stumbling in the right i.e. Georgist, direction, which is to abandon all current taxes on North Sea oil producers and for the government to enter into fixed-price agreements with them to purchase oil for cost-plus, say £30 a barrel.

This gives the oil companies incentives (the price would be set by however much they bid at a reverse auction) and certainty; and the government gets the freebie. It also gets the upside and the downside of oil price fluctuations, but as oil revenues are only a very small part of UK tax revenues, that scarcely matters.

Remember also that even if the world oil price fell below £30/barrel, the UK government would still not be making a commercial loss, because the 'pump price' of a barrel of oil (159 litres), minus refining and transport costs is £1/litre. It would just be making a smaller profit than it otherwise would have been.

Whether the government would get more or less revenue under such a system is neither here nor there, it would be getting the right amount of revenue and that is what matters.

Fun Online Polls: Have you ever bought the house you were renting & Madonna's latest stunt.

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

Have you ever bought the house you were renting when your landlord put it up for sale?

Yes - 15%
No - 85%

That's more than I was expecting, albeit on a low turnout so not entirely reliable as a statistic.

It doesn't really matter though, because it illustrates a general point. The Home-Owner-Ists maintain that somehow magically landowners create land values, and that tenants are merely supplicants who should be grateful for what they get.

If that were true, then no tenant would ever wish to buy his own home.

By crude analogy, I - like most people - would be useless at repairing a car, and most mechanics are pretty useless at company paperwork (as pointless as it might be). So I take my VW Golf Mk II to the garage for service and MOT and so on; in turn, the garage owner takes his paperwork to accountants like me to sort out. If I had to repair my own car and he had to do his own company paperwork then all Hell would break loose.

Not so the landlord: cut him out of the equation by buying your home and nothing bad happens. The contribution that you - as worker, taxpayer, consumer and/or voter - make to the local or national economy - and hence the desirability or otherwise of your neighbourhood - is entirely unchanged whether you are a tenant or an owner-occupier.
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That dispute over whether that dress was pale blue/gold or deep blue/black having been settled, let us return to the other *hot topic* of last week.

I have watched Maddona's BRITS tumble a couple of times, and to me it looked staged. The clue is that the backing band never missed a beat and played one extra line empty in anticipation of her standing up again. And I bet the cloak was well padded.

Vote here or use the widget in the side bar.

Rubber plant

I'd had this plant since it was a few inches tall (about twelve years ago, a three-for-a-fiver offer at Homebase) and dutifully chopped off all the sideways branches so that it would grow nice and straight (which it did).

Problem was, it grew so high it touched the ceiling, so it got relegated to the stairwell a few years ago. It didn't get enough light there, so most of the leaves fell off, apart from at the very top and on a stray branch at the bottom and one half way up.

So I have just chopped it off just above the bottom branch, repotted it vertically and will now start again.

Ho hum, we'll see:

Iron ore: Another classic example of cartel behaviour

From mining.com:

The price of [iron ore] is trading at the lowest levels since early May 2009. So far in 2015 the price has fallen 12.5% following a year in which the commodity nearly halved in value [to $63/tonne]

... more than softening demand, increased supply has been blamed on the fall in the price. Global production of iron ore rose by an annual average of over 6% from 2010 to 2014 despite the fall in prices and is set to expand even further this year.

The growth in output came mainly from the big three producers – Vale, Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton – which even at today's price enjoy fat margins thanks to cost of production of only around $25 a tonne.

Goldman Sachs released its estimates for iron ore on Friday. The investment bank cut its outlook for iron ore for this year to $66 a tonne this year, down substantially from an earlier estimate of $80: "Significant overinvestment to date will ensure that the market is well supplied, while demand from the Chinese steel sector is maturing. A painful war of attrition awaits."

So the Big Three are doing pretty much exactly the same as the Saudis with oil. Drive up prices and lull lots of would be competitors into investing in higher cost production, then boost output, watch prices halve and drive them all out of business again.