Showing posts with label ribbing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ribbing. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 28, 2010

"Red Ed" Miliband wins the Labour leadership

Just for fun, you understand...

Inspired by Wee Ed's new monicker—endowed upon him because of the unions' support for his candidacy—I threw together this little picture.

Before anyone gets too upset, of course I am not seriously trying to draw an equivalence between Wee Ed Miliband and Josef Stalin—certainly not.

After all, Stalin was more than competent at wiping out his enemies.

Whereas Wee Ed, of course, just barely scraped a win...
He told reporters on Monday: "New Labour was right for its time and there are many aspects of New Labour that we will retain, like the idea that we appeal to all sections of society, that we are for wealth creation as well the distribution of wealth.

"But it came to be associated with a particular style and nature of politics and actually it got stuck in its old certainties itself and I will be saying that in a speech on Tuesday and I will be saying more about my vision of where we go as a party then."

I seriously cannot wait...
"It's about us showing to the country that we understand why we lost the general election and us showing humility to the country. I think the country are more interested in what I have to say to them rather than details of the shadow cabinet."

I wouldn't bet on that, frankly. After all, there are—no doubt—a bunch of people betting on who will be in your Shadow Cabinet, whereas no one gives two craps in a bucket about anything that you have to say. About anything.

Red Ed?—nah. Very Bland Miliband, more like. And my peripatetic yet potless Greek friend appears to agree.
I stand by my view that this guy is IDS with hair, with all the charisma of a plate of curried shoe leather. In as far as he seems to have any "ideas", they seem to have been designed by a computer program to tickle the erogenous zones of the rank-and-file fuckwits otherwise known as the Labour Party faithful (and the born-again, like Sunny), and even then both the MPs and the membership rejected him. Say what you like about David Cameron, but at least he's the most talented politician in his family.

Mind you, someone's getting excited about Red Ed—and it's not under her bed that she wants him...
Still, if I and many others are exultant that Labour appear to have been sold a lemon, it is refreshing to see that some people just don't learn from fucking experience. Here is the pantomime dame of British social democracy casting her lustful eye over the new 'un:
How will he look across that deadly dispatch box on Wednesdays? Younger, brighter, insurgent, hungry to score. [...]

With one bound he has won the generation game, leaving the ghosts of Blair, Brown, Mandelson and their damaging memoirs in a bygone era. All those wretched warnings not to move a millimetre away from the Blair doctrine are gone with the wind. Now he is free to write whatever he wants on the clean page he has created.

Ah, yes, you are hungry to score, aren't you, my Viking warrior? Oh, yes, Gordon Ed, my Norse god...

Can it be that darling Polly is about to get all frisky for Ed? Who knows—but I'm pretty sure that the poor little Greek boy, if not myself, will be there to report on the squalid thrills and filthy spills involved...

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Taxing Richard Murphy

Most of us would like to minimise our tax burden and, indeed, the government actually provides a number of ways in which one can do so. One of the single best ways in which one can do so is to incorporate, i.e. to become a company.

How does that work?

Well, you can arrange your affairs in a number of ways but, broadly speaking, one of the best ways is as follows:
  1. incorporate
  2. pay yourself, as a director, a minimal salary (a little under £5,000),
  3. at this level, you still accrue National Insurance credits, i.e. you get money put towards a state pension, but you don't actually have to pay any National Insurance Contributions,
  4. pay your corporation tax
  5. pay the rest of the money out as dividends to shareholders (yourself),
  6. on which you will pay less tax than on ordinary income.

Well, that is the gist of the thing. Obviously, it's not so easy unless you have figures to illustrate the above.

Luckily, Richard Murphy wrote just such an article for The Observer, back in 2005 (so, obviously, the figures will have changed: your tax accountant (should you have one) will be able to update these).
The way that the saving is achieved is fairly straightforward. An individual in self- employment pays three taxes on profit. They are income tax, class 2 national insurance and class 4 national insurance. On £30,000 of profit the income tax is £5,354 this year, class 2 national insurance is £104 and class 4 national insurance is £1,777, a total of £7,235.

If a limited company makes the same profit it can pay its owner in one of two ways. If it paid out all £30,000 as a salary then there would again be three taxes, being income tax (£4,764), employer's national insurance (£2,679) and employee's national insurance (£2,271). That's a total of £9,714, which is £2,479 more than the self-employed pay.

But, if the company is run with strong discipline, and keeps good accounts, then dividends can be substituted for most of the salary paid in the previous example. Just enough salary is still paid to make sure that the director is credited with paying national insurance - currently £4,615 - although no national insurance (or tax) is actually paid on this. That leaves a profit of £25,385 in the company on which corporation tax of £3,654 is paid. This is low because the first £10,000 of profit generated by a small limited company is tax-free.

That means a dividend of £21,731 can then be paid. Because that level of dividend does not take the recipient into the higher rate bracket, he or she does not have to pay any additional income tax on the dividend. The only tax paid will be the company's corporation tax bill of £3,654, which is £3,581 less than the self-employed person pays.

All of this is perfectly legal, of course. And, personally, I'd go further—I'd describe it as perfectly laudable.

After all, arranging your affairs so that the government can steal as little of your money as possible not only leaves you with more cash (which you will spend far more wisely than the state) but also ensures that our lords and master have fewer resources with which to oppress the rest of us.

The trouble is, you see, that Richard Murphy would not agree with you.

Richard, apparently, thinks that you have a moral duty to pay as much tax as you can and that tax avoidance is just as bad as tax evasion.

And the operative word in that sentence is "you". Because, as Timmy reports, Richard Murphy does seem to believe in minimising his own tax payments.
So, what do we find from Companies House about the directorships of one R. Murphy?
Fulcrum Publishing Ltd:

“Publishes original written materials”, seems to have been his old vehicle for paid writing.

Jointly owned 50:50 by Ritchie and Jacqueline Murphy (same address, born 1963, presumably his wife).

Hasn’t traded since 2003, but when it was trading it paid out all of its profits as dividends. Incorporation and taking dividends from the company instead of a salary is a classic tax/NI avoidance strategy—as he set out in his Observer article.

I wonder how much of the company’s work his wife did, or whether giving her shares was just a device to save tax by transferring half of the income to her? Did “the rewards paid [to her] match the underlying economic substance” (Ritchie’s own test of whether incorporation is “abusive”)? It seems unlikely that she was generating 50% of the profits from his writing.

It’s difficult to see what legitimate non-tax reason he would have for incorporation, and (as he said in his reply to you) he regularly argues against incorporation—for other people.

(Via email, so no link).

Yes, yes: but this all stopped in 2003, didn't it. So the author of The Missing Billions [PDF]—a report on the tax gap authored on behalf of the Trades Union Congress—is definitely not doing any of this stuff now, eh?

What? What did you say...?
But wait, I hear the call. This all stopped in 2003 didn’t it?

Well, yes, with Fulcrum, yes, it did.
The Tax Gap Ltd (formerly Tax Research Ltd):

Carries out “social science research”. Shares owned 90% Ritchie, 10% Jacqueline.

Paid out small (£3-4k) directors’ salaries in 2005, 2006 & 2007 (another classic tax/NI avoidance strategy, keeping the salary under the personal allowance).

Paid out a £12,000 dividend in 2006 (classic NI avoidance strategy, to take money out as NI-exempt dividend rather than salary).

Profits of nearly £13,000 retained in the company (another classic tax avoidance strategy, to delay paying dividends until a year when your income is below the higher rate threshold).

Oh. If we are to continue our speculation about GPs and maternity pay, we might assume that income shifting is now not a useful strategy. For why shift income to someone who is already in the higher tax band? But we do note the other parts of the Observer technique. Low directorial salaries, enough that the director is credited with having paid NI (ie, that State pension accruals continue) without having to actually pay NI and then the rest of the profit being paid out as dividends.

And do note again, the tax free first £10k of profits was abolished in 2006, so at least in 2005 the first £10k of dividends would have been entirely free of either corporation tax or basic rate income tax.

Oh.

Now, one might think that all of this might reveal Richard Murphy to be a colossal hypocrite but, of course, you would be wrong—as darling Ritchie makes absolutely clear in his reply to the "torrents of abuse" [sic] that is Timmy's article.
I note the right wing blogosphere is seeking yet again to question my integrity...

Well, I think that it probably started out as just Timmy in this instance—although I am sure that others have joined in since then. Although, I am glad to add my voice to what is, quite literally, the entire "right wing blogosphere"—after all, I have regularly questioned Murphy's sanity and intelligence, since October 2006.

The substance of Ritchie's rebuttal is that he has changed his mind since those dark days when all he wanted to do was to keep his earnings out of the taxman's grip. Alas, he does not elaborate on what caused this Damascene conversion—although I suspect that it has less to do with a soft heart than it has to do with raking in the ackers.

The rest of his post is basically an ad hominem against the entire liberal blogosphere for "seeking to play the man".
First of all – as I’ve often said the issue is one of intimidation – they seek to propagate the message that if anyone stands up to their vicious form of capitalism they will seek to crush them. So much for a belief in liberty! It takes courage to stand up to such behaviour. They know that. They want to stop others entering the fray by behaving as they do.

Ah, yes: we occasionally use some bad behaviour. We do, also, expect people to practice what they preach—and we will tend to look at evidence as to whether they do or not. This is all very intimidating.

But here's the rub, Ritchie: it is central to our philosophy that you be able to do what the hell you want. Sure, we might lob some nasty names at you—for avoiding tax whilst trying to ensure that no one else can, for instance—and we may even point out that, if you think tax is so wonderful, you might like to donate some extra money to the state.

But what we do not do, Ritchie-poppet, is work to ensure that you are forced to do what we want. We don't attempt to influence the state to take more money from you; we don't spend our time lobbying and encouraging others to use force, violence and extortion in order to satisfy our personal philosophies.

Whereas you do, Ritchie—and that is why you are so very dangerous. And it isn't only that your philosophy is, at root, fundamentally evil: it is that you and your kind are pushing at an open door—money is power, and politicians do not need any excuses to give themselves more power.

You see yourself as some sort of crusader, eh? One of a small band of brave warriors making a stand against the evil liberals who would "crush our current democratic way of life in the UK, Europe and beyond".

You deluded fool.

The only things being crushed are the hopes and dreams of individual people who find that, try as they might, their lives are less and less theirs as the months go on: with every passing year, the liberty of individuals is removed as they find themselves more and more slaves of the state.

But I don't expect you to understand this, Murphy: I don't think that you have the intelligence to understand it. But more than that: I think that you are ideologically capable of understanding it.

Because, as far as I am concerned, people (like you) who venerate the will of the demos over the freedoms of the individual—those who believe that the tyranny of the majority always justifies the oppression of the few—are rather more than "flawed like the rest of us": they are evil bastards.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Climate bias

Hilariously, as my peripatetic Greek chum has noticed, some fantasist over at Liberal Conspiracy believes that the BBC has adopted a pro-sceptic bias in the climate change debate.

Since my comments over at LC quite often tend somehow to get a little mangled by the... er... software, I thought that I would post my—very reasonable—reply here. Especially since it is, perhaps, time that I turned my attention back to the subject.
andrew adams (and others),

The notion that recent changes in climate are caused predominantly by human activity is not some idea which scientists have conjured up in isolation either for political purposes, to try to get funding or just as a convenient way to justify recent warming.

Um. So, how did scientists come up with this explanation?

Let’s ask Phil Jones of the CRU, shall we?
Roger Harrabin: If you agree that there were similar periods of warming since 1850 to the current period, and that the MWP is under debate, what factors convince you that recent warming has been largely man-made?

Dr Phil Jones: The fact that we can’t explain the warming from the 1950s by solar and volcanic forcing…

So, since Phil and his friends are unable to account for the warming in terms of volcanos or solar warming, then obviously it must be solely human induced?

What about this mysterious decadal Pacific oscillation that is now, apparently, “masking the warming”? What about cloud formation, or albedo or… or… so many other things, many of which we may not be aware of?

The climate is a pretty Chaotic system and we have, really, very little idea of all of the factors involved. Yes, it may be man-made forcings but, ultimately, it could be something else entirely. Or a mixture of both natural and human, of course.

What does Dr Phil think? [Emphasis mine.]
It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well.

Indeed.

A science that measures temperatures by proxies—especially given the problems with said proxies which have been widely detailed (including the tree ring divergence problem)—and then tries to predict future temperatures is not going to be a black and white issue: quite apart from anything else, the temperature has consistently failed to match the predictions of the climate models.

Now, people will say that this is because the climate is a very complicated system, and the models are still improving—but that is the point about a chaotic system like the climate, isn’t it?

The simple fact is that the evidence (that is, the actual, observed temperatures) has not matched the predictions.

Even if we accept that CRU and IPCC are right, then how should we deal with it? Well, luckily, the IPCC has been kind enough to run some models for us, to help us to decide this—they are known as the SRES models (Special Report on Emissions Scenarios).

There are a number of scenarios there but, for my money, the best outcome is produced by the A1 family.
The A1 storyline is a case of rapid and successful economic development, in which regional average income per capita converge—current distinctions between “poor” and “rich” countries eventually dissolve. The primary dynamics are:
  • Strong commitment to market-based solutions.

  • High savings and commitment to education at the household level.

  • High rates of investment and innovation in education, technology, and institutions at the national and international levels.

  • International mobility of people, ideas, and technology.

  • The transition to economic convergence results from advances in transport and communication technology, shifts in national policies on immigration and education, and international cooperation in the development of national and international institutions that enhance productivity growth and technology diffusion.

This may be the type of scenario best represented in recent literature (e.g., Shinn, 1985; UN, 1990; Schwartz, 1991; Peterson, 1994; Gallopin et al., 1997; Glenn and Gordon, 1997, 1999; Lawrence et al., 1997; Hammond, 1998; Raskin et al., 1998). Such scenarios are dominated by an American or European entrepreneurial, progress-oriented perspective in which technology, especially communication technology, plays a central role.


Now, others—those with ideological problems with markets or economic growth, for instance—may disagree; personally, however, I think that a course of action that eliminates poverty and keeps the planet going seems to me to be a pretty good option to go for.

And note, please, that these scenarios are collated and produced not by a bunch of oil-funded right-wing loons, but by the IPCC—the same organisation whose scientific evidence you accept.

DK

Time to get back on this horse, methinks...

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Snake oil salesman

I have to disagree with Seth Friedman here...
If Obama & Co really want to do the best by both their electorate and the environment, they could do worse than permanently nationalise oil companies as a way of enacting serious positive change in the industry.

Yes, they probably could do worse—I'm just struggling to think how.

I mean, one of the surest ways to bugger up a company is to put it in the hands of politicians.

For a more indepth—and less flippant—analysis of this article, do wander over to Timmy's...

Saturday, May 29, 2010

In which I disagree with Dan Hannan...

It's not that I disagree with his premise (I am undecided), but I do disagree with the way in which he argues it.
If there's anyone out there who still opposes reform of the House of Lords…

… I have two words for you: Ian Blair.

What? This is utterly wrong on two levels:
  1. Difficult cases make bad laws. Yes, The fact that Ian "shooty" Blair has gained a peerage makes me want to fucking vomit—but is every appointment in this round of honours utterly unsuitable? In fact, we don't even know that Ian Blair will not be a good, sensible and conscientious legislator (although I seriously doubt it).

  2. Ian Blair's peerage is not a symptom of the need to reform the House of Lords: it is an indication of how bankrupt is the elected House of Commons. Blair was not given his peerage by the Lords—he was nominated and approved by Members and servants of the elected House of Commons.

So, when Dan Hannan asks this question...
How can an elected Upper House be worse than what we have now?

... I would tell him to look at the self-serving corruption of the elected House, and cite the elevation of Ian Blair to the Lords as evidence of said turpitude.

So, yes, Dan: I can think of many, many ways in which an elected House of Lords could be worse than what we have now—how long have you got?