Comments for In-ter-leck-choo-ull

Comment on A Bit Of Political Fun by Max Tappenden

Max Tappenden — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 08:52:14 +0000

This would lead to terrible unemployment. Think about companies with large numbers of low-wage service staff. For them to bring down their salary differential in a meaningful way would cost an awful lot of money, and it would make employing people on the lowest end an expensive thing to do. If a company wants to reduce its corporation tax, it could easily do so by stripping out all redundancy and leaving only the bare minimum staff at the lower end. These are people on the shop floors. These are people flipping my burgers. I don’t want the services I use to be impacted because of tax laws created because of some kind of moral high ground.

This would also be extraordinarily expensive to manage. Look at companies with low-paid call centres, for example. Generally the staff in the call centres are “self-employed”, paying fees to the call centre and receiving commission of some kind when they place calls, sales, etc. If you don’t incorporate these people, you’ll find more companies making the effort to set it up. If you do incorporate these people, you’re creating really massive amounts of work at IR, and they don’t like that at all, and they *will* make it expensive.

Comment on A Bit Of Political Fun by @fuhammatty

@fuhammatty — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 09:57:23 +0000

It’s an interesting idea, but is rather too dependent on corporation tax receipts, which by definition, lag behind business activity by 9-15 months, and not all businesses are in profit & paying it each year.

Tax hikes on the wealthy and redistribution by the state to the poorest are guaranteed to achieve the “desired” outcome of a narrower gap between rich & poor; which is precisely why successive governments haven’t and wont impose them.

Comment on Those Manifestos In Full. Sort Of. by Lesley Miller

Lesley Miller — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 20:25:43 +0000

I will be honest and say that the reason I checked out your blog was your tweets today.

I therefore wanted to see what kind of person you were and what interested you, my basic nosiness at work:-) So, what I found when I did a bit of roaming was the word cloud and I just think it is a class bit of work….

One thing for me to ponder – isn’t it interesting that the Labour cloud doesn’t contain the word ‘labour’? Were they so ashamed that they didn’t want to use ‘that word’? Also, Labour were also quite spare in their use of another power word, ‘government’. It is writ large in the Conservative cloud and quite large for the Liberal Democrats.

One last search of the page found that the word ‘spend’ is not used at all, quite telling I think.

I am sure that some statistician could take this information and make something of it, although I am also fairly sure that they could take a random word generator and do the same. However, I do think that being ashamed to use the name of your party in your manifesto is a negative any way you look at it.