2013/05/12 22:37
I must have overlooked this very interesting blog post by The Telegraph's Thomas Pascoe (probably because the Scottish holidays had already started at the time). He's arguing that Gordon Brown wasn't an innumerate idiot when he sold most of the UK's gold reserves at a ridiculously low price, as most people had assumed. What he really did was trying to...
2013/03/16 22:01
[caption id="attachment_5455" align="alignright" width="150"]" today, I learnt that it's expressed as bu chòir do "it's proper for".With that information in hand, it didn't take me long to find a BBC blog page which gives the question as Am bu chòir do dh'Alba a bhith na dùthaich neo-eisimeilich?Although I have no way to verify it, this looks correct to me. The...
2013/05/24 22:53
Companies have lots of advantages compared to real people. Amongst other things, they generally only pay taxes on their profits, not on their income (revenue), and lots of companies are registered for VAT, which means they don’t pay any VAT on what they buy.
Companies have these advantages to encourage investment and promote growth.
However, one might argue that this should apply to individuals, too.
Imagine if every individual automatically owned a “personal” company (i.e., at birth I would have been made sole director of Thomas Widmann Ltd.), and all their work took place through their company (it would be illegal for companies to employ people rather than other companies). In this scenario, everybody would need to decide when to take profits out of their personal company instead of investing the money (which would be tax-free).
With the move away from direct employment towards self-employment, this is increasingly becoming a reality for a large number of people, so perhaps it would be worthwhile making this approach universal.
After this change, it would be possible to completely abolish income tax, because employment would then always an issue between two companies, and all that would be needed would be company taxation and taxes on withdrawing profits. I guess many people would let their personal companies own their house and their car and let their personal company provide free meals to its employee in order to minimise tax and VAT, but that would be a good thing as it would just be levelling out the playing field (which is currently distorted in favour of companies and rich people).
At the moment, most rich people have companies (or charities) to lower their tax bill, so giving everybody a VAT-registered company would basically just give normal people the benefits that the rich currently enjoy.
2013/05/11 11:09
It's completely clear that David Cameron's plans to renegotiate the EU membership terms is just a plot to halt the progress of UKIP. He thought that promising a referendum in five years' time would make UKIP's voters come back to the Conservatives in time for the next general election. However, it's now increasingly clear that voters are drifting towards UKIP for many different reasons (immigration being one of the major ones), which means that the referendum promise now looks utterly...
2013/04/25 23:15
In the past I've been writing about ways to split up England for the purpose of making federalism work in the UK (see this and this and this). For some bizarre reason one split I never suggested in these blog posts was in many ways the most obvious one. As a linguist, I've been aware for years that English dialects...
2013/01/23 14:03
I really don't understand what Cameron is trying to achieve by trying to renegotiate the EU membership terms and then holding a referendum with only two options: the new terms or leaving the EU altogether (without any option to opt...
2013/01/07 15:44
When I created my independence blog, Arc of Prosperity, I decided I would at first publish relevant posts on both blogs.However, it's not ideal that there isn't a primary location for each post. For instance, it means comments on the...
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