Fancy a “one off” tax?

I don’t know whether it’s just me, but I’m hearing some nasty little rumours at the moment.

For instance:

The IMF world bank is proposing a ten per cent wealth tax on all households in the UK and the rest of the Eurozone.

What this would mean is men and women having to pay a levy on the total value of their accumulated assets, including their properties, cash, bank deposits, money funds, and savings in insurance and pension plans.

The amount payable would also depend upon whether they have any businesses, personal trusts, corporate funds, earnings, loans and mortgages.

All of these things are already taxed – so a wealth tax would represent an additional tax on the same assets. In other words, we would be taxed twice.

Now I haven’t heard a peep out of the MSM but surely there must be someone out there who has heard of this rumour. I only got hold of this through a blog written by journalists who I’ve never heard of before.

There’s also a link to a PDF discussing the proposal. 

This is not a new idea. If you remember it was carried out in Cyprus. The hyperlink takes you back three years ago.

The most distressing part of the discussion paper, is the lack of understanding by the authors. They don’t seem to realise they are sanctioning theft on the grandest scale.

What do you think? I personally think it’s time to take my money out of the bank and hide it under the…………………

The Science of Government

The CSIR has discovered the heaviest element yet known to science. The new element is Governmentium (Gv). It has one neutron, 35 assistant neutrons, 88 deputy neutrons and 198 assistant deputy neutrons, giving it an atomic mass of 312.

These 312 particles are held together by forces called morons, which are surrounded by vast quantities of lefton-like particles called peons.

Since Governmentium has no electrons or protons, it is inert. However, it can be detected, because it impedes every reaction with which it comes into contact.

A tiny amount of Governmentium can cause a reaction normally taking less than a second to take from four days to four years to complete.   Governmentium has a normal half-life of 2- 6 years. It does not decay but instead undergoes a reorganisation in which a portion of the assistant neutrons and deputy neutrons exchange places.

In fact, Governmentium's mass will actually increase over time, since each reorganisation will cause more morons to become neutrons, forming isodopes.

This characteristic of moron promotion leads some scientists to believe that Governmentium is formed whenever morons reach a critical concentration. This hypothetical quantity is referred to as critical morass.

When catalysed with money, Governmentium becomes Administratium, an element that radiates just as much energy as Governmentium since it has half as many peons but twice as many morons.

All of the money is consumed in the exchange, and no other byproducts are produced.

Can I have my Nobel prize now?

Spend, Spend, Spend

Can I have one of those?

Bloody government needs to downsize to a Ford Fiesta.

A charity broadcast on behalf of the Prime Minister

They need your help, give miserly.



H/T to OH

Ministers to shelve Internet snooping plans

Ministers have shelved plans to collect details of all text, e-mail and Internet communications until after the general election.

That it was even contemplated in the first place, given labour's disastrous knack of losing data, in recent years beggared belief.

Full article in Yesterday's Times

Hague does well

William Hague puts out his own labourlist.



Didn't labour do well. Wankers

They're dead right.

From an article in the Times today shows that even the MOD are overstaffed with civil servants.

The Ministry of Defence is so stuffed with civil servants that they outnumber the combined manpower of the Royal Navy and the RAF.

The statistic, produced by the Conservatives yesterday to attack the Government’s record on defence manpower, followed condemnation by General Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank, a former Chief of Defence Staff, over imbalances between uniform and non-uniformed personnel.

Liam Fox, the Shadow Defence Secretary, said that 16 per cent of the Civil Service resided in the MoD, and that the number of civilian officials (86,620), was about 12,000 more than the Royal Navy (34,830) and RAF (39,260) put together.

I work for the Royal Fleet auxiliary, and worked ashore for a couple of years in an office helping to manage the re-fitting of ships. My job was to collate the work for each ship's refit in my group, and edit each job specification to weed out cost overruns.

Now as most engineers know, it is not an exact science and you can't plan for every eventuality. Because of this we expected a cost overrun on several jobs.

For instance, if you open up a pump for survey you may find that the wear is far more than predicted, therefore extra cost incurred.

To this end we were allowed a package of extra money, usually between 5% and 15% depending on the age of the ship to be refitted.

Our outfit was comprised of 50% uniformed staff and 50% civil servants.

One part of Office was entirely staffed with civil servants devoted to writing specifications for alterations to the vessel, ie new equipment to replace the obsolete stuff. (Every thing wears out in time and can't be fixed)

What shocked me was the length of these specs. Sometimes 20 pages or more with endless waffle. The number of lines stating the bleeding obvious such as, "The contractor will carry out the following work", beggared belief.

Needless to say, often these specs arrived at my desk only just in time to be sent to the various tenderers, which procluded me from giving them the real once over.

5% or 15% overrun?

Bollocks! Some of these came in at 150%. What made it worse, is that for a lot of the specs, they called in outside contractors to write them.

Just to end it all, (Not me) when I went into the office there were 21 ships. Now we have 16 and the office has expanded their personnel by over 25%. Make sense to you? Me neither.

Here is the Time article

I'll write a post about the shipboard workplace sometime.

Another tax

Another initiative, announced by the government, is to give everyone broadband access. Very laudable in the spin sense.

But....

it looks like those that already pay for it, will be hit with a charge of £20 to subsidise the chav scum to get faster access with their console, to access their mind numbing games whilst they sit at home on their disability benefit.

Anyone got a sharp knife so I can slash my wrists?