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ThoughtCrime2008

Listed below are comments made by ThoughtCrime2008 between Friday, 20th November 2009 and Tuesday, 1st December 2009 (3 Hours Ago) .

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The Lib Dems and a taxing subject 4:08pm on 01 Dec 2009 It's good to see the pathetic situation of the low-paid being taxed, then being given some of the tax back, and then having the tax repayments themselves subject to tax. And at every step of the way an army of bureaucrats is required to administer and correct mistakes.

Hiking the personal allowance and abolishing tax credits will streamline the system, although the price we'll pay is that many people currently employed at HMRC will find their services no longer required. So on a national level it's the right thing to do, but at a local level it might not be politically expedient to promise lots of people a P45 in the near future.

That said about the only thing Libdem ideas are good for is the other parties to steal. In previous elections LibDem was the way to vote if you didn't like one main party but couldn't face voting for the other. Now the government is clearly just waiting for the bitter end I suspect many voters will return to their main folds and the LibDems will become an irrelevance again.
Appetite for fat cat taxes? 00:28am on 01 Dec 2009
Of course the first thing we can do is change the mindset that the government has an automatic right to anything.

Before we ask how the government can pay for something we should ask whether it's the government's role to be paying for it at all.

At present we need to raise money to cover the monstrous national debt, and at the same time we need to cut costs.

But given the need to raise money at least temporarily it needs to be a tax which is clearly fair, hard to avoid, and which will be revoked when the economic situation has improved. The trouble with most "tax the rich" calls are that they are usually based on spite and envy. When people say "the rich" they inevitably mean "people richer than I am".

It's very easy to stir up spite and envy in the masses, introduce a populist tax which will only affect the very rich, and before we know it the rich don't pay it but the average working person does. Just look at income tax - once paid only by the very rich and now paid by everybody except the very rich.

We could save billions by cutting out fraud in the benefits budget - officially estimated to run to several billions which almost certainly means it runs to well over 10bn. With a budget of some 120bn and a population in the region of 60m, that means the benefits budget would pay 40 pounds per week to every man, woman and child in the country. So where's it all going? Cutting this fraud would yield far more money than being more spiteful towards people who spent their life working for something.
My guide to making your fortune 1:08pm on 29 Nov 2009
And so, #11, you have hit on an even bigger moneyspinner. Convince the politicians that something is critical, get it put into legislation that everybody has to do it, then charge a small slice on every single time somebody does do it.

I'm off to patent the idea of having to pay 1p for a #1 and 2p for a #2 every time you use the toilet. Who needs to compost it - if 60m people visit the bathroom twice daily that means £1.2m per day for me in royalties.
Dubai: Just a sideshow? 11:39am on 28 Nov 2009
If nothing else it's good to see people waking up and finally realising that all their money isn't actually there at all.

I've been saying for at least five years what people are saying now - the equity in your property - the "profit" if you will - is only yours once you sell. And if you sell you need to buy somewhere else, and if you buy a bigger place then high property prices mean you need more money, a bigger mortgage, more taxes, more fees to the agent and so on. So for the average person high property prices are bad, but we've been sold the lie that they are good. So we crow at middle-class dinner parties about how clever we've been when the bottom line is we're sitting on a paper profit we can't spend through good fortune and nothing more.

Now as more and more of what the coneheads and rocket scientists have developed is turning to dust around us it's time to look at what underpins all these things.

A bond is an IOU, a promise to pay at some time in the future. The value of the bond depends on the rate of interest promised and the perceived likelihood of actually getting the future value at all. I say "future value" rather than "money" because getting a specific amount of money is of limited value if the spending power of that money has devalued. As Warren Buffett said many years ago, if you've got a 5% savings account then a 100% income tax with zero inflation has the same net effect as 5% inflation and no tax. We've been lied to there as well, focussing on the tax treatment rather than the net increase in spending power.

In other words, if we invest enough money to buy a pizza now, when we get it back we need enough money to buy a pizza and have something left over. If what we get back is less than it takes to buy a pizza we've lost out, regardless of what the numbers say in isolation.

So it is with building castles in the sand. Lots of property built in the hopes of selling it, when the buyers it seems were mostly people with lots of pretend money who only bought because they figured someone else would come along with more pretend money and they could earn a quick profit. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that the only difference between an upward spiral and a downward spiral is confidence. The upward spiral stops when confidence expires, the downward spiral won't stop until confidence returns.

So, the $64000 question, who's feeling confident right now? If we aren't feeling confident in the future the coneheads can pull whatever numbers they want to show us the "recovery" but it's not real until we all believe in it again.

For myself, I don't believe in things unless I can see some substance. And unfortunately even our money no longer has any substance, given that "the full faith and confidence of the government" isn't worth anything.
British banks and Dubai 08:43am on 28 Nov 2009
As others have said it's easy to say things are bearable when you don't have to make any sacrifices to bear it.

Perhaps we should structure public sector bailouts the same way the now infamous CDOs work - politicians who voted for it fund it to the limit of their annual income (including expenses, bonuses etc) and only then can they come at the rest of us for raised taxes.
A healthy squeeze (II) 5:13pm on 26 Nov 2009 #9, so in fact when you point fingers at the CEO you're talking about "those richer than you". It's easy to see people who are rich by any definition but when we use generic terms like "the rich" we need to define how much money it takes to be considered "rich".

The CEOs of huge corporations earn more in a month than I do in a year. I have no problem with the size of anyone's remuneration - the problem is the rewards being given for failure rather than for success.

Perhaps it would have been better to fire the heads of the banks when the taxpayer took such a huge stake - that way the discussion over whether their huge incomes should be taxed differently would be as redundant as they were.
A healthy squeeze (II) 4:43pm on 26 Nov 2009 Ah yes, "the rich". That generic yet very vaguely defined group that everybody loves to hate, when of course when they say "the rich" they mean "people richer than I am".

First off we can leave aside the argument that on a global scale every single person in this country is very rich, and the ones we call poor would be unlikely to give up the heating in their home so that someone in Africa could have a home at all.

Then we can look at the idea of taxing "the rich". It's common knowledge that rich people can afford accountants, and accountants make their living by reducing peoples' tax bills. Every time the tax system is tweaked and more rules added, more loopholes appear that accountants can exploit.

Instead of constantly expecting certain groups of people to give up a higher and higher percentage of their income (thereby ensuring that the truly rich don't actually pay it at all), what we need is to massively simplify the tax system. Cut the number of exemptions, cut the endless pages of tax legislation and streamline it all. Not only do we save money by not having so many tax inspectors needed to ensure compliance (which in turn saves the nation money) we also provide fewer places for tax to be legally avoided.

I'd say the answer is to increase the personal allowance to something like £10,000 per person. Give couples the opportunity to file tax returns individually or jointly (couples being married or in a civil partnership, it doesn't matter for tax purposes). Then have a 10% tax on the next £10,000 per person and 25% tax from there on up. No ifs, no buts, it's very quick and simple.
A healthy squeeze? 7:13pm on 24 Nov 2009 Hahaha, tax the rich, good one. Which group of people will be the first to disappear off-shore and thereby pay 0% rather than 40%? Take a wild guess.

And don't think this is going to be anything to do with rich people not living here any more. When someone has their assets tied up in a corporation or trust of some kind, it can move abroad pretty much at the stroke of a pen.

Look out for more wealthy folks setting up trading companies in Sark, Gibraltar and the like.
A healthy squeeze? 6:04pm on 24 Nov 2009 Why is there so much talk about raising more money when we haven't even begin to cut the waste yet?

Why do councils need 5-a-day outreach coordinators and diversity managers? Why do we have ever-more trivial activities turned into crimes, with ever-more public sector workers hired to enforce them? If we start by cutting all the useless unproductive areas in the public sector we could save a huge amount of money before we even begin.

It'll never happen, because it will highlight what a lie Labour's "achievement" on reducing unemployment really was. But if we can unshackle the productive private sector from the dead hand of ever-more government control we're at least in with a chance.

Before people go off about private sector waste, if MegaCorp plc hires more people than it needs it has to raise prices to compensate and its customers go elsewhere. If the government hires more people than it needs we don't get a choice to pay taxes elsewhere unless we physically emigrate. Big difference.
Why cars are greener than buses (maybe) 12:07pm on 20 Nov 2009
Did anyone ever consider the logistical problems associated with trying to be green?

I bought a mountain bike six months ago - partly for recreation and partly to replace the car for shorter trips where no bulky bags are required. But then I hit a problem. Where do I park my bike? Where can I leave it, secure in the knowledge it will still be there when I return?

As it stands I need to secure the bike to a solid post. No problem there. But I need a lock to secure the rear wheel and frame, a cable to secure the front wheel, and I need to take the lights, GPS mount and saddle with me to prevent them from being stolen. London Police's own crime fighting advice is to take anything with you that's quick release. Er, that means the entire bike except for the frame. So it seems I can't take my bike into town in case someone nicks it. The bus is smelly and unreliable, and by the time I've walked to and from stations I might as well have driven. So I guess I'll take the car after all.

If we can get secure cycle parking and get away from the idea that "cycle provision" means a green bit of tarmac beside the main road so people can park in it, perhaps we'll get more people out of cars and onto bikes. Until then, cycling remains a recreation rather than a viable means of transport.

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