Household Charge Groundhog Day

As we have the same conversation about the Household Charge every single day on the Journal I’m just going to stick this here so I can get to it when I need it, and save me having to find it, copy it and repost it:

 

Someone always wheels out that tired old line “If you didn’t register you don’t have to pay.”

It’s simply not true.

When this was mentioned in February all the relevant organsations, on both sides, said that this wasn’t true.

“Why then”, asks the tax evader, “were we asked to register at all (at all)?”

Well it’s simple, the state didn’t have a registry of of the ownership status of every property in the State. They could have gone through a long process of determining it but they decided to ask people thinking, incorrectly as it turns out, that people are basically law abiding.

The next line is “An ESB bill doesn’t prove that I own a house”, maybe not but when you sign up for electricity, or gas, or a phone you are asked what your home owner status is. So you’ve already given that status to a state run authority, they are simply collating ownership claims you’ve already made.

Finally we get, “I didn’t get a first letter.” Well if you read the articles and press releases you’ll see that the first wave of letters was targeted mainly at landlords, are you a landlord? The second wave, the harder to determine wave is targeted at home owners.

I’m not quite rolling in money but I can afford 2 euros a week, can’t you? Are you sure you don’t have any expenses you can’t get rid of? Your internet connection? Your TV? Sure there’s nothing worth watching anyway.

And it’s “unjust”, apparently. Well Morality is a nebulous concept. I’ll leave it to the churchmen and the philosophers, but what else might be unjust?

What if the millionaire says “Well I contribute a lot to society and I pay plenty of income tax, but a lot of other people pay nothing and take a lot out, that doesn’t seem very just to me. I’ll with hold some of my taxes.” Is that OK? Or if someone says “I don’t like what this government is doing, it’s unjust, I won’t declare my income, pay not tax and still take social welfare.” Is that OK?

Everything’s unfair or unjust to someone.

And apparently the rich don’t pay enough tax, well according to news reports on this site in 2010 tax revenues from high earners resulted in an average effective tax rate of around 30%. The OECD tax database shows that the average tax burden on wages from “All-in average personal tax rates” comes to about 16.5%. Now it’s been a little while since my maths degree but 30 is more than 16.5 still, isn’t it?

Then someone will start off about sheep or “sheeple”, well studies show that sheep are smarter than previously thought (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8335465/Sheep-are-far-smarter-than-previously-thought.html). If people are like any mammal found on a farm then they’re like a party of small schoolchildren on a day trip to that farm. “Wah ‘snot fair! Don’t wanna!”

Does that cover everything? No, not quite. Massive savings could be managed by wholesale public services reform. And that’s true, perfectly and utterly true, but to do that you’ll need to get the Unions on board and they, these unelected self serving officials, will never stand for it. If you can get them on board then I’ll be very impressed and will look at any reforms with great interest.

So what if they raise it next year by a factor of 100? A 10K Household charge? They won’t.

 

Hating The Poor And Vulnerable

A bit of a convo about the poor and workfare on twitter last week and a blog explaining my position was promised but wasn’t forthcoming because I have a newborn in the house and any quiet moment I could get to myself was spent quietly, or tidying, or sorting out paperwork, or sleeping.

Before you have your first child people tell you to store up your sleep but we aren’t hibernating mammals and sleep doesn’t work like that.

So …

… When workfare and related topics of social welfare reform rear their heads certain things are bound to happen.

First there is an accusation of hating the poor and vulnerable.  I don’t hate the poor, I hate that they are poor and would like them to have more money so that they can contribute to society’s unspoken contract.  Then someone, let’s call him Arthur Pitworker, turns up.  Arthur has worked 20 years in a coal mine paying his dues and contributing to society and now he has been thrown on the slag heap and all he wants is to collect his dole and keep his dignity while he looks for alternate employment without being put on some sort of half arse scheme that insults him, his intelligence, his experience and the fact that he has contributed.  Well good on you, Arthur.  You understand how things should work.  You have paid in and now you want to take back what you have paid in and you want to work.  Unfortunately the money you paid in has been spent, invested, bought, sold, appreciated, depreciated and spent on redundant missile systems over the years to the extent that the money you are taking out is, in fact, the money I am putting in.  I don’t begrudge you that.  When I get to the point where I am taking out the same will have happened to my contributions and it’ll be our children and grandchildren who are contributing that money.  That’s how it’s supposed to work.

Unfortunately there are a couple of other people in the equation.  Reece School-Leaver and Eustace Scrounger.  Reece has finished school or college and can’t get a job.  Not the job he thinks society owes him for getting reasonable grades.  He’s not going to work in McDonalds for instance, he thinks he’s better than that.  Fortunately for him he still has a room in his parent’s house, electricity, water, internet and food paid for and if he needs some spending money he has the government to fall back on.  They’ll give him at least 100 Euros a week so he has some money in his pocket.  They’ll give him more if he goes into some sort of further education, but there are no jobs with his current qualifications, so he doesn’t bother with that.

Eustace has never had a “job” as such.  He has a house on the council with rent allowance, money from the government, a free washing machine every 3 years and financial assistance where he can finagle it on incidental expenses, like when his wife has a kid and he needs a new pram or pushchair, he gets a bit of extra money because he can’t work because his leg hurts when it rains he has a note on his from an overworked doctor who didn’t really examine him.  He does work occasionally, when he isn’t in the pub, but he does it black or keep it’s under 20 hours a week so he doesn’t impact the money he is “due” from the government.

It’s people like Reece and Eustace that make the impact on tax payers like me and former tax payers like Arthur.  We resent them.  We resent their money for nothing attitude and we resent the fact that they don’t get society’s contract: Society pays out because people pay into society.

As a result of Reece and Eustace the truly poor and vulnerable do start to get hit quite badly when money is tight.

That’s why we want people like Reece and Eustace to be made to go out to work, even on workfare, so that the poor and the vulnerable aren’t impacted.

 

The Price Of Gender Equality?

An interesting little theory I ran across years ago and have since seen expounded more than once that appears to hang together but is probably worth the paper it’s printed on.

Gender Equality is the cause of the economic bubble (and a bunch of other stuff).

Gender Equality led to more women working, thus to greater disposable income and thus to more inflation, it also led to the ageing population as more women put off having children and having careers instead.  Employment will have been impacted as some jobs done by men will have been done by equally qualified women and all this will have impacted inflation and the property bubble as prices rose to accomodate the disposable money and the increased borrowing power of these dual income couples.

So the impacts are:

• Ageing population (and hence the need for economic immigrants)
• Property Bubble
• Unemployment
• Inflation

All going to unsustainable levels and the inevitable crash.

Seems a bit neat, a bit too neat.  I don’t subscribe to single causes of issues.  You could see, though, how it could be used by an unscrupulous person.  Heck we could probably throw in Adolf Hitler for starting a war that led to more women working outside the home and showing that they are every bit as capable as men.

But then Godwin.

 

Yes to the Fiscal Stability Treaty.

People of Ireland, vote Yes to the Fiscal Stability Treaty.

Vote Yes for Stability.

You want to vote No?  You want instability do you?  You want people starving in the streets?  You want no new jobs in Ireland again ever?  You voted Yes (eventually) to Lisbon and Nice and they promised you jobs and those jobs are on the way, you just have to vote Yes to this treaty too and maybe to one or two more.

Vote Yes for Stability.  Vote Yes for Jobs.

You know that for every person that votes No, this man:

Will bite the head off a puppy?  You want puppies to die?  He’ll do it on live television you know, while kids are watching.  You want that do you?  You want instability, unemployment and a man eating puppies on television in front of your kids?

Vote Yes for Stability.  Vote Yes for Jobs.  Vote Yes for the puppies.  Vote Yes for the children.

The weather has been dire lately, that’s because you’re thinking of voting No.  Your negativity is affecting the weather.  You want instability, unemployment, a man eating puppies on television in front of your kids and you want more rain?

Vote Yes for Stability.  Vote Yes for Jobs.  Vote Yes for the puppies.  Vote Yes for the children.  Vote Yes for the sunshine.  Vote Yes for the moonlight.  Vote Yes for the good times.  Vote Yes for the boogie.

Come on Ireland.  Vote Yes.

 

Solution To The Greece Problem

Obviously the Greeks don’t know what they’re doing or what they want.

Isn’t it time that Angela Merkel the EU stepped in and just appointed a government so the euro can last another couple of weeks?

 

Keep The Faith With Davey C

Today the PM is saying that his government is going to stick with his current policies on sorting out the economy.  He’s aware of the elections in Europe, the demises of various governments and so on, and he’s going on with what he has been doing, trying to get the deficit under control through public spending cuts.

Looking at the toilet wall many people seem quite dissatisfied.  They say that Cameron is a moron.  This means that two years ago 10 million of your countrymen voted for people who are led by this moron.  About one fifth of the UK electorate endorsed that moron.  They must be morons too.  Doesn’t say much for the British people as a whole.

Or maybe those scrawling on the toilet wall are wrong.  After all Cameron rejected the Fiscal Compact (Fiscal Union or FU, according to Hannan, the Stability Treaty according to the Irish Yes campaign and the Austerity Treaty according to the Irish No campaign) which seems to be the straw that’s breaking the camel’s back all over Europe.  By rejecting such strictures Cameron remains able to pursue austerity now and, if things change 6 months down the line, he can pursue other routes.  Anyone who embraces the Compact can’t create their own fiscal policy, they have to be approved by the rest of the union.

The real problem here is that Cameron isn’t doing what the wall scrawlers want.  He’s doing what makes sense to him, and to his team.  Could they be right?  In fact, could they be more right than a disparate group ranting on the Internet about Cultural Marxism at the drop of a hat?  Odds are they could.

But at the same time this isn’t what people want.  What they all want is less austerity and more spending as long as they don’t have to pay for it.  But that simply isn’t practical.  You need to get money in order to spend it, we don’t want to borrow it (you can’t borrow your way out of debt) and no one wants to be taxed for it.  At the same time Cameron has to play a balancing act to keep his own party, his coalition partners and the electorate at large happy.  It’s hardly an enviable task.  It’s easy to complain, but it’s a tough act to manage, I doubt many of those complaining could do better.

And what’s the alternative?  Under the basis of the recent council elections some are saying “Let the coalition fall, have new elections.”  They want the Tories and UKIP to form an alliance and take power.  But think about this.  As far as the wider electorate, who aren’t scrawling about the EUSSR on the wall of the bog, are concerned the Tories will be tainted with the hard measures they’ve been implementing, necessarily, for the last two years.  Who would get in?  Could it be a party led by a man who looks like what you get when Nick Park decides to do an animation on monkeys?  Oh yes indeed.  The only possibly good aspect to this would be that at the next election the Tories could win a clear majority but what would be left by then for them to govern?

There are no economic miracles.  The last whiff we got of one was under Brown as Chancellor and then as PM.  It turned out to be smoke and mirrors and has left a legacy which is distinctly whiffy.  No one said that turning around the economy would be easy.  This is a hard slog from a committed team that knows that change doesn’t come easily.

So keep the faith with Davey C like any politician he wants one thing above all, re-election, and he’s prepared to fix the economy come what may to try to do that.

 

Protest Voting Makes No Sense

This is directed at Protest voters, not at people who voted for candidates they truly believed in.  Despite what some of the papers are saying one or two people didn’t vote as a protest, they voted for people they thought could make a real change to the way their local authority functions and maybe to reward them for what they’ve done in the  past.

No, this is about people who looked at what was going on Westminster with Dave and Nick and said “Oh I don’t like that” and voted Labour locally in order to protest.

So you’ve got rid of some local councillors who may have been working hard to help you and your local community, maybe for years.  People who may have some influence with your local MP or may have some association with the main party that is in power.  You’ve replaced them with someone who is ‘led’ by Ed Miliband.  The Opposition Leader.  A man who has little influence over your local authority and little influence over government policies that influence your local authority.  Your local authority now has the same budget restrictions and challenges that it had yesterday but now it has some much greener people running it.  Well done.

Sure, in a few years Labour might be in power and your local councillors might then be able to influence people who influence people who influence change but in the meantime … And anyway Labour will turn out to be a right shower again and then you’ll get rid of all your Labour councillors to protest at Westminster again, that’ll show ’em.

I’m not saying you should necessarily re-elect the same councillors again and again, or you should necessarily elect people who are in the same party as the party in power, that’s equally stupid.

Surely when you elect people at a local level you should elect people who think and function with the needs of the local community at heart and not on the basis of what is going on in the Westminster bubble, which is barely aware of you.  Anyone who tries to drag national policies, that have nothing to do with the local government remit, into local electioneering is clearly an imbecile.  If you vote for an imbecile or you vote in an imbecilic way then you can’t very well complain when central government acts like the electorate are idiots.

 

A Question For The Amateur Economisticians

I’ve had a thought, yes another one, yes it was lonely etc etc.  It ends in a question for the amateur economists out there.

Things in the UK are beginning to look better with falling unemployment and possibly rising house prices.  One thing the economy would need to sustain growth would be increased personal spending, and if other factors begin to look better increased personal spending would ensue.

However one thing the UK also needs is increased steady light rain to alleviate the drought.  If that happened, of course, people wouldn’t go out as much and personal spending might not manifest.

So my question is … what would you prefer a good summer or sustained economic growth?  Answer as honestly and selfishly as you wish.

 

The Really Worrying Thing About Breivik

One thing I find most worrying about Breivik isn’t so much what he says, but how familiar what he says is.  As you may know I used to use the DT Blogs to comment on issues of the day until the popular opinions of some of the more “enthusiastic” posters grew in me a soul destroying sense of futility such that I left it alone.  But it was comments such as these that echo most strongly with what Breivik says.  Mad Dano Connor for one, agrees with Breivik on so many points.

Go to many of Ed West’s blogs (sorry Ed, but you are a venue for these people much as you disagree with them) and sort the comments on best rated and you’ll see that many people on that site, while they may not agree with Breivik’s actions, agree with the sort of things he was saying in his speech.

Take these comments by Paul Weston (chairman of the British Freedom Party) on a recent blog on George Galloway’s by election victory:

I am afraid the old order is changing now, and nothing can stop it. When the native British were still “native” the old political order could have continued on for many more decades.

But the importation of foreign races and cultures has effectively ended that. Over the coming years we will see more division and societal friction, more riots, more rapes and murders and more retaliation from the whites.

It is unprecedented that an ancient race of warlike people (the English) could possibly accept their soon-to-be-minority status in a land much fought for, when faced with a clear and growing vision of how their children and grandchildren will be treated when they become a minority.

We are entering Weimar Republic times Ed. The 2015 elections will probably be the last of the historical political order in Britain. After that it becomes impossible to predict, but a new era of angry “monocultural” politics is fast descending upon us.

I no longer fully believe our future survival can be ensured peacefully, so why Blair and Brown are not facing treason trials is quite beyond me. I can only hope they will be held to account one day at our own version of Nuremberg.

And

I don’t see how the Tories can appeal to white working class (WWC) without morphing into the BNP-lite.

The WWC are angry. betrayed by Labour, and most unlikely to vote for the Tories, where will they turn?

It never seemed to occur to our half-witted politicians what the likely outcome of a seriously unhappy WWC could be, but that outcome only waits on the ticking clock of history and reality.

Now read the live blog of Breivik’s speech from AFP.

Do you see an echo between the two?  I’m not saying Weston is going to go crazy and kill a load of people, Weston has chosen political confrontation rather than a violent confrontation, but they both speak of it being “inevitable” that “ethnic” people will become minorities in Europe and that violent confrontation is similarly “inevitable”.  There’s a definite level of agreement between them.

A few months ago I asked people like Dano and other users like him if in the case of such societal discord being “inevitable” they would be prepared to precipitate their “inevitable” civil war by an act of aggression that could be attributed to the “other side”, one of them said yes (and got a few recommends as a result, post Breivik they deny this response).  In light of Breivik’s actions this seems even more worrying.

In an earlier blog I agreed with Dan Hodges that we should give the security services the powers to track and monitor the sort of people that might perpetrate such horrors, I can only hope that we do so and that people like this can be identified by their comments on blog sites like the DT and can be so monitored.

Earlier today, though, Dan said on twitter that he wished Breivik had been shot by the Norweigian police, but I cannot agree.  An easy death is too easy for people like Breivik and it is by identifying and understanding him that we can identify similar risks throughout society and endeavour to stop their own acts of horror.

 

Elgin Marbles And Falklands – Same Bleedin’ Principle

There are two claims of ownership being forced at the British people at the moment, The Elgin Marbles and The Falklands.

On the latter whenever this rears its head someone on the Argentine side starts bleating about Diego Garcia.  They say that because the British, as part of an agreement with the US, forcibly repatriated the inhabitants of Diego Garcia in 1971 then the claim that the inhabitants have the right to self determination is in some way negated.  This is tantamount to saying, you did this thing that was wrong 40 years ago so you have no right to do the right thing now, do the wrong thing because that’s what we want you to do.  Which is bollocks in anyone’s language.

But this does come down to self determination.  If the Falklanders want to remain British then they should have the right to do so and the British government should defend them, same would go for Gibraltar.

And maybe the same for the Elgin Marbles.  If the Greeks can bring these statues to life and they express a wish to return to Greece they should be allowed.  However if the Greeks can’t bring their own economy to life I can’t see them having much luck with some 2400 year old statuary.

In both cases, they’re ours.  Sod Off.  Do you not understand that?  What’s the issue?  The “sod” or the “off”?