May 15, 2008Today's Web Grab
A demographic shift for Obama?Stephen Colbert explains why: The scale of the Zimbabwe tragedy
Please don't miss Peter Oborne's magnificent piece on Zimbabwe in today's Daily Mail. Peter has covered the tragedy of that country with necessary relentlessness and courage. His great fear is that the rest of us are forgetting Zimbabwe:
He is right. Our attention mustn't wander until Mugabe and his thugs are gone. How to get up in the morning
Guaranteed to drive you mad in the morning but at least it kickstarts your brain while doing it. Ladies and gentlemen, the one and only Puzzle Alarm Clock. Alice Fishburn Magazine Rack - Issue 224
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You say Obama but I say...
It's a truth universally acknowledged that where one political spouse leads, the other is bound to follow. For Exhibit A, please see Hill and Bill. So it's refreshing that while Obama revels in the prized Edwards endorsement, he actually only managed to get half of it. According to The New York Times:
The Budget that destroyed Brown's alibi
His attempt to suggest that the £2.7bn borrowing was a deliberate measure to give a fillip to the economy was painful. Truly painful. But I struggled my way though it. And two points struck me. The first was that he appears to have changed his investment rule. When John Humphrys asked him about exceeding the public sector debt ceiling on 40 per cent of GDP he interrupted, denied that he was breaking the rule and said that it applied over the economic cycle. That's funny. I could have sworn that rule applied every year. If he has changed the rule, he has opened the way to a massive borrowing spree. The second point concerned the abolition of the 10p rate. He claimed he was doing this in order to simplify taxes at two rates. Now, this has always annoyed me, because he introduced the 10p rate in the first place. Until this point, the Government had a response to any smartarse who mentioned the fact that Brown had introduced the rate. No, they said, he didn't introduce it for political reasons (to make himself look like a low tax Chancellor) and he didn't abolish it for political reasons (to make the Tories look silly and cut the basic rate). Instead he did it for principled reasons. He wanted to help the poor and do it quickly. As tax credits didn't exist he put the 10p rate in place, always intending to replace it later when credits could do the work instead. And in his last Budget that moment finally arrived. Really. That was their line. But there's a problem, you see. That line was fine (ish) when they were planning to compensate everybody by changing the tax credits system. But now they have done it a different way - through tax allowances. And that method, of course, was available to them in 1997 when they introduced the 10p rate. Indeed Andrew Dilnot at the Institute for Fiscal Studies urged them at the time to use allowances and not complicate the tax system. So Alastair Darling's emergency Budget has destroyed Brown's alibi. He now has no defence against the charge that his introduction and abolition of the 10p rate were political stunts. Thursday's comment from the papers in...
Today in Times Comment
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And from around the world...
May 14, 2008Today's Web Grab
Labour's doomed four point plan for recoveryBen Brogan sets out Labour's four point plan for recovery on his must-read blog. Step one is to put the 10p thing behind them, step two to get past the memoirs, step three to do better than expected (having set the bar ridiculously low) in Crewe and Nantwich and step four to avoid defeat over the 42 day proposals. As Ben points out these are internal objectives, all about survival and keeping the Parliamentary Labour party (PLP) onside. There is no hope of recovery if this is their plan. Why has Bush given up golf?
Never let it be said that President Bush doesn't know the meaning of sacrifice. In an interview with Politico, he revealed why he has given up one of his favourite pastimes:
Alice Fishburn More bad news for Brown's spitting imageThe Brown waxwork fiasco continues. After receiving no response from No. 10, an irritated Madame Tussauds held a vote on whether the PM should be immortalised with his peers. Here's Boulton & Co's report on the result:
Still. There's one thing Brown won't have to worry about. The previous PM suffered through Bling Blair and Holiday Blair. What on earth would they have done to Son of the Manse Brown? Alice Fishburn
Magazine Rack - Issue 223
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The secret to a long, happy lifeMy column this morning was on the Easterlin Paradox. In a nutshell:
The Easterlin Paradox is the foundation stone of the vast happiness literature. And it turns out that Easterlin wasn't right. I thought you might want to read the original paper from Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers of the Wharton School. They assess the data and show that rising income and rising happiness go together after all. But while I was working on the piece I also came across this rather simple argument, which should have occurred to me before, but didn't. In 2003 Ruut Veenhoven and Michael Hagerty also looked at Easterlin's work. And like Stevenson and Wolfers they too found rising income and happiness go together. But they also added this idea - happiness years. Their point is that as we live longer the wealthier we are, so the wealthier we are the higher the total number of happy years we have. Thus even if a wealthy individual is no happier per day, their total happiness across their life is increased. Why the tax break will come back to bite Darling
So we've borrowed £2.7 billion, given everyone a tax break, and.....well, the 10p issue is still with us. Why? Not so much because some of the low paid are not fully compensated. It's because the package Darling put forward is a one-off one year deal. Next year he will still have to put forward his patchwork of remedies. And - and this is the difficult bit - he will have to remove the increased tax allowance. Surely this won't matter? Surely we will be pleased to have it for as long as we have it and then, when it's gone, we will go back to how we are now? No. That's not how it works. As the Nobel prize winning economists Kahneman and Tversky have demonstrated, we are loss averse. In other words, we treat gains and losses differently. When the Government attempts to return our taxes to their current level, they will find we react to it as if it were a tax rise. Wednesday's comment from the papers in...
Today in Times Comment
And from the rest of the papers...
And from around the world...
May 13, 2008£2.7 billion? Well that ends one Labour campaign tactic
This is surely the end of any possibility that Labour can run a black hole campaign against the Tories in the next election. They've just shown they don't mind borrowing almost £3 billion for entirely political reasons. Today's Web Grab
Henry Kissinger on IraqWhat would happen if the US withdrew from Iraq? Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger provides his views in our new FORA video. He also talks about what John McCain has to do to sustain support for the war. You can watch it all here. If you can't see this video, click here Just how unpopular is George W. Bush?
Ouch. Talk about damning with faint praise. But, as the Fact Checker asks, is Rove even right? Alice Fishburn Your WritersFeedsthree random posts |
