Mansion tax inspectors will target homes with views of the countryside and driveways, The Telegraph can reveal.

The Government valuation agents will be sent out with a checklist of features supposed to signal an increase in a property’s estimated value.

They include whether the house is set in scenic surroundings, if it has a conservatory, and even the number of parking spaces and bathrooms.

It comes after The Telegraph revealed that HMRC agents will be able to demand entry to people’s properties to assess their value for the levy.

Sigh. So, the most stupid tax ever is generally agreed to be the Windows Tax. This led to people bricking up their windows in order to avoid the tax and therefore live in the dark just to middle-finger the revenue. Well, OK, giving the revenue the middle-finger is an honourable thing to do but still, forcing people to live in the dark and dank via your choice of taxation methods is generally agreed to be very stupid indeed.

The thing is this is not, in fact, the most stupid tax ever. This was actually a replacement - a less bad replacement - of the tax which went before. Which was the Hearth Tax. Window tax was under Willie III and it replaced the hearth tax of Charlie II - if you are unblessed by being English yes, C II was before W III.

The aim and intent was the same with both - tax those rich bastards with large houses. A mansion tax that is. But taxing hearths means getting into the house to count the number of hearths. Which then runs up against that Englishman’s home and castle and all that - basic civil liberties stuff. And, of course, the expense of a team of people going around to count fireplaces. And the protection thugs they’ll need when knocking on the door of Squire Haggard. So, not sensible, that. Plus, of course, people will reduce their tax bill by blocking up fireplaces and generally living worse, poorer and colder lives by doing so - but being able to middle-finger the taxman.

The windows tax was an advance on this. We still get the poncey rich bastards in their big houses but we can do so by a clerk walking down the street and counting. No civil liberties violations there and it’s hugely, vastly, cheaper.

Except, of course, we’ve now only got the second most stupid tax in all history.

And back to the present day. There’s that desire to tax the poncey rich in their big houses. So, they’re going back to the hearth tax. Instruments of the State get to invade the righteous castle and thereby - very expensively - tot up the tax. When what we actually want is a simple, from the street, method of valuing the big poncey houses.

Which we’ve got. We have Land Registry records - and yes, it’s true, a lot of the land isn’t there, but near all of housing is. We’ve got RightMove which tells us what people are trying to sell for in that area. We can in fact do house valuations for tuppence each with a bit of internet scraping and perhaps an AI agent. So, that’s what we should do then.

Is that what is being done? Nope, the current proposal is that we move back to the most stupid tax of all time, the one even worse than the Windows Tax.

Now do you believe me when I insist we’re ruled by morons?

Rupert Lowe, the leader of Restore Britain, is on course to earn as much from the social media platform X as he does from his salary as an MP, after surging income from posts that include demands for mass deportations.

Lowe has earned £932 an hour for his posts on X, formerly Twitter, since the start of the year, according to his own declarations in the register of MPs’ financial interests, which detail how many hours he has spent on X for each payment he received from the platform.

Apparently something must be done because. Well, because. It’s Lowe, see? You know, because.

We do not see generalised calls for politicians to forgo fees from writing for or appearing in the media. Ministers already have to but a backbench MP writing for a newspaper, appearing on the BBC, gets a fee. Which will be declared in his Commons returns etc.

But Lowe, see?

The actual answer here is that anyone freelancing absolutely hates evidence of other people freelancing successfully. Flat jealousy, see?

For example, my Twitter account receives too little traffic for me to even be allowed to sign up to get paid. And Lowe gets £100 large a year from it?

Bastard, that’s all there is to it, see?

There is a ready supply of theories on offer at Westminster. But a surprising number start from the basic truth that the state does less because, after the financial crisis, we consciously decided that it should do less, by managing the cost of the crisis largely through spending cuts, rather than tax rises.

So why does it spend more as a share of GDP than it did before 2010? One reason is that arguments about “shares of GDP” are almost always selling what is, at best, a partial truth. You can spend more as a share of GDP simply because your country grows at a sluggish rate,

But why would slow growth mean that government spending increases as a percentage of GDP? No, Baumol does not explain it, for that’s a function of decent growth (good growth means higher wages, thus services rise in cost compared to manufactures). The only possibility here is that government spending is planned based upon the idea of already spending future growth. Which isn’t an inevitability at all now, is it?

But if you have sluggish economic growth, you are going to see your spending go up as a share of GDP even if you are standing still.

Again, only if you’ve already assumed growth and have already decided to spend that money that flows from growth.

So, err, yes, apparently they do.

The AI boom at present. Sure it’s going to burst, sure many will get very burnt. As with dotcom, railways, canals and tulips before. The outcome was that the average - median and modal - investment lost money and there’s a damn good argument that the mean was negative too. Some few, very few, investments panned out. But that mean average was still pissing it up the wall.

The this time is different is that in China they’ve wise government directing the investing. This is much better because of course. The commies think that because it’s the CCP it’ll work, authoritarians of every stripe think that because it is being planned it will be better and the fascists are just noting the spiffy uniforms with which it is enforced.

It’s still pissing it up the wall in grand style and volume.

For example:

The boom could not last. Evergrande, like other developers, gorged on cheap credit to finance construction, building apartment blocks on land sold by local governments. The company relied on a straightforward cycle: borrowing money to buy land, pre-selling flats before borrowing again. With house prices rising and demand seemingly endless, the model appeared unassailable.

But in 2020, as the Covid pandemic arrived and house sales slowed, the Chinese government attempted to tame the boom by tightening developers’ access to borrowing, effectively cutting their lifeline to credit markets.

By then, Evergrande was the world’s most indebted property developer, with liabilities of more than $300bn (£222bn). Towards the end of 2021, it stopped paying its debts in the biggest corporate default in China’s history. The fall of Evergrande, which has since entered liquidation, triggered an avalanche, with more than 50 other developers also defaulting, including Country Garden, the country’s second-largest developer.

Gorging on cheap capital at the direction of the CCP didn’t work out. Ah, but this this time it will be different:

Fearing a repeat of the “lost decades” of stagnation that afflicted Japan after its property crash in the early 1990s, China has responded to the collapse in domestic demand by doubling down on its efforts to find markets abroad.

….

Unable to rely on property to drive growth, China has continued to pour investment and credit into manufacturing and strategic industries, allowing its companies to outcompete European rivals and contributing to a considerable global trade imbalance. China recorded a record trade surplus of $1.2tn (£879.6bn) last year.

Supported by the state, Chinese companies, once the purveyors of cheap tat, now sell quality products at prices that can be difficult for foreign rivals to match. In March, the Jaecoo 7, a Chinese-made SUV, became Britain’s best-selling new car, although it ranked second for the year to date.

These companies, exporters, are not making money. They’re gorging - again - on cheap capital.

The Chinese worker doesn’t have good healthcare and a solid state pension to look forward to in old age. So, he saves. But what he can save into is significantly restricted - called “financial represession”. Mostly depositing money at the local state bank. Which pays a negative real interest rate - below the inflation rate. So, there’s no topping up of your savings by the earnings of your savings. Quite the opposite, you get back less than you saved. So, for prudential reasons you have to save a massive amount - China’s household savings rate is some 40% of GDP (in the US perhaps 5%).

The state bank takes that money and lends it, real cheap, to the 160 different EV companies and all the rest. And, when they die - they will - they’ll take all that money with them, as the property developers did.

Pissing the money away through capital misallocation is still pissing the money away even if it is the CCP doing the directing of the micturation.

It ain’t gonna be different this time, really, it ain’t.

Workers are set to pay £468m a year in extra National Insurance contributions (NICs) as a result of Labour’s salary sacrifice raid.

Rachel Reeves, the former chancellor, announced at her last Budget that, from April 2029, a £2,000 cap would be imposed on the amount that can be paid into a workplace pension via salary sacrifice before contributions are liable for NICs.

At the time, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) said that the Treasury would rake in £3.5bn in additional NICs in 2029-30 as a result, but there was no detail about how this cost would be split between employees and employers.

However, a new breakdown released under Freedom of Information (FOI) rules has revealed that businesses are expected to shoulder around £3bn of this tax hit, with workers paying the remaining £468m directly from their payslips through higher NICs.

Of course if they’d used me to write this it would have been correct but for some reason I’m banned from writing for the paper.

The issue here is that taxes upon employment income end up being paid by the workers, not the employer. It’s wholly standard analysis that this is so, that the incidence of things like national insurance, social security, is on wages, not upon corporate profits.

Thus that entire £3.5 billion is a rise in taxation upon the wages of the workers. That’s just the way it works out.

If our rulers knew this and decided to do it anyway then I’d at least admire their sneakiness. But what worries me rather more is that peeps like Our Ange will be believing that the £3 billion does in fact come from the employers. You know, that they’re simply ignorant.

We’re so lucky, right?

Britain’s water supply is entrusted to a string of local private monopolies, overseen by underfunded, demoralised and largely toothless watchdogs. Since Margaret Thatcher sold off our water, this essential infrastructure has fallen into the hands of a transnational network of spivs and cowboys who have stripped it of almost every penny. For the sake of elite enrichment and lower household bills, the water system has relied on the public investment made by postwar social-democratic governments.

That’s the generally accepted opinion among the left-on. Here stated by Aditya Chakrabortty in an opinion column in The Guardian.

Except:

Based on new figures from the economic regulator Ofwat, water companies in England and Wales delivered £9.2bn of capital investment in 2023-24. This is up nearly a fifth (18.8%) on the previous year, and more than double the annual levels in the years immediately before the sector was privatised in 1989.

Yes, those are real terms numbers, after we account for inflation.

I’ve heard that investment in the water and wastewater sectors has steadily decreased over time. How have you allowed this to happen?

Investment in the industry has roughly doubled since privatisation in 1989, rising drastically in the 1990s. Average totex (total expenditure) has been consistently running at around £10bn a year since 2000, and average capex (capital expenditure – money spent on assets, such as such as buildings, equipment, and technology) has been between £5bn and £6bn a year, reaching the highest point in that range (£6bn) between 2015-2020.

The standard belief is simply wrong. Wholly at odds with reality.

Aren’t we lucky to have an establishment so well informed?

Today, while 60% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck,

OK, so that’s a problem. Thus the solution is that 60% of Americans should save more of their paycheck rather than spend it upon living in the here and now.

OK, fine by me. This is just the statement that we should increase the savings rate. Again, fine by me.

So, what is it that people actually save for? Given that people are actually rational - to an extent, and in general, this is not the statement that all actions by all humans beings are wholly rational - savings tend to be for old age and medical emergencies.

We can even test this. In places that do not have decent pension and medical systems then people save much more of their income. Say, in China, where households seem to save 40% or so of their incomes. As opposed to about 5% overall in the US and, as Bernie is asserting, nothing for 60% of the people who are spending all their paycheck each and every time.

Which is great, now we know how to raise that savings rate. Abolish Social Security and Medicare. Then Americans will spend less of their paycheck on the here and now and save more of it for that uncertain future. They will no longer be living paycheck to paycheck which is the original worry, the original complaint. Problem solved.

We await the bill in the Senate, right? Because Bernie will indeed solve the problems that he himself identifies. Coolio.

There is that slight suspicion here that this is not a deep enough analysis. For workers alread pay 12.4% in social security taxes. Plus 2.9% Medicare. Yes, yes, supposedly split with employers but come along now, we all know that taxes upon employment income are incident upon the worker, not the employer.

So, workers are, in fasct, saving 15% of their income already. To pay for their old age and their medical care in that old age. It’s just they’re saving it with the government.

Which is, I think, really lovely. Bernie uses forced savings with the government as proof that the workers aren’t saving. Just wondrous.

Andy Burnham has said middle-class families should “play their part” by accepting asylum seeker accommodation near their homes.

The Prime Minister said he would work to ensure that the “poorest communities” did not have to take the lion’s share of accommodation for asylum seekers.

Leave aside whether we should have migration, immigration, asylum seeking and all the rest. Just accept, arguendo, that we do and shall. OK. So, housing these folk is a problem. We like to solve problems in the cheapest manner possible. For this makes us richer - we have, by solving a problem cheaply, more economic resources to do other things with.

So, we’ve this problem with housing migrants. We’re now, as a matter of state policy, going to insist upon using more expensive land, more expensive property, to solve this problem.

We are ruled by cretins.

I will permit one exception to this. No, not the cretins idea, but to the housing. I would support the creation of a shipping container park to house all those boat folk. Set up on Hampstead Heath. Then our Lanyard class will get what they’re voting for good and hard. As democracy insists they should.

So, as it cannot be logically supported he’s got to be doing something odd. So, the best I can get to is this:

Why? Because while renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels, fossil fuels are around 3 times more profitable. This is because renewables have a low barrier to entry and are highly competitive (which is great for low prices!), while fossil fuels are more conducive to market control and monopoly pricing.

OK, that doesn’t work, as we can see from how oil prices change. All oil prices change at the same time. If oil producers had significant power over the oil price then they would charge what the market would bear all the time. That oil prices go up and down - together! - as supply and demand change shows that the oil price is, largely, market created, not through market power.

So, what is this thing that Hickel is doing to get to this conclusion? His reference there is to this:

RECENT TECHNICAL ADVANCES mean it is typically cheaper to produce electricity from renewable sources than from fossil fuels.

Which is the thing. Sure, it can be very cheap to produce electricity from renewables. I’ve seen - or heard of at least - bids for solar in Abu Dhabi at 1.8 cents US per kWhr. Which is really pretty cheap.

That’s also electricity in daylight hours only out in the middle of the Arabian fucking desert. Which is not wholly and exactly useful.

The expensive part of renewables is getting to a 24/7 supply, in volume, at the 99.98% reliability we desire of a grid. That’s expensive, not cheap. It’s also true that other renewables are not, even purely in the generation of electricity sense, cheaper than fossil fuels. £150 per MWhr from North Sea wind is not cheaper than a natural gas station on land built for continuous generation.

So that’s the trick, to switch from the price of usuable power to simple electricity generation. But then he’s a propagandist so obviously there’s going to be a trick, right?

But now to the actual delusion. He says the following three things:

But when it comes to the economy, the system of production, not even a pretence of democracy is allowed to enter. Under capitalism, production is controlled overwhelmingly by capital: the big banks, the major corporations, and the 1% who own the majority of investible assets. They determine what to produce, how to use our labour and our planet’s resources, and who should benefit.

And for capital, the purpose of production is not to meet human needs or improve society, much less to achieve any ecological goals. The purpose is to maximize and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective. This is known as the “capitalist law of value”: capital only invests in producing what is profitable to capital.

OK, let us accept that. Then:

But it also requires scaling down damaging and unnecessary forms of production – not just fossil fuels, but also things like SUVs, private jets, mansions, fast fashion, industrial beef, advertising, and the practice of planned obsolescence. Scientists have made it clear that if we want to achieve sufficiently rapid decarbonization, this has to be on the table.

OK, let us accept that too, arguendo. Which leads to:

So what is the antidote to capitalism? Economic democracy. With democratic control over our productive capacities we can stop climate breakdown in short order. We can overcome the capitalist law of value, and organize production around social and ecological objectives.

That’s delusion. Proper, right out, foaming at the mouth gaga delusion.

Why are the beef, the SUVs, fast fashion more profitable for capital to produce? Those are the things we consumers are willing to part with our money for. These are, given the constraints on what we have, what we want. So, why is economic democracy going to mean less of these things? We’ve just shown that these are the things that we want. So, why would voting on them produce less of them than voting with our money for them? We’ve already got the revealed preference, no?

Of course, Hickel could mean a highly edited version of economic democracy where we’re not allowed to vote for what Hickel thinks we shouldn’t. Which is what Hickel actually means, I’m sure.

But this still leaves us with the delusion of the claimed solution. The things currently produced are more profitable because this is what we out here want. The cure is therefore that we out here define what gets produced?

Eh?

This is a lesson that has been forgotten. From a Guardian list of things government should pass laws to make happen:

Force companies to put a phone number on their homepage

You’ve got a problem with a company and you want to get it sorted – and then you realise you cannot find a number for it anywhere. There are communications companies that have no “contact us” link anywhere to be seen, and energy companies that send you all round the houses looking for a way to get in touch.

One of the recurring themes of Guardian Money readers’ problems is the struggle to find someone to help when something goes wrong. Clearly, once you have published a phone number, you need staff at the other end answering the phone and offering some joined-up thinking, so this is only the start of the solution – but at least customers would not feel like companies were trying to hide from them.

This does not work as there is no guarantee that anyone will answer the call.

We’ve also that basic point that Burke and his Little Platoons can - and often do - solve problems better than government. So, here’s the pitch for that private sector service.

We set up a database of the home and work and mobile phone numbers - emails too - of the management of companies. Most importantly, the board of directors. If the company is owned by private equity - say - then the General Partners of the PE company.

Obviously, if a company has a helpline, which people answer, then all of that information stays private to us. If a company does not then we publish it as a page saying these are the contact numbers for that company. Say, Evri, the delivery people. The board members get their numbers and email publicly revealed. As I recall it they’re PE as well so some number of GPs over in the US also start getting aggrieved calls from Lesser Wallop about non-delivery. Not that any Septic would be able to understand Ms. Aggrieved of Lesser Wallop but it’s the instance of the call that matters. Evri is used as an example for a bit of looking around a few months back seemed to reveal that they had no UK phone number at all. Thus the directors it will be.

The top management of companies that do not provide a helpline - nor answer the one they claim to have - will have the customer complaints calls directed toward them. This will, of course, rapidly mean the opening of a useful customer complaint line that people actually answer. Those making that £250k a year as the board member of whatever do not want to be talking to Ms. Aggrieved of Lesser Wallop. Therefore phone calls from Ms. Aggrieved will lead to the creation of a useful customer services department.

At which point, of course, we take the board members’ phone numbers down and job done. But, clearly, we keep monitoring to ensure that those service times don’t then decline.

Make the bastards who make the decisions suffer the consequences of those decisions. Works this does, really, it works.

Now, there will be some who say that government can do that. Why use the Little Platoons when a law can simply be passed?

Which is to miss a basic philosophic point, which is that we should only use government when we, ourselves, cannot do it. Government is for when the Little Platoons cannot achieve it. Letters of Marque are lovely things but biffing the Frenchies is better done with a Royal Navy. Assuming we still had one of course. RNLI, on the other hand, works better without government than it would with.

But much more than that. For who are the worst at providing a contact number that works? Why, that would be government, wouldn’t it? Anyone ever tried to ‘phone HMRC? Quite. Which is where these numbers and contact details all get revealed:

HMRC Commissioners

Our Commissioners are responsible for the collection and management of revenue, the enforcement of prohibitions and restrictions and other functions, such as the payment of tax credits. They exercise these functions in the name of the Crown.

The Commissioners are also entitled to appoint officers of Revenue and Customs who must comply with their directions. The way in which the Commissioners conduct their business is governed by the Commissioners for Revenue and Customs Act. Decisions relating to the resolution of our largest and most sensitive cases are decided by 3 Commissioners, chaired by the Tax Assurance Commissioner.

HMRC has 9 Commissioners:

John-Paul Marks, First Permanent Secretary and Chief Executive

Angela MacDonald, Second Permanent Secretary and Deputy Chief Executive

Justin Holliday, Chief Finance Officer and Tax Assurance Commissioner

Penny Ciniewicz, Director General for Customer Compliance

Myrtle Lloyd, Director General Customer Services

Jonathan Athow, Director General Customer Strategy and Tax Design

Carol Bristow, Director General Borders and Trade

Helen Pickles, Chief People Officer

Daljit Rehal, Chief Digital and Information Officer

HMRC Board

The HMRC Board is advisory. It provides challenge and advice on HMRC’s performance, delivery, strategy, capability and risk.

It does not advise on policy development nor the affairs of individual taxpayers.

The board is chaired by the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury.

You can read the HMRC Board’s Terms of Reference:

HMRC Board Terms of Reference (ODT, 150 KB)

Board members

The board comprises of members of HMRC’s Executive Committee and Non-Executive Directors.

Chair: Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury

Members:

Dame Jayne-Anne Gadhia, Lead Non-Executive Director

John-Paul Marks, First Permanent Secretary and Chief Executive

Angela MacDonald, Second Permanent Secretary and Deputy Chief Executive

Justin Holliday, Chief Finance Officer and Tax Assurance Commissioner

Daljit Rehal, Chief Digital and Information Officer

Michael Hearty, Non-Executive Director

Jen Tippin, Non-Executive Director

Bill Dodwell, Non-Executive Director

Heather Self, Non-Executive Director

Sir Craig Mackey, Non-Executive Director

Sachin Jogia, Non-Executive Director

HMRC takes longer than 2 minutes to answer the phone with a useful and helpful human being? Then all of those start to get those calls from Ms. Aggrieved of Lesser Wallop. Oh yes, all of them. Work numbers, home, mobiles, emails where we can get ‘em.

True, true, 2 minutes is more than we’d demand of the private sector - or less time if you prefer - but the argument in favour of government is that it’s better than the private sector, amiwrite? So, hold it to those higher and better standards. And hold it to those higher and better standards by making sure the bastards running it have to deal with the outcomes of their decisions.

In the HMRC case we might well add the numbers of senior PCS and ARC union officials. In fact, definitely.

Now what we require is the billionaire to fund all of this. Which brings us to this:

Virginia Postrel

@vpostrel

I endorse this idea. That plus giving big bucks to @internetarchive In the immortal words of Faber College, knowledge is good.

Quote

Séb Krier

Aug 9

A lot of philanthropists and soon to be rich techies wonder where they should donate their money. This piece makes a compelling case for donating it to struggling universities across the world.

Nah, bugger the universities. That would just be pissing good after bad. As with Ms. Scott spending $26 billion on the usual grievance studies folk without solving world hunger, Ms. Gates French spraying equal sums on articles about grievance studies, Ms Jobs spending fortunes on employing grievance studies grads to write articles.

People become billionaires by making the world a better place - in the opinion of those who buy their products and thus make them billionaires of course. The cash piles accumulated from having done so should be spent upon continuing to make the world a better place. Like, say, making government more efficient, insisting that both government and private industry can be contacted by the average consumer.

One further joy is that the further left wing you are the more this form of philanthropy should appeal. It’s the left who think that government works so therefore it should - logically - be the left most willing to make government work by holding government management’s feet to the fire. It’s also the left who insist that those who run private companies are evil bastard bloodsucking capitalists so let’s make the bastards suffer, eh?

So, there we are, I expect the first founding £5 million by next week and the full £10 million - £20m? Bids? - to allow a proper and long-running test bed in the UK by, umm, next month say? At presentation of the evidence of that clear success we can run it out to other nations equally gasping for such good, common, sense.

So, Elon? Marc? Ms. Scott? Who wants to make the world a better place then?

I have a Wise account so can accept dollars as well.

Something I miss about the Before Times is advertising genius. It’s quite staggering how bad advertising is now. They have a toolkit at their fingertips that can do anything, and they use it to create the most unbelievable low-grade rubbish.

And I think I can answer this question. The old saying - usually attributed to Lord Lever but varied Septics insist it was someone over there etc - is “I know that half my advertising is a waste of money. The difficulty is knowing which half” and variations on that theme.

One of the things that the internet has done is tell people which part of their advertising budget is being wasted. Sure, sure, it doesn’t tell anyone which part of their TV budget has been wasted. But online there’s a very close connection possible between “What did we say, how did we say it?” and “Did they buy?”

And the thing is, well, we out here have no taste. Or, OK, we do, we’ll admire surf turning into black horses and grasp the connection with Guinness. But we don’t buy much more Guinness as a result. On the other hand:

Literally every single ad contains a woman late 20s or early 30s pulling a contorted gurning face - I was literally just saying to my wife I had noticed this. Obligatory black man of course. Generally “pretty” people are off the agenda now for what ever reason. And “humour” is as unfunny and dull as could ever be imagined.

Wimmins spend 70% of household money. That’s what gets wimmins to open their purses. Because we now know this. We can - and do - track whether an ad gets people to buy. This is what gets them to do so.

The fault is not in capitalism at all, nor in the stars we can use to advertise. The fault is in ourselves. Or at least those of us who control the purse strings. Now that we can track advertising effectiveness we end up with advertising closer to what slides the viewing spenders off their chairs.

Modern ads reflect us. Or, at least, reflect what hots the wimmins.

The joy of this - wholly correct - analysis is that it does give us the solution. Which is to insist upon what no patriarchy has actually managed before. The wimmins get some pin money to do whatever with while actual household spending - including whatever the wimmins might be earning - comes under male control.

We’d soon see the toucans and snail races back if that happened. Oooooh. Bring. It. On.

The government is piling mountains of debt and higher tax rates on young people heading to university, according to analysis into the “ticking timebomb” of costs faced by future students.

Hundreds of thousands of sixth formers will receive their A-level results on Thursday, with many expecting to continue on to higher education courses.

But Toby Whelton, author of the analysis for the Intergenerational Foundation, a thinktank, says those in England will face more extreme financial penalties than previous graduates.

As noted elsewhere that’s all the proof we require that we cannot have higher income taxes. For we have a group that pays higher income taxes - ex-students - and the claim is they canna handle it. So, more income taxes are right out then.

But there’s more fun here too.

The analysis shows that amounts being repaid by today’s graduates in England are more than double those paid under plan 1, which was in place before the coalition government in 2012 raised annual undergraduate tuition fees from £3,375 to £9,000. Plan 2 ran from 2012 until 2023.

“We estimate that average earners under plan 5 will repay £56,240 over their lifetime, compared with £25,700 under plan 1,” the report says.

Meanwhile, expected lifetime repayments for lower earners “have risen from £6,430 to £42,070”, expressed in 2026 prices.

Lower earners are those who do something woke, of course. Sociology of education or summat. Fake subjects badly taught by Ardays. Proper subjects, engineering, economics, that sort of thing, lead to proper incomes and therefore higher repayments. So, given that student loans are pretty much - as above - the funding for the system we’ve got those doing proper uni classes subsidising the dross that shouldn’t even be done.

Won’t it be fun when the brighter students - clearly, those doing the real subjects - work this out?

I await the first reports of the hard sciences student body launching all out physical attacks upon the social sciences faculty…..

3 Proton Lithium Inc. (3PL) today released the updated Resource Report for its Railroad Valley Minerals Project in Nye County, Nevada, confirming measured resources of multiple world-class critical minerals in a single salt complex. The findings include a discovery of an inferred tungsten resource of approximately 1.78 million tons, more than five times the largest tungsten resource currently listed in the United States, a Tier I critical mineral the country has not mined commercially since 2015.

And, well.

Tungsten. 1.78 million tons of inferred tungsten, a Tier I critical mineral the United States has not mined commercially since 2015 and now imports amid Chinese control of the global market.

Is the tungsten there? Well, I don’t know, obviously, but OK, let’s run with it it. Wouldn’t be a surprise if it is anyway. I’d hesitate to call it a resource myself, even that weakest form of inferred, as we’ve no knowledge on extraction costs as yet. But, well, OK.

But we can run by analogy. For there’s something similar over at Searles Lakes. No, no, you’re right, it’s not exactly the same. But we do know that extraction of tungsten - as a byproduct - from that process stream is possible. Costs about $5 a lb in 1984 money - $17 in modern, call it $40 a kg today - to extract. And current tungsten costs are in the $70 to $80 per kg range (which is about what $700/MTU comes to). Down, a lot, from recent absurd highs. And, well, when you’re planning you’d probably like to see more of a gap there between production and sales price. Especially in something so obviously under political pressure as tungsten. And, you know the tungsten price dropping as it is as people realise the political pressure might not last and so on.

Or even, everyone realising there’s an awful lot of tungsten out there at $300 a kg - a recent price - and therefore tungsten’s not going to stay at $300 per kg.

Oh, and Searle Valley has just gone bust. In fact, up for auction in Chapter 11. Even better, if we did add the extraction to Searles then the revenue would be of the $30 million a year sort of range. Which is nice, definitely, but just not the sort of thing that moves the dial on a large scale brines project.

But all of that’s true enough, it’s this bit that’s absolute lunacy:

Together, the resource represents an estimated $3.5 trillion in gross in-ground value

That’s insane. It’s not an unusual form of claim but it is insane.

For what they’ve done is added up the value of all the metals and fun stuff they claim is in there, at the extracted, purified, marketed price. Without any of the costs of extraction, purification or marketing. The actual value of the deposit is what’s extracted after the costs of extraction, of course. Do it any other way and we get idiocies like claiming the North Sea’s worth $5 trillion for the gold in it. The gold is there too - it’s just likely to cost $20 trillion to get it out. The in-sea value of the N Sea for gold is thus minus $15 trillion, not plus $5 trillion.

Which is how they’ve calculated this “gross in-ground” number.

Complete insanity.

But then junior mining companies, eh?

While renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels in nearly all circumstances, fossil fuels are more profitable, because useful reserves are limited and can each be monopolised by a single corporation, while prices can suddenly take flight in times of war or chaos.

Prices can suddenly take flight. OK, that works. That’s the same statement as there’s no point in drilling the North Sea because it’ll all be sold at the world price. The little bit extra won’t lower prices here etc. OK. That the actual point about the N Sea is that if we drill it then we get the tax revenues from it but still. OK.

That then means that the monopolisation of a field doesn’t matter, does it? Because the monopolist of a field still isn’t able to influence the global price. The price they get to sell at is that global price - the one taking flight from war, or not doing so from not-war.

We can cast this in another way. So, the monopolist of a field is, in fact, a price taker. They’ve no actual market power that is - they get the world price and what they want to do about it doesn’t matter. This is the same statement as their monopoly of the field doesn’t matter. But, OK - that the fossil fuel producer must sell at the world price means they’ve not market power.

We have, just because prices move on things other than producer desire, proven that the producer is not a monopolist but has no market power and thus is a price taker.

So the explanation doesn’t work. Even then, the assertion itself is wildly stupid. The cheaper form of production will make the greater profit. That should be obvious to everyone.

Think. We’ve £100 worth of energy. That’s what the consumer is paying, £100. Who makes the larger profit, the producer with the higher or the lower production cost? Well, obviously, if renewable production costs £70 and fossil fuels £80 - renewables are cheaper than fossil - then the renewables are making the greater profit. £30, not £20. And renewables are making the greater profit because they’re cheaper to produce. How could it be any other way?

Seriously, think. Fossil costs £90 to produce £100 worth of energy. Renewables £50. Say. How can the fossil be more profitable? Yet George really does think that the cheaper to produce energy makes less profit than the more expensive. Shouldn’t we be taking care of him in a nice quiet room somewhere?

As to where the error comes from it’s one of those inventions from Jason Hickel. George believes Jason which he really shouldn’t because Hickel knows less economics than my cat and she’s been dead 5 years now. But these are the people influencing government decisions, aren’t they?

How lucky we all are.

The obvious problem with this measure is that it does not account for how many hours of work each country has to put in to produce its GDP. This implicitly treats all time not spent working as having zero value. Childhood, student life, retirement, vacations, holidays, family time, and socializing are assumed to be worthless. Under such a metric, a country whose workers put in eighty hours a week to produce a certain amount of output is considered to be just as well-off as a country whose workers can produce the same output in half the time. This is nonsense.

To account for differences in leisure time across countries, you want to look at GDP per hour worked, which is a figure the OECD also provides.

So, while the US has higher GDP per person it has lower per hour worked and also, the second part of the argument, that income is less equally distributed. Therefore USians are, in fact, poorer than EUians. QED.

That GDP per hour declines the more hours worked well, economists have been talking about marginal whatevers forever.

And so Breunig’s argument seems to work and therefore……except we also get this line toward the end:

The fact that GDP is unable to capture the value of leisure time (or the value of nonmarket production),

Oh, wait up, what is this non-market production?

That’s the work we all do at home, not for money nor The Man. The washing up, the laundry, clearing the gutters, changing the oil in the car and on and on. A century back it would have included growing the vegetables for the family, two centuries back moving the outhouse each 6 months and skinning the pig each autumn.

As feminists like to remind us - even if they go well overboard with that burden of emotional labour shtick - there is indeed work that has to be done in the household.

Economists concur - Tim Smeeding is big on this. We end up, in the science here, dividing time into four parts. Personal time is what must be done personally and cannot be done for you. Sleeping, eating, having a shower and even, yes, a bowel movement. Household labour is what is done inside the household not for money. Kiddie care, cooking, washing up, clearing gutters and so on. Market hours are those done out in the economy for The Man - and are recorded in this GDP thing. Leisure is the balancing item. What’s left over to be ourselves after we’ve done the first three.

One amusement is that those passing stools at 3 and 4 on the Bristol Chart have more leisure time than those at 1 and 2 - time taken per visit - and those at 5, 6 and 7 - more visits.

The rather more important point is that leisure is not the time left after working for The Man. As it happens, personal time doesn’t vary much over Europe and US. But non-market - household - hours do. A pencil sketch would be that USians work more market hours, buy more tech and gadgetry to do that household labour than EUians do. Well, OK, it’s a choice. But note the assumption that Breunig has made - that this leads to more leisure for the EUians. Which isn’t, necessarily, true. It is at least feasible that the paid for gadgetry saves more household hours than the The Man working hours required to buy it. Therefore, while USians work more market hours they actually gain more leisure time.

And, well, that’s an empirical thing. And there is at least one Tim Smeeding paper showing that the German housewife has less free - leisure - time than the USian one. Fewer The Man working hours, sure (it’s societally normal for a German woman not to work while there are young children in the household) but home making that vital sauerkraut leads to less free time overall. Perhaps.

And, well, this also seems to be more generally true. While USians do more market, The Man, working hours they do not have fewer leisure hours. In fact, quite possibly more leisure hours as a result of much less unpaid labour in the household hours. Note the possibly there, I’ve not seen an absolute proof of this. But German housewives as an example etc.

Which, you know, rather kills the Breunig hypothesis.

But then something very basic to remember about any analysis of working hours, leisure and so on. If you’re not including unpaid hours in the household in your count of working hours then you are going to be wrong.

Oh, and getting the roughage content of your diet right will increase leisure time, of course.

Will rising oil prices push Britain into recession? And if they do, will the Bank of England make the situation even worse?

In this video, I examine the extraordinary profits recently reported by the world’s largest oil companies following the conflict involving Iran.

While households and businesses face higher fuel costs, oil companies are making windfall gains.

I argue that these profits reveal something important about today’s inflation: it is being driven by pricing power and economic extraction, and not by excessive demand in the UK economy.

Myrphy’s answer is that oil prices aren’t affected by UK interest rates, the inflation’s about the oil price therefore changing interest rates as a result of oil price induced inflation is incorrect.

His logic here is impeccable - which is something of a first of course. It’s his ignorance that is at fault here, not his logic.

For we have a number of inflation rates we can look at. RPI, CPI, CPIH and so on. All measuring slightly different things. But the thing is we do not consider CPI - or CPIH, or RPI - to be the interest rate policy relevant inflation rate.

For we know that fuel prices move around a lot. Also, that food prices do. A drought that pushes up the price of cauliflowers is not something relevant to interest rates. Nor is a war in the Gulf that puts oil prices up. So, we do not look at inflation rates that include fuel and food when considering interest rates.

Instead we look at “core” inflation rates. Core CPI, Core CPIH and even, if we really want to, Core RPI.

The Consumer Prices Index including owner occupiers’ housing costs (CPIH) rose by 2.8% in the 12 months to June 2026, down from 3.0% the previous month.

On a monthly basis, CPIH rose by 0.2% in June 2026, compared with a rise of 0.3% in June 2025.

The Consumer Prices Index (CPI) rose by 2.6% in the 12 months to June 2026, down from 2.8% the previous month.

On a monthly basis, CPI rose by 0.1% in June 2026, compared with a rise of 0.3% in June 2025.

Transport, and food and non-alcoholic beverages made the largest downward contributions to the monthly change in both CPIH and CPI annual rates.

Note that we didn’t suddenly cut interest rates when inflation lowered as a result of transport and food prices.

Core CPIH (CPIH excluding energy, food, alcohol and tobacco) rose by 2.8% in the 12 months to June 2026, unchanged from the 12 months to May; the CPIH goods annual rate slowed from 2.0% to 1.7%, while the CPIH services annual rate was unchanged, at 3.6%.

Core CPI (CPI excluding energy, food, alcohol and tobacco) rose by 2.6% in the 12 months to June 2026, unchanged from the 12 months to May; the CPI goods annual rate slowed from 2.0% to 1.7%, while the CPI services annual rate eased from 3.7% to 3.6%.

Those are the inflation rates - note, without fuel - that are relevant for monetary policy. That they’re the same is just a bit of happenstance, they’re still - without fuel note - some 35 to 40% above target. Thus the argument for raising interest rates.

Murphy’s problem is not just that he’s near always wrong. It’s that he’s also ignorant about the basics.

As the spirit of jealousy and ostentation prevailed in the councils of the emperors, they proceeded with anxious diligence to divide the substance and multiply the titles of power. The vast countries which the Roman conquerors had united under the same simple form of administration were imperceptibly crumbled into minute fragments, till at length the whole empire was distributed into one hundred and sixteen provinces, each of which supported an expensive and splendid establishment.

‘Bout sums up this devolution idea, doesn’t it? No one’s devolving any real power down to these Mayors and the like. But they are offering substantial salaries and pensions to the Mayors, their hangers on and assistants. How many deputy mayors does Khan have in London? That nightclub Tsar was on £120k or whatever.

Devolution today means just what it did back when as Gibbon describes it. Another layer of Lanyards we’ve all got to pay for. And no more.

It is, of course, possible to imagine a devolution that would actually work. Kill 50% of government and allow us the people to piss our own money up our own walls. But that wouldn’t employ Lanyards so it isn't what is going to happen, is it?