Bankers Bonuses

  This morning on the news there was some good news, The government has just announced that it is giving £3 million to help research on on prosthetics. Trying to improve the feeling in artificial limbs. Obviously this is good and I wish the researchers well. But we should get this in perspective, £3 million sounds a lot of money but it wouldn't by the bonus for the chief executive of HBOS, who has salted it all away in some offshore fund.

  How can a banker be worth more that serious research into helping people. At the sort of rewards that bankers are given, it would be hard to use the word earn, they must be classified as leeches on society. How have we allowed our society to drift into this situation? Are we all sleep walking into a nightmare without realising it? I am not sure I know the answer but my suspicion is that those with excessive amounts of money can spend a lot of it buying propaganda to tell us that they are need it and it would all be a disaster if they didn't get it.

 We have to believe that  advertising and propaganda work as most firms spend a lot of money. Once the rich are rich it is easy to stay rich. If you get a £5 million bonus and waste half of it you are still rich.

Douglas Carswell: a fraud/

I went to the Charles Clarke conversation on politics with Douglas Carswell at UEA last night. Perhaps it is unfair to  Carswell a fraud but certainly he lives in a world of self-delusion.

He was moved by his experiences as a child in Uganda where his parents were doctors during Idi Amin's regime. It is not surprised that such events moved him to believe in the need for people to be given freedom and independence. So he became a libertarian but what did this mean to him.As a student he studied history at UEA.

Politically he joined the Tory party because he couldn't join the Labour Party because it didn't believe in democracy, just wanted to tell people what to do. Perhaps I am paraphrasing but that is what comes across. As a Libertarian he wants everyone to do their own thing and not be corralled by government or big business, so why he joined the Tories is a bit of a mystery.

So having realised that he could never convert the Tories to his views, he joined UKIP because they are the party of intelligent libertarian thinkers. He managed to explain that they are not a bunch of racists who just don't like immigrants and foreigners. It is wonderful to hear him justify his position as a libertarian who supports the restrictions of peoples liberties, my question was just a  sixth form question. However for a libertarian he supports the health service and the welfare state, or seems to. He also happily supported campaigning against Scottish independence. What has happened to his libertarian principles, they are probably only used against trade unions and the Labour Party and other political parties. He would sacrifice them for other political ends.

Like many people he deludes himself into thinking he is being consistent, never ever self aware of the inconsistencies of his own position. My wife always says that I think consistency is too important but as a mathematician I have no choice, what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.  I have always believed in judging people by what they do not what they say. Something my Dad used to say which I disagree with I understand, "Don't do what I do, do what I say" at least recognises that we don't all live up to the standards we set ourselves, perhaps we would be a better society if we all admitted that.

Property & Land Tax

   In all the discussion of tax dodgers it seems what we really need to do is to make it hard to dodge paying tax. There is nothing illegal about tax dodging it is just immoral, taking things for nothing.  It is as simple as that, these individuals and companies want all the benefits that come from government spending but do not want to pay their share of the bill. As  a consequence the poorer in society pay a bigger share proportionally than they can afford. £100 is a lot to a person with no money and is a trivial amount to someone with a lot.

  So we need a tax, one of many, which is hard to dodge and, preferably,  cheap to collect. We use  to have one but we need to expand and develop it. That is a tax on land and property. it is relatively cheap to collect and is clearly identifiable. If Amazon has a dirty grat warehouse then we know where it is, they cannot pretend it is in Luxembourg.

  It would also be a way to localise taxation and give them a significant revenue that was independent of central government. They could be made responsible for the collection. As there is now a Land Registry it is much easier to identify who owns land. I would argue that any land not registered would be advertised and if not claimed within 6 months would be requisitioned by the local authority and could be used by them.

 Essentially it would be a tax on assets which is missing from the current taxation system. It would encourage efficient use of assets and would mean that if planning permission is granted for development on the land the tax would increase. This would encourage companies and people to actually do something with the permission because they would be paying tax. Also if values went down then the tax payable would decrease.

 These values would be determined by using Land Registry data, a small percentage of the tax would help fund the Land Registry to improve their services and make access to their database free, It would also be good to have a hotline so that if things happen it could be reported anonymously. Tjis would be analogous to the benefits version.

 If this was done for land and property on a quarterly basis there should be  gradual revaluation  and so no sudden shocks. I think we need to move away from restricting taxation to being based on income and expenditure. This is economically illiterate and reduces the base of taxation. Given that we are overcrowded do we wish to discourage the efficient use of land and property?

care would have to be taken, for example public parks should not be taxed because they are in public use and planning permission should not be given to develop them. Waste land should be taxed and the owners might feel it would be good to have some income from the land. Where there is no identifiable owner the land or property reverts to public ownership. When the taxation is not being paid there should be a process as in with unpaid mortgages, the property or land will be sold, the taxation taken out of the proceeds and the remainder will go to the owners.