Dear Tescos,
I would like to compliment you on your new advertising campaign. It is very clever indeed. I like the way that you mention, very loudly, that your stuff for schools give away has donated £150million to our darling little children. My you are a generous little business, aren’t you? Britain’s Bill Gates some might say. I also like the way that the voice over sort of mumbles “since 1992”. Sorry what was that? That amount has been donated over 16 years. Oh that is a little less generous isn’t it? That’s £9.3 million a year. Well, that’s still quite generous, nearly £10million a year.
What were your profits last year by the way? I think they were about £2.8billion, give or take a little bit. Well £9.3million is still quite generous, I think. Let me just work that out as a percentage, ummm……. Oh that’s about 0.3% of your profit from last year. Oh that is a little less generous than I thought and was sort of lead to believe by your advert. As I said, very clever. It’s like Mad Men and their “Roasted Tobacco” ad campaign. “But everyone roasts their tobacco!” says the man from the cigarette, “indeed they do but you are the first one to says you do”. “We are so generous” says your new campaign but really it’s only 0.3% of your profits from last year. In fact ALL the money you have given away over the last 16 years is only 5.3% of THIS year’s profit.
Oh and the Government closed a loophole that you used to used to save £50million a year in corporation tax, which is 5 times what you generously give away.
Oh again, you seem to be now based in Switzerland, which is, I think, a tax haven after you had to leave the tax haven of Jersey because the authorities feared your presence might damage to the islands' reputation. And they’ll have pretty much any one,
Yours not taken in by your Ad,
Martyn xx
Showing posts with label tax. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tax. Show all posts
Tuesday, 3 March 2009
Monday, 2 March 2009
Diana Watch
Sorry, sorry, sorry. I know it’s late but we spent the weekend in Kent again, I’ll explain why we are going there so often at a later date.
I want to start with a heart warming story from my hospital. One of our patients is a young man who is planning to marry in May but his consultant advised him that he would probably not live that long and he should consider moving the wedding forward.
As you can imagine a wedding is a hard thing to organise and suddenly being told to bring it forward too really quite soon presented the couple with a few problems. We have a fantastic social worker for those with cancer in our hospital and she started to make some phone calls. She phoned round all of the local cancer charities and within 4 days they had organised, between them, a venue and food and most of the other things for a wedding. There was still a problem however. The dress that the bride wanted was still on order and will take a while to come, so his consultant said, “Don’t worry about it. Go to the bridal shop, get any dress you want and I will pay for it.”
Now I am a slightly cynical man who has recently seen a not so good side to my beloved NHS but this, this beautiful gesture by everyone involved has restored my faith completely in my fellow man. It brings to my eye a small tear every time I either hear, or tell, the story. So hurray for people. Some of them are pretty good really.
It seems a shame to go on with the news now but that is why we are all here, if you not then do tell me why you are here and I will attempt to accommodate you.
We can talk about whatever you like, except celebrities obviously. If you haven’t actually done something important than I don’t care that you’ve have a new t-shirt. I like your song but I don’t care that you had a sweat patch on that new t-shirt on a hot day. Come up with a new theory on quantum mechanics and then we can talk, well you can talk and I will nod like a confused chimp not understanding any of the concepts that you are trying to explain.
As a normal brained human I have no frame of reference for these incredible ideas, oh and can some one ask Schrödinger to let that cat out of that box. Particle physics joke there. Not a good one I grant you but I bet you can’t think of a better one. How shame faced will I be if someone does e-mail me a better one? It’s a risk you take. Can I give you a couple of quantum physics’ facts? Actually I’m not going to wait for all 10 of you to answer individually because you probably won’t. I’ve asked you things before and none of you have got back to me so I’m just going to type them anyway and you can read them if you want. A cup of coffee weighs more when hot than it does when cold. You age faster at the top of a building than you do at the bottom. Time travel is not forbidden by the laws of physics. And my favourite is; the entire human race would fit in the volume of a sugar cube. It’s true. There is some much empty space in an atom, if you removed all that space, the entire human race would fit in the volume of a sugar cube.
The lack of reference points comes with the stuff about atoms existing in two places at once and atomic switching.
Oh yes news, I remember. I would like to start be congratulating the Government and the right-wing press on their excellent controlling of the news agenda, with a little help from the opposition parties. For a couple of weeks we have been thrown a single story about Britain’s financial problems to foam at the mouth about and, like good little Pavlovian dogs, we did. Firstly it was bank bonuses. You mention a banker’s bonuses in a crowd and you could guarantee that at least one person in the crowd would get so worked up that they would have a heart attack or a stroke; it’s like a fire in your head you know. It was quite entertaining really (the stroke causing bit) but it was an irrelevant argument (the bonuses bit). Most of the money being given in bonuses was given to counter staff and branch staff who had no part in the near collapse of the companies that they work for. They hit their targets and their contract states that they are entitled to a bonus. If I’d worked my arse off for £17,000 a year and met my, quite hard to reach, targets and then the Daily Express works it’s self into a frenzy over whether or not I should get my little bonus I would be a little disgruntled. “Well, its tax payers’ money” goes the argument, “and it shouldn’t go to rewarding failure”. Quite right too but John Major still got paid. Oh and how much tax does your papers owner, the pornographer Richard Desmond, pay? Well, your company is registered in St Hellier in the Channel Islands, above a small parade of shops I believe, in order to take advantage of the tax haven status of the Islands. Just a quick side note, 50% of the worlds tax havens are Crown dependences, i.e., we run them so they are our fault and problem.
In his personal finance Richard Desmond saves in quite a lot of tax. £13m in 2006 for instance by, legally, paying himself straight into his pension before the rules changed. So before you start lecturing us, have a look at yourselves. And this is the story that isn’t being covered by the Government, right wing media and, strangely, the BBC. Tax is one of the biggest problems with our nation’s finances, with massive amounts of money not being paid, but is the tide turning against them? Well, President Obama says he wants to close these tax havens. I do hope that he brings this up with Gordon Brown when he visits the White House this week. That won’t be too uncomfortable for Mr Brown will it?
This week’s attention drawing story is the pension pot of Sir Fred Goodwin, former chairman of The Royal Bank of Scotland. It seems that despite resigning from a bank that is now pretty much owned by you and me, he still managed to leave with a pension that will pay him about £650,000 per year. For life. Do you think he stole his stapler on his way out as well?
My, that is a lot of money and most of the press are frothing at the mouth and want blood, well some of the money back anyway. Now, it does seem that he has a pretty strong legal position for not giving any of it back, his contract says he can have it and some one in the Government signed of on it but yesterday Harriet Harman said one of the most stupid and scary things ever uttered by a Government minister, “it may be acceptable in a court of law but not in the court of public opinion and that is where the Government steps in.” Woah there Nelly! What’s that? It may be lawful but because the mob doesn’t like it then we’ll, as a Government, ignore the law? Is that what you are saying? In front of us we have a very steep, very slippery slope. Is it something that we want to try and stand on? Laws are ok as long as the Sun agrees with them? Is that is? I know you ignore certain international laws, you know, those petty little ones about war, more on that later, but this is quite a remarkable statement. I hope it was made in haste and it will be retracted. Whilst I don’t agree with the size of his pension plan, Sir Fred is entitled to it. His contract says so and, therefore, so does the law, you know, those things that you are supposed to up hold, what with being an MP and all. Oh, and a lawyer I think. Is my paranoid fantasy coming true? Massive surveillance, huge database keeping (and data mining doesn’t work) and now Government threatening to ignore laws that it decides that it doesn’t like right now. How do you think that would go down if say, umm…. Vladimir Putin said something like that; do you think that there might be a word or 2 from the Foreign Office?
Jack Straw has decided that he will not publish the minutes from Cabinet meetings that happened just before the start of the war in Iraq, despite a freedom of information request and the information commissioner tell him that he should. His argument is that it will undermine cabinet Government if people feel that their private views will be aired in public at some later date.
I can understand his point of view on this one but there are two important facts that he seems to be forgetting, 1, Tony Blair massively undermined cabinet Government by himself without any help from us, and 2, The papers refer to something, the invasion of a sovereign country, that may well be illegal under international law. That is really rather important Mr Straw. Is the Government withholding information about its illegal activates?
I’m in full on paranoid delusion mode this week but with good reason. Your Government admitted this week that when it said that it had not been involved in any “extraordinary rendition” activities in collusion with the U.S., it really meant that it had and was lying, a bit.
Despite the rantings above I am quite a good mood today, the sun is shining, I’m on holiday for a week and we are off to see the fantastic Elbow in Bournemouth tonight and Franz Ferdinand next week, which is nice. We went to see some more modern dance on Friday evening and I sort of enjoyed it. As you know I’m not super keen on modern dance but, using a scoring system based on the number of times I yawned during the performance, it was once by the way, I think that it went quite well.
Let’s do some awards,
The Award for Being a Brave Man or Clearing Looking For a Fight,
This goes to Peter Mandelson who wants to try and sell off some of the Post Office to a private company. No one is really sure why. The company started making a profit last year and selling it won’t help with the pension’s black hole that they have. Even Margaret Thatcher backed away from that fight.
The Award for What May Have Been Coincidence But it Doesn’t Look Like it to Me,
This again goes to Peter Mandelson. He was supposed to bring in the bill about the part selling of the Post Office in the second half of the week but it was suddenly bought forward and was introduced on the day that every news outlet was reporting constantly on the death of David Cameron’s son Ivan. Now as I say, it may have been coincidence…..
I think that will do for this week, hope you all have a nice week doing whatever it is you do. I’ve learnt to do hyperlinks now but I think you might have noticed that.
I want to start with a heart warming story from my hospital. One of our patients is a young man who is planning to marry in May but his consultant advised him that he would probably not live that long and he should consider moving the wedding forward.
As you can imagine a wedding is a hard thing to organise and suddenly being told to bring it forward too really quite soon presented the couple with a few problems. We have a fantastic social worker for those with cancer in our hospital and she started to make some phone calls. She phoned round all of the local cancer charities and within 4 days they had organised, between them, a venue and food and most of the other things for a wedding. There was still a problem however. The dress that the bride wanted was still on order and will take a while to come, so his consultant said, “Don’t worry about it. Go to the bridal shop, get any dress you want and I will pay for it.”
Now I am a slightly cynical man who has recently seen a not so good side to my beloved NHS but this, this beautiful gesture by everyone involved has restored my faith completely in my fellow man. It brings to my eye a small tear every time I either hear, or tell, the story. So hurray for people. Some of them are pretty good really.
It seems a shame to go on with the news now but that is why we are all here, if you not then do tell me why you are here and I will attempt to accommodate you.
We can talk about whatever you like, except celebrities obviously. If you haven’t actually done something important than I don’t care that you’ve have a new t-shirt. I like your song but I don’t care that you had a sweat patch on that new t-shirt on a hot day. Come up with a new theory on quantum mechanics and then we can talk, well you can talk and I will nod like a confused chimp not understanding any of the concepts that you are trying to explain.
As a normal brained human I have no frame of reference for these incredible ideas, oh and can some one ask Schrödinger to let that cat out of that box. Particle physics joke there. Not a good one I grant you but I bet you can’t think of a better one. How shame faced will I be if someone does e-mail me a better one? It’s a risk you take. Can I give you a couple of quantum physics’ facts? Actually I’m not going to wait for all 10 of you to answer individually because you probably won’t. I’ve asked you things before and none of you have got back to me so I’m just going to type them anyway and you can read them if you want. A cup of coffee weighs more when hot than it does when cold. You age faster at the top of a building than you do at the bottom. Time travel is not forbidden by the laws of physics. And my favourite is; the entire human race would fit in the volume of a sugar cube. It’s true. There is some much empty space in an atom, if you removed all that space, the entire human race would fit in the volume of a sugar cube.
The lack of reference points comes with the stuff about atoms existing in two places at once and atomic switching.
Oh yes news, I remember. I would like to start be congratulating the Government and the right-wing press on their excellent controlling of the news agenda, with a little help from the opposition parties. For a couple of weeks we have been thrown a single story about Britain’s financial problems to foam at the mouth about and, like good little Pavlovian dogs, we did. Firstly it was bank bonuses. You mention a banker’s bonuses in a crowd and you could guarantee that at least one person in the crowd would get so worked up that they would have a heart attack or a stroke; it’s like a fire in your head you know. It was quite entertaining really (the stroke causing bit) but it was an irrelevant argument (the bonuses bit). Most of the money being given in bonuses was given to counter staff and branch staff who had no part in the near collapse of the companies that they work for. They hit their targets and their contract states that they are entitled to a bonus. If I’d worked my arse off for £17,000 a year and met my, quite hard to reach, targets and then the Daily Express works it’s self into a frenzy over whether or not I should get my little bonus I would be a little disgruntled. “Well, its tax payers’ money” goes the argument, “and it shouldn’t go to rewarding failure”. Quite right too but John Major still got paid. Oh and how much tax does your papers owner, the pornographer Richard Desmond, pay? Well, your company is registered in St Hellier in the Channel Islands, above a small parade of shops I believe, in order to take advantage of the tax haven status of the Islands. Just a quick side note, 50% of the worlds tax havens are Crown dependences, i.e., we run them so they are our fault and problem.
In his personal finance Richard Desmond saves in quite a lot of tax. £13m in 2006 for instance by, legally, paying himself straight into his pension before the rules changed. So before you start lecturing us, have a look at yourselves. And this is the story that isn’t being covered by the Government, right wing media and, strangely, the BBC. Tax is one of the biggest problems with our nation’s finances, with massive amounts of money not being paid, but is the tide turning against them? Well, President Obama says he wants to close these tax havens. I do hope that he brings this up with Gordon Brown when he visits the White House this week. That won’t be too uncomfortable for Mr Brown will it?
This week’s attention drawing story is the pension pot of Sir Fred Goodwin, former chairman of The Royal Bank of Scotland. It seems that despite resigning from a bank that is now pretty much owned by you and me, he still managed to leave with a pension that will pay him about £650,000 per year. For life. Do you think he stole his stapler on his way out as well?
My, that is a lot of money and most of the press are frothing at the mouth and want blood, well some of the money back anyway. Now, it does seem that he has a pretty strong legal position for not giving any of it back, his contract says he can have it and some one in the Government signed of on it but yesterday Harriet Harman said one of the most stupid and scary things ever uttered by a Government minister, “it may be acceptable in a court of law but not in the court of public opinion and that is where the Government steps in.” Woah there Nelly! What’s that? It may be lawful but because the mob doesn’t like it then we’ll, as a Government, ignore the law? Is that what you are saying? In front of us we have a very steep, very slippery slope. Is it something that we want to try and stand on? Laws are ok as long as the Sun agrees with them? Is that is? I know you ignore certain international laws, you know, those petty little ones about war, more on that later, but this is quite a remarkable statement. I hope it was made in haste and it will be retracted. Whilst I don’t agree with the size of his pension plan, Sir Fred is entitled to it. His contract says so and, therefore, so does the law, you know, those things that you are supposed to up hold, what with being an MP and all. Oh, and a lawyer I think. Is my paranoid fantasy coming true? Massive surveillance, huge database keeping (and data mining doesn’t work) and now Government threatening to ignore laws that it decides that it doesn’t like right now. How do you think that would go down if say, umm…. Vladimir Putin said something like that; do you think that there might be a word or 2 from the Foreign Office?
Jack Straw has decided that he will not publish the minutes from Cabinet meetings that happened just before the start of the war in Iraq, despite a freedom of information request and the information commissioner tell him that he should. His argument is that it will undermine cabinet Government if people feel that their private views will be aired in public at some later date.
I can understand his point of view on this one but there are two important facts that he seems to be forgetting, 1, Tony Blair massively undermined cabinet Government by himself without any help from us, and 2, The papers refer to something, the invasion of a sovereign country, that may well be illegal under international law. That is really rather important Mr Straw. Is the Government withholding information about its illegal activates?
I’m in full on paranoid delusion mode this week but with good reason. Your Government admitted this week that when it said that it had not been involved in any “extraordinary rendition” activities in collusion with the U.S., it really meant that it had and was lying, a bit.
Despite the rantings above I am quite a good mood today, the sun is shining, I’m on holiday for a week and we are off to see the fantastic Elbow in Bournemouth tonight and Franz Ferdinand next week, which is nice. We went to see some more modern dance on Friday evening and I sort of enjoyed it. As you know I’m not super keen on modern dance but, using a scoring system based on the number of times I yawned during the performance, it was once by the way, I think that it went quite well.
Let’s do some awards,
The Award for Being a Brave Man or Clearing Looking For a Fight,
This goes to Peter Mandelson who wants to try and sell off some of the Post Office to a private company. No one is really sure why. The company started making a profit last year and selling it won’t help with the pension’s black hole that they have. Even Margaret Thatcher backed away from that fight.
The Award for What May Have Been Coincidence But it Doesn’t Look Like it to Me,
This again goes to Peter Mandelson. He was supposed to bring in the bill about the part selling of the Post Office in the second half of the week but it was suddenly bought forward and was introduced on the day that every news outlet was reporting constantly on the death of David Cameron’s son Ivan. Now as I say, it may have been coincidence…..
I think that will do for this week, hope you all have a nice week doing whatever it is you do. I’ve learnt to do hyperlinks now but I think you might have noticed that.
Sunday, 8 February 2009
Diana Watch
How can you score 5 tries and still be rubbish? Who knows but England have managed it. Is this really the team that won the world cup and were then runners up?
I’m not entirely sure that there has been any news this week that hasn’t been snow related in Britain. The first word of pretty much every news bulletin has been “SNOW!” The only time that the news got interesting was when the BBC accidentally played a clip from Christian Bale’s rant without the appropriate beep at 6:55 in the morning.
It made me laugh.
The cockpit tapes from the flight that ended up in the Hudson last month have been realised and they tell us 2 things. 1, it was a bird strike that bought the plane down and 2, the pilot, Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III, is the calmest man in all the world. His plane has no thrust and he’s gliding over New York but there is not the slightest note of panic in his voice. It is incredible to listen to. Even as he is about to attempt to land his enormous aircraft on a river, nothing. Not a thing. Just a calm, “We may end up in the Hudson “. Remarkable.
There are 2 things I forgot to mention last week. Bob Dylan did a Pepsi advert for the Super Bowl. I know I have complained about people selling out for adverts but Bob Dylan? Oh for fucks sake, make it stop. I know he did an ipod ad but I’m not sure that that really counts because it was sort of an advert for his album at the time but Pepsi? With Will i am from the Black Eyed Peas. It makes me very sad.
The other thing was that Iceland now seems to have the worlds first openly gay Head of State and it’s a woman. 2 underrepresented groups in one. Good work Iceland. It’s another milestone for the world and it means the Daily Mail readers will avoid your beautiful country. I’m on my way.
Do any Americans pay tax? I only ask because it seems that most of the people that President Obama knows seem to have a little trouble with it. Tom Daschle, who was going to be Health and Human Services Secretary, failed to pay $100,000 in taxes for donated limos and has now withdrawn his nomination. I’m assuming that that is a lot of donated limo travel. The new Treasury Secretary, Tim Goithner, hastily had to pay a tax bill of $42, 000 which also included penalties for late payment. These and several other cases involving Obama nominees are a microcosm of a bigger problem in this globalised, corporate world. Tax avoidance is a growing industry and big money can be made by accountants who know how to work it. It is estimated by some economists that, world wide, companies avoid paying some £280 billion. This is, of course, all perfectly legal via an exciting web of loopholes and front companies, all set up with the explicit point of not paying any tax. Governments seem powerless to close the loopholes because if they try the companies threaten to leave the country and take what little tax they do pay and the jobs they create with them to which every country they decided to relocate too. At the moment there is nothing that any singular country can do because it is competing against other countries for that company. If something is to be done then it will have to be a world wide effort and I don’t think that anyone has the appetite for that fight with all the other problems that they are trying to sort out. There does seem to be a bit a flight towards protectionism from a number of countries in the past few weeks, one of these being America. Most economists, even the ones I mentioned last week, will tell you that protectionism, whilst always playing well on the domestic market, just asking some striking power plant workers, was one of the main reasons for the length of the great Depression in the 30’s. It is a very poor idea.
One of the better plans to come out of the Whitehouse recently, on the economic front anyway, was an announcement that top bankers, a term that was not defined, whose bank had taken government bailout money would be limited to a salary of $500,000 per year, with a limit on bonuses. There has been some moaning about this from various banking groups but, as President Obama pointed out, the leader of the free world only gets paid $475,000, so do you think that you are worth more then him?
My favourite counter argument to this limit on pay was made by a very long faced banker who said “you need to pay these bonuses in order to attract the best people. If you don’t pay them the best people will go and work for other people.” I’m sorry? What now? The best people? The best people, as you call them, HAVE COMPLETELY FUCKED WORLD! Sorry about that but he annoyed me.
I’m breathing deeply now and counting to 10 and as I calm down, shall we do some awards?
The Award for Correct Use of Words, Of The Week,
This goes to the composer Howard Goodall who, whilst on radio 4’s The Today program discussing music teaching in Primary schools, used the word “children” all the time. It was so nice to hear the correct word being used and not the rather horrid “kids”, which I hate.
The Award for Thing That Annoyed Me in a Bookshop of the Week,
The book that the film Slumdog Squarepants was based on, which used to be called “question and answer” I think, is now called Slumdog Millionaire. I know it is only a little thing but the author is a bit of a sell-out.
The Award for Ill-Informed Pedant of the Week,
This goes to anyone who criticised Gordon Brown for accidentally using the term “Depression” instead of “Recession” during Prime Minister’s Questions this week. My problem with this, quick distract people from the fact that we have no ideas, fuss is the fact that neither of the words actually mean anything. A recession is defined as 2 successive quarters of negative growth but this definition was made up in about 5 minutes before a press conference some time in the 50’s or 60’s (can’t find out exactly when). It really has no meaning economics wise.
The Award for Most Incredible Thing I’ve Heard All Week,
A 56-year-old American athlete has become the first woman on record to swim the Atlantic. Yes, that’s right, she swam the Atlantic. It took Jennifer Figge 24 days to swim from the Cape Verde islands off Africa to Trinidad. Good lord. I have trouble doing a length of a swimming pool.
Shorter this week, which I think is a good thing, but still too much economics, sorry. Umm, I’ve bought so eco-pants and some bamboo socks this week. When they arrive I’ll review them for you. Significant other is reading the new novel “Wetlands” at the moment and I’m assured that it is filth and more then a little unpleasant. I’ll read it and tell you.
England’s rugby players were substandard, the cricket have just been bowled out for 51, their 3rd ever lowest score, so it all rest upon the football team, who play Italy on Wednesday, to restore national pride.
At the moment I can’t find Clarkson’s column on the Time website so I can’t tell you if my prediction about him using the snow to bash “Global Warming” was right or not. Will keep looking though. Hope you have a good week.
I’m not entirely sure that there has been any news this week that hasn’t been snow related in Britain. The first word of pretty much every news bulletin has been “SNOW!” The only time that the news got interesting was when the BBC accidentally played a clip from Christian Bale’s rant without the appropriate beep at 6:55 in the morning.
It made me laugh.
The cockpit tapes from the flight that ended up in the Hudson last month have been realised and they tell us 2 things. 1, it was a bird strike that bought the plane down and 2, the pilot, Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III, is the calmest man in all the world. His plane has no thrust and he’s gliding over New York but there is not the slightest note of panic in his voice. It is incredible to listen to. Even as he is about to attempt to land his enormous aircraft on a river, nothing. Not a thing. Just a calm, “We may end up in the Hudson “. Remarkable.
There are 2 things I forgot to mention last week. Bob Dylan did a Pepsi advert for the Super Bowl. I know I have complained about people selling out for adverts but Bob Dylan? Oh for fucks sake, make it stop. I know he did an ipod ad but I’m not sure that that really counts because it was sort of an advert for his album at the time but Pepsi? With Will i am from the Black Eyed Peas. It makes me very sad.
The other thing was that Iceland now seems to have the worlds first openly gay Head of State and it’s a woman. 2 underrepresented groups in one. Good work Iceland. It’s another milestone for the world and it means the Daily Mail readers will avoid your beautiful country. I’m on my way.
Do any Americans pay tax? I only ask because it seems that most of the people that President Obama knows seem to have a little trouble with it. Tom Daschle, who was going to be Health and Human Services Secretary, failed to pay $100,000 in taxes for donated limos and has now withdrawn his nomination. I’m assuming that that is a lot of donated limo travel. The new Treasury Secretary, Tim Goithner, hastily had to pay a tax bill of $42, 000 which also included penalties for late payment. These and several other cases involving Obama nominees are a microcosm of a bigger problem in this globalised, corporate world. Tax avoidance is a growing industry and big money can be made by accountants who know how to work it. It is estimated by some economists that, world wide, companies avoid paying some £280 billion. This is, of course, all perfectly legal via an exciting web of loopholes and front companies, all set up with the explicit point of not paying any tax. Governments seem powerless to close the loopholes because if they try the companies threaten to leave the country and take what little tax they do pay and the jobs they create with them to which every country they decided to relocate too. At the moment there is nothing that any singular country can do because it is competing against other countries for that company. If something is to be done then it will have to be a world wide effort and I don’t think that anyone has the appetite for that fight with all the other problems that they are trying to sort out. There does seem to be a bit a flight towards protectionism from a number of countries in the past few weeks, one of these being America. Most economists, even the ones I mentioned last week, will tell you that protectionism, whilst always playing well on the domestic market, just asking some striking power plant workers, was one of the main reasons for the length of the great Depression in the 30’s. It is a very poor idea.
One of the better plans to come out of the Whitehouse recently, on the economic front anyway, was an announcement that top bankers, a term that was not defined, whose bank had taken government bailout money would be limited to a salary of $500,000 per year, with a limit on bonuses. There has been some moaning about this from various banking groups but, as President Obama pointed out, the leader of the free world only gets paid $475,000, so do you think that you are worth more then him?
My favourite counter argument to this limit on pay was made by a very long faced banker who said “you need to pay these bonuses in order to attract the best people. If you don’t pay them the best people will go and work for other people.” I’m sorry? What now? The best people? The best people, as you call them, HAVE COMPLETELY FUCKED WORLD! Sorry about that but he annoyed me.
I’m breathing deeply now and counting to 10 and as I calm down, shall we do some awards?
The Award for Correct Use of Words, Of The Week,
This goes to the composer Howard Goodall who, whilst on radio 4’s The Today program discussing music teaching in Primary schools, used the word “children” all the time. It was so nice to hear the correct word being used and not the rather horrid “kids”, which I hate.
The Award for Thing That Annoyed Me in a Bookshop of the Week,
The book that the film Slumdog Squarepants was based on, which used to be called “question and answer” I think, is now called Slumdog Millionaire. I know it is only a little thing but the author is a bit of a sell-out.
The Award for Ill-Informed Pedant of the Week,
This goes to anyone who criticised Gordon Brown for accidentally using the term “Depression” instead of “Recession” during Prime Minister’s Questions this week. My problem with this, quick distract people from the fact that we have no ideas, fuss is the fact that neither of the words actually mean anything. A recession is defined as 2 successive quarters of negative growth but this definition was made up in about 5 minutes before a press conference some time in the 50’s or 60’s (can’t find out exactly when). It really has no meaning economics wise.
The Award for Most Incredible Thing I’ve Heard All Week,
A 56-year-old American athlete has become the first woman on record to swim the Atlantic. Yes, that’s right, she swam the Atlantic. It took Jennifer Figge 24 days to swim from the Cape Verde islands off Africa to Trinidad. Good lord. I have trouble doing a length of a swimming pool.
Shorter this week, which I think is a good thing, but still too much economics, sorry. Umm, I’ve bought so eco-pants and some bamboo socks this week. When they arrive I’ll review them for you. Significant other is reading the new novel “Wetlands” at the moment and I’m assured that it is filth and more then a little unpleasant. I’ll read it and tell you.
England’s rugby players were substandard, the cricket have just been bowled out for 51, their 3rd ever lowest score, so it all rest upon the football team, who play Italy on Wednesday, to restore national pride.
At the moment I can’t find Clarkson’s column on the Time website so I can’t tell you if my prediction about him using the snow to bash “Global Warming” was right or not. Will keep looking though. Hope you have a good week.
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