Is there indexation on investment income? No. Or earnings from work? No. Or VAT? No? So what is the special case for capital gains tax? A pound of profit is just that – and equal to any other pound when it comes to taxation. Not acknowledging the difference between current income and gains that arise over time and so are affected by inflation. What excellent economics that is. Especially from a man who has been known to whine about the effects of fiscal drag – a result of inflation, obvs – upon income taxes. The post An economist speaks first appeared on Tim Worstall ..read more

Rebel Wilson claims British royal invited her to drug-fuelled orgy Writing in her memoir Rebel Rising, the Australian actress says that the party was held in 2014 and hosted by a tech billionaire What was last week’s advertisement for her new book? She was a virgin until 35 or whatever? This week….. The post Oh. Right. first appeared on Tim Worstall ..read more

Property value assessment may not sound like the most thrilling of topics, but according to historian Andrew W Kahrl’s new book The Black Tax, it represents a hugely important piece of structural inequality in the US, one that implicates a wide range of topics, including the process of gentrification, the quality of public schools and other amenities, and maintenance of local infrastructure. Kahrl argues that for decades now the assessment process for homes has been used prejudicially against African Americans, leading them to pay more than their fair share in property tax despite receiving f ..read more

In 1997, a young Canadian forest ecologist named Suzanne Simard (the model for Powers’ character) published with five co-authors a study in Nature describing resources passing between trees, apparently via fungi. Trees don’t just supply sugars to each other, Simard has further argued; they can also transmit distress signals, and they shunt resources to neighbours in need. “We used to believe that trees competed with each other,” explains a football coach on the US hit television show Ted Lasso. But thanks to “Suzanne Simard’s fieldwork”, he continues, “we now realise that the forest is a soci ..read more

We should be charging capital gains tax on every final disposal by a person or their spouse or their civil partner at the time that the last of those two ceases to use that property, whether that’s either because they die, on the second death, or because they move into a nursing home or whatever else, or both of them quit the country and move abroad. Whatever the reason, on the last disposal of a property without there being a reinvestment, which if both are dead there couldn’t be, then there should be capital gains tax charged on the whole of the lifetime gain that they’ve made. Among the m ..read more

ANNE JENKIN It’s only male MPs who take these career-ending risks Excellent. So, only have male MPs then. Because they’ll do something stupid, crash and burn, and we can get rid of them. #A Commons that was permanently resigning would have no time to fuck the country, would it? The post Isn’t this an argument against Wimmins MPs then first appeared on Tim Worstall ..read more

Lebanon’s economy and electricity system are broken and much power is now generated locally, with devastating effects on air quality and health Smog hangs over Beirut most days, a brownish cloud that darkens the city’s skyline of minarets and concrete towers. An estimated 8,000 diesel generators have been powering Lebanese cities since the nation’s economic collapse in 2019. The generators can be heard, smelled and seen on the streets, but their worst impact is on the air the city’s inhabitants are forced to breathe. New research, to be published by scientists at American University of Beirut ..read more

DEI – short for diversity, equity and inclusion – has become the latest dog-whistle term in the conservative war of words to frame basic egalitarianism as a net negative. There are those of us really not sure – to put it polititely – about basic egalitarianism. For egalitarianism implies – at the very least – an equality of outcome. And there are indeed those of us who think that’s a seriously bad idea. Equality of opportunity, sure, that’s vital, but to insist upon that equality of outcome is vile. Or, as we might put it, a net negative. Given that the background here is Baltimore the disti ..read more

I thought that what I meant was unambiguously clear. My reference to ‘real’ interest rates referred to those actually on offer to real people in contrast to Bank of England base rates. It never occurred to me that anyone would interpret what I said in the context of the economic theory of ‘real’ interest rates, which compares those paid with the inflation rate. I am, of course, familiar with that concept, much beloved by right-wing microeconomic fetishists who think the concept isat the forefront of the mind of all savers, none of whom should ever hold cash in their opinion because real rates ..read more

One symptom of their anxiety is the way they have been throwing unconscionable amounts of money at the 70-odd generative AI startups that have mushroomed since it became clear that AI was going to be the new new thing. Microsoft reportedly put $13bn (about £10.4bn) into OpenAI, for example, but it was also the lead investor in a $1.3bn funding round for Inflection, Deepmind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman’s startup. Amazon put $4bn into Anthropic, the startup founded by refugees from OpenAI. Google invested $500m in the same outfit, with a promise of $1.5bn more, and unspecified sums in A121 Labs ..read more