The Leopard changes its spots and believes that Ed Balls has the answers after all!
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| Balls to Osborne |
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Showing posts with label George Osborne. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George Osborne. Show all posts
Sunday, 8 December 2013
Wednesday, 21 March 2012
Is George Osborne a psychopath?
And by that I don't mean that he murders street kids after enticing them into his hired Lexus with promises of free smack and Polish vodka. I've not found any evidence that he's done this and frankly you should be ashamed of yourself for thinking he's got corpses stashed in a Big Yellow Storage depot in Croydon and holds tea parties with them dressed up as impish Victorian urchins. This is unlikely to have happened.
No, I wonder how his behaviour would contrast with a diagnosed psychopath if they had been delivering the budget speech today.
Psychopathy can be diagnosed utilising a 20 point checklist devised by a Dr. Hare. The 20 traits described include; glib and superficial charm, shallow affect, cunning and manipulativeness, lack of remorse or guilt and juvenile delinquency amongst others.
George's Hookers and Coke youth accounts for the last point but in his selling of the upper tax bracket reduction is there evidence of other, sociopathic, traits?
There's no doubt about about his glib charm, his smarmyness knows little bounds so what about the others?
Imagine if there was a psychopath who was desperate to pay less tax but was in such a position that criminally evading payment would be spotted in an instant, if he was chancellor for instance. Do you not think he'd use his cunning and manipulativeness to make sure that people thought his tax bill was bad for them? Using all his super - psycho powers to get the media on side and drip feed a narrative that him being out of pocket was bad for everyone, rich and poor alike.
Then when it had been kicked through into law he could show a complete lack of remorse by pointing out that it wasn't such a big deal anyway, after all it raised "next to nothing". That next to nothing was in fact one billion pounds, enough to "Provide hope" to 160,000 youngsters according to the Deputy Prime Minister.
Looking through the other dozen or so Psycho traits here I score Mr Osbourne as a conservative 22 points out of Peter Sutcliffe possible 40. Not enough to be a full blown nutjob but maybe a man who has criminal tendencies.
So if he's not mental then the 10% tax cut for Britain's wealthiest must be solely down to self serving greed and the sexually motivated murders are just a hobby.
Disclaimer : George Osborne, wall paper heir and chancellor of the exchequer, does not kill homeless people for sexual kicks. Or for their money.
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| There's no evidence he's killed anyone |
No, I wonder how his behaviour would contrast with a diagnosed psychopath if they had been delivering the budget speech today.
Psychopathy can be diagnosed utilising a 20 point checklist devised by a Dr. Hare. The 20 traits described include; glib and superficial charm, shallow affect, cunning and manipulativeness, lack of remorse or guilt and juvenile delinquency amongst others.
George's Hookers and Coke youth accounts for the last point but in his selling of the upper tax bracket reduction is there evidence of other, sociopathic, traits?
There's no doubt about about his glib charm, his smarmyness knows little bounds so what about the others?
Imagine if there was a psychopath who was desperate to pay less tax but was in such a position that criminally evading payment would be spotted in an instant, if he was chancellor for instance. Do you not think he'd use his cunning and manipulativeness to make sure that people thought his tax bill was bad for them? Using all his super - psycho powers to get the media on side and drip feed a narrative that him being out of pocket was bad for everyone, rich and poor alike.
Then when it had been kicked through into law he could show a complete lack of remorse by pointing out that it wasn't such a big deal anyway, after all it raised "next to nothing". That next to nothing was in fact one billion pounds, enough to "Provide hope" to 160,000 youngsters according to the Deputy Prime Minister.
Looking through the other dozen or so Psycho traits here I score Mr Osbourne as a conservative 22 points out of Peter Sutcliffe possible 40. Not enough to be a full blown nutjob but maybe a man who has criminal tendencies.
So if he's not mental then the 10% tax cut for Britain's wealthiest must be solely down to self serving greed and the sexually motivated murders are just a hobby.
Disclaimer : George Osborne, wall paper heir and chancellor of the exchequer, does not kill homeless people for sexual kicks. Or for their money.
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Wednesday, 29 February 2012
Georgie's happy ending
A little bright economic news for Berkshire's resident perverts, reported in this week's Midweek Observer, as prossies slash their rates.
Rumours this is an initiative proposed by the chancellor - whose seedy hookers & coke youth means he can no longer look his mum in the eye whenever Billie Piper comes on the TV - have been hotly denied.
Rumours this is an initiative proposed by the chancellor - whose seedy hookers & coke youth means he can no longer look his mum in the eye whenever Billie Piper comes on the TV - have been hotly denied.
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| Lilo Lil suffers deflation |
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Wednesday, 21 December 2011
Poetry corner
Wednesday, 7 September 2011
Is it raining?
Tax is a kick in the teeth, most people think this. You work your fingers to the bone, sat on your fat arse in an office, then pay day comes around and some of your hard-earned is creamed off to spend on killing God-bothering-nut jobs in Afghanistan. Of course most of the tax actually gets spent keeping the street lights on or having an ambulance on stand-by for when I decide Ice Hockey is actually the sport for me. So based on this you suck it in, write off your losses and get on with your life.
Unless you can afford a PR company. In which case you get them to round up a few tame academics - who will do anything for a sniff of cash and almost anything for an undergraduate with a nice smile and a lack of morals - and get them to tell the world that the 50p tax rate is making the country unbearable to live in and repelling free floating wads of cash from landing here. Making the rich pay this high rate of taxation on their well deserved pay-packets is driving them out of the country and raising a barrier to stinking rich foreigners coming over and building business empires here.
To be honest who cares if they leave and who cares if they don't come, neither will really happen. The real driving force of the economy in this country is the small & medium sized businesses and it's rare their owners and employees would come close to earning the £150,000 pa required to be taxed so heavily. The people who take home this sort of size pay packet tend to be working in the Service / Finance sector and so don't add much to the real economy - but keep the coke dealers in The City busy (I'm looking at you Chancellor...)
The few people actually paying the estimated £2.7bn this tax raises feel hard done by and so, after getting very angry and beating their Au Pairs with an ivory golf club, came up with the brilliant idea to tell us peasants that if they continue to have to suffer this inhuman taxation regime it'll actually be worse for us in the long run. The economy will continue to fall because of it and the only jobs available will be part-time trainee floor moppers at Kansas Fried Chicken.
This is known as pissing down your back and telling you it's raining.
As a youth I used to work behind the bar in a working men's club - the working part is ironic I think - during the tombola (Not bingo, tombola) I used to contemplate how many pints of lager I'd earned so far that night. It worked out about a pint an hour so I used to count down the minutes till another Carling Black Label had been earned. This impressed on me the importance of how much per hour you're paid and therefore I wondered how much these hard done by folk take home per hour after the tax man's had his cut, for all the fuss they've kicked up it must be a significant drop, a real belly blow to the take home, when they hit the magic number. So I did a smashing graph showing how much people take home per hour after tax & NI compared to their gross annual income. What I was expecting was a huge kink in the curve at £150,000 justifying their cry baby antics. What I got was a straight line and proof that they're just greedy bastards.
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| Canadian Can-Can |
Unless you can afford a PR company. In which case you get them to round up a few tame academics - who will do anything for a sniff of cash and almost anything for an undergraduate with a nice smile and a lack of morals - and get them to tell the world that the 50p tax rate is making the country unbearable to live in and repelling free floating wads of cash from landing here. Making the rich pay this high rate of taxation on their well deserved pay-packets is driving them out of the country and raising a barrier to stinking rich foreigners coming over and building business empires here.
To be honest who cares if they leave and who cares if they don't come, neither will really happen. The real driving force of the economy in this country is the small & medium sized businesses and it's rare their owners and employees would come close to earning the £150,000 pa required to be taxed so heavily. The people who take home this sort of size pay packet tend to be working in the Service / Finance sector and so don't add much to the real economy - but keep the coke dealers in The City busy (I'm looking at you Chancellor...)
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| Hookers & Coke - not an upper class department store |
This is known as pissing down your back and telling you it's raining.
As a youth I used to work behind the bar in a working men's club - the working part is ironic I think - during the tombola (Not bingo, tombola) I used to contemplate how many pints of lager I'd earned so far that night. It worked out about a pint an hour so I used to count down the minutes till another Carling Black Label had been earned. This impressed on me the importance of how much per hour you're paid and therefore I wondered how much these hard done by folk take home per hour after the tax man's had his cut, for all the fuss they've kicked up it must be a significant drop, a real belly blow to the take home, when they hit the magic number. So I did a smashing graph showing how much people take home per hour after tax & NI compared to their gross annual income. What I was expecting was a huge kink in the curve at £150,000 justifying their cry baby antics. What I got was a straight line and proof that they're just greedy bastards.
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Sunday, 12 June 2011
Flogging a dead horse
I thought the fight was over. I thought the general election and local elections rubber stamped the official history. The reason we're in economic plight is solely down to spending more money than we had during the Labour years. This is the accepted truth by the vast majority of the country, I've had conversations recently and it's seen as the only reason we're in the shite. There's books about it and everything.
Yet there's still a slow drip of stories and commentaries in the popular press that seems to want to continually reinforce this truth, almost as if you stopped saying it it might prove to stop being the case. The Ed Balls documents leak has offered another opportunity to make sure no one forgets the truth.
This story in the Mail - copied from the original in the Telegraph - makes a big play of the comment "We're (sic) spent all this money, but what have we got for it?" More proof that Labour were spending way above their means and squandering the lot on diversity playground technicians and lesbian lessons for little 'uns.
However if you take a look at the actual documents, which the Telegraph has kindly uploaded (note to Mail - in 2011 all online news should link to sources wherever possible), you can see the quote isn't really the hysterical screaming warning that the papers are touting.
It is in fact a sub-heading clarifying why the 2006 spending review should be looking at public sector productivity if they want to achieve flat spending. That is if the amount of money spent by the government is to remain at a flat 40ish % of GDP and not fluctuate depending on tax take and whims.
So it's just a policy suggestion, coming from the Treasury, asking for a predictable spend plan, not a cut in spending. This has been made to a Labour government who, I think, have the over-arching aim to stop wealth being sucked up from the bottom of society to the top and so are within their rights to ignore it; focusing on the benefit to society instead of the benefit to the economy. It's a matter of ideology how closely you feel these two things are linked.
Strangely the prediction made in the document of a spend of 42.4% GDP in 2007/08 was way out the, actual spend was 38.9%, things aren't as bad as they thought they could be.
Not being an economist my take on this is likely to be missing some important aspects but to take it as simply as the Mail readership tends to: You should only spend what you make. So what does the government make, whatever it taxes basically. This tends to be somewhere around 40% GDP mark - very similar to the amount it spends funnily enough!
As an aside the treasury takes around 40% of wealth generated in the country, yet I pay a lot more than that in total tax probably closer to 50%. Somewhere, someone is making money and not paying tax on it...
So if you subtract the tax take from the public spend it will show how out of control spending was and is. The data can be found easily enough on t'internet (here and here) and plotting them against each other gives this...
Basically put if the bar's below the line we're spending more than we're making and if it's above we've money left over.
Going back through time Wilson pissed cash against the wall through most of his time in office as did Heath, Wilson again and Callaghan. Thatcher spent less than she made, but Major splurged. Blair liked what he saw Thatcher do and saved more than he spent. The current controversy surrounds Brown. As I said earlier popular opinion is that he spent like a 10 year old with his parents iTunes account password, the graph seems to show this isn't quite the case. His strategy was to spend what he made. Not borrow or save, he seemed to control it more or less as closely as possible, up slightly one year down a bit the next.
So if the truth is that the state of the economy is more complicated than simple excessive public spending why is there the continued drip, drip, drip of copy saying that it is that simple?
We've a conservative government and ideologically they believe that it's better to live in the best room a Travelodge has to offer rather than pay more and have a smaller room at the Ritz. So if we cut the spending, get rid of the deficit we'll be left with a glut of cash. What do you think that'll get spent on, hospitals, nurseries and care homes for the elderly or getting rid of the upper tax band?
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Yet there's still a slow drip of stories and commentaries in the popular press that seems to want to continually reinforce this truth, almost as if you stopped saying it it might prove to stop being the case. The Ed Balls documents leak has offered another opportunity to make sure no one forgets the truth.
This story in the Mail - copied from the original in the Telegraph - makes a big play of the comment "We're (sic) spent all this money, but what have we got for it?" More proof that Labour were spending way above their means and squandering the lot on diversity playground technicians and lesbian lessons for little 'uns.
However if you take a look at the actual documents, which the Telegraph has kindly uploaded (note to Mail - in 2011 all online news should link to sources wherever possible), you can see the quote isn't really the hysterical screaming warning that the papers are touting.
It is in fact a sub-heading clarifying why the 2006 spending review should be looking at public sector productivity if they want to achieve flat spending. That is if the amount of money spent by the government is to remain at a flat 40ish % of GDP and not fluctuate depending on tax take and whims.
So it's just a policy suggestion, coming from the Treasury, asking for a predictable spend plan, not a cut in spending. This has been made to a Labour government who, I think, have the over-arching aim to stop wealth being sucked up from the bottom of society to the top and so are within their rights to ignore it; focusing on the benefit to society instead of the benefit to the economy. It's a matter of ideology how closely you feel these two things are linked.
Strangely the prediction made in the document of a spend of 42.4% GDP in 2007/08 was way out the, actual spend was 38.9%, things aren't as bad as they thought they could be.
Not being an economist my take on this is likely to be missing some important aspects but to take it as simply as the Mail readership tends to: You should only spend what you make. So what does the government make, whatever it taxes basically. This tends to be somewhere around 40% GDP mark - very similar to the amount it spends funnily enough!
As an aside the treasury takes around 40% of wealth generated in the country, yet I pay a lot more than that in total tax probably closer to 50%. Somewhere, someone is making money and not paying tax on it...
So if you subtract the tax take from the public spend it will show how out of control spending was and is. The data can be found easily enough on t'internet (here and here) and plotting them against each other gives this...
Basically put if the bar's below the line we're spending more than we're making and if it's above we've money left over.
Going back through time Wilson pissed cash against the wall through most of his time in office as did Heath, Wilson again and Callaghan. Thatcher spent less than she made, but Major splurged. Blair liked what he saw Thatcher do and saved more than he spent. The current controversy surrounds Brown. As I said earlier popular opinion is that he spent like a 10 year old with his parents iTunes account password, the graph seems to show this isn't quite the case. His strategy was to spend what he made. Not borrow or save, he seemed to control it more or less as closely as possible, up slightly one year down a bit the next.
So if the truth is that the state of the economy is more complicated than simple excessive public spending why is there the continued drip, drip, drip of copy saying that it is that simple?
We've a conservative government and ideologically they believe that it's better to live in the best room a Travelodge has to offer rather than pay more and have a smaller room at the Ritz. So if we cut the spending, get rid of the deficit we'll be left with a glut of cash. What do you think that'll get spent on, hospitals, nurseries and care homes for the elderly or getting rid of the upper tax band?
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Wednesday, 13 April 2011
Georgie tells it how it is
If they win the electoral reform vote next month it will be the end of the matter as far as the conservatives are concerned "This settles it for a long time" George Osborne told the Mail today.
One of the key arguments made by the No campaign's Martin Cross at the Evening Standard debate on AV last week was that 'voting for AV is not voting for Proportional representation'. That's a truism, but what George has nicely pointed out is that voting against AV hammers the nail in the coffin of PR for the foreseeable future.
His message is clear. If you ever want to see a government made up of the parties that the population actually voted for you must vote Yes. PR will never happen if you vote No.
AV itself is only slightly more proportional if you're a Liberal, if you're a Labour supporter it'll probably make not a jot of difference. If you follow the Tories however there's a real chance that, for the next couple of elections at least, AV will reduce the number MPs returned to Westminster. This is why they really aren't interested in changing. George might like to suffocate the brown children of poor people with Waitrose carrier bags (Or he might not, we'll probably never know) but he's not stupid. He is likely to be very unpopular at the next election and would really rather keep his job as an MP. How else is he going to afford his council tax and carrier bag collecting hobby?
It's also why the main donators to the NotoAV campaign are big Conservative funders. Posh bookmaker Michael Cruddas gave a cushty £400k, another city wide-boy Michael Farmer gave £100k and shopkeeper Lord Sainsbury coughed up further £100k. These are all big Tory donors and don't want to see their hard earned (cough) cash donations end up without a little say in what sort business environment they'll be working in.
People don't donate to political causes because of hard intellectual ideals, the contribute because they want their life to be easier when their boys get the power. George Osbourne knows this, but still thinks that the Electoral Reform Society donating to the Yes to Fairer votes campaign "stinks". It "stinks" that a society that campaigns to change the way we choose our leaders is supporting a campaign that wants to change the way choose our leaders.
It didn't stink quite so much when another Tory & NotoAV donor Andrew Cook donated to the Conservative war chest. This bought his company a nice little kick-back when the incoming government dropped a loan to help his competitor Sheffield Forgemasters expand.
It also didn't stink quite so much when Rupert Murdoch supported his political party with paper bags stuffed with used fivers and in return got Vince Cable sacked and subsequently the opportunity to buy Sky and tell us all who to vote for and what to buy for the rest of our lives.
You know what does stink? George Osborne. He stinks of chips apparently, not vinegar you understand. Chips. He thinks it's sophisticated.
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His message is clear. If you ever want to see a government made up of the parties that the population actually voted for you must vote Yes. PR will never happen if you vote No.
AV itself is only slightly more proportional if you're a Liberal, if you're a Labour supporter it'll probably make not a jot of difference. If you follow the Tories however there's a real chance that, for the next couple of elections at least, AV will reduce the number MPs returned to Westminster. This is why they really aren't interested in changing. George might like to suffocate the brown children of poor people with Waitrose carrier bags (Or he might not, we'll probably never know) but he's not stupid. He is likely to be very unpopular at the next election and would really rather keep his job as an MP. How else is he going to afford his council tax and carrier bag collecting hobby?
It's also why the main donators to the NotoAV campaign are big Conservative funders. Posh bookmaker Michael Cruddas gave a cushty £400k, another city wide-boy Michael Farmer gave £100k and shopkeeper Lord Sainsbury coughed up further £100k. These are all big Tory donors and don't want to see their hard earned (cough) cash donations end up without a little say in what sort business environment they'll be working in.
People don't donate to political causes because of hard intellectual ideals, the contribute because they want their life to be easier when their boys get the power. George Osbourne knows this, but still thinks that the Electoral Reform Society donating to the Yes to Fairer votes campaign "stinks". It "stinks" that a society that campaigns to change the way we choose our leaders is supporting a campaign that wants to change the way choose our leaders.
It didn't stink quite so much when another Tory & NotoAV donor Andrew Cook donated to the Conservative war chest. This bought his company a nice little kick-back when the incoming government dropped a loan to help his competitor Sheffield Forgemasters expand.
It also didn't stink quite so much when Rupert Murdoch supported his political party with paper bags stuffed with used fivers and in return got Vince Cable sacked and subsequently the opportunity to buy Sky and tell us all who to vote for and what to buy for the rest of our lives.
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| Rare image of Mr Osborne in his part time role as assistant till operator at the Jolly Frier |
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