Site of the month

You really must look at http://911review.com/ Whether or not you are prepared to accept the basic premise, it's formidably well argued, and if its facts are even half correct, extremely disturbing.

Nothing is certain but death and taxes

A recent poll found that inheritance tax is the most hated tax of all, and yet I would imagine that most people would agree with the general principle of redistribution of wealth, which is exactly what inheritance tax is designed to achieve. So what's the problem? The most quoted objection is that it's double taxation - a tax on money which has already been taxed. And yet, what is VAT if not double taxation, and you don't hear people complaining about that (or its predecessor, purchase tax). No, I think there are three main problems with inheritance tax. The first and most obvious is that it is no longer a rich person's tax - it is now catching people who would not consider themselves as particularly well off. But more than this, it's a tax which catches people at the worst possible moment. Most executors are close relatives of the deceased, and the last thing they want at a time of grief is insensitive hassle from the Revenue. And then there's the problem when - as is often the case - the majority of the value of the estate is in the family home, which may have to be sold to pay the tax. You would have thought that, where this is the case, the problem could be dealt with by the Revenue taking a charge on the property, rather than requiring its sale. All in all, I think a lot of the distaste and distress the tax causes could be avoided if the Revenue took a more sensitive and flexible approach. Unfortunately this is not something that they're known for. Perhaps there is a case for a separate section being set up to handle collection of the tax?

Must try harder

I sometimes think I must have gone to sleep and woken up in an Alice in Wonderland world. We hear stories, which we hope are not true but suspect are, of parking meter attendants and traffic police being given targets as to how many tickets they must issue, but this morning on the box a Government Minister, no less, was bemoaning the fact that only 6% of rape trials result in a conviction, and stating that This Is Not Good Enough, and that Something Must Be Done About It! I mean - it couldn't just be that the answer is that only 6% of the accused were guilty, could it? We do still work on the premise of the presumption of innocence, don't we? The argument seems to be that because this is a much lower conviction rate than for other offences, it must mean that men who should be being found guilty are getting away with it. But this ignores the fact that rape is very much a crime sui generis and any attempt to draw comparisons, statistical or otherwise, with other crimes is like comparing apples and pears.

Dirty tricks

Much comment about the Chancellor taking action in the budget to thwart those seeking to avoid or minimise inheritance tax by creating trusts. There are two very valid points to be made I think - firstly that he is seeking not merely to prevent people doing this in future, but also to make ineffective such trusts as already exist. In other words, this is retrospective legislation - something which governments rarely do, and usually only in cases of dire necessity, and this can hardly be considered to fall into that category. Secondly, it blurs the distinction between tax avoidance - that is, so arranging your affairs that you pay as little tax as possible - which is entirely legal, and tax evasion - failing to pay tax which is due from you - which is illegal. These trusts were a form of tax avoidance, and although it is perfectly within the Government's right to change the law so as to make them illegal in future, they were legal when created, and to retrospectively make them illegal is a misuse of Government's powers.

Who takes care of the caretaker's daughter...

Most of the local schools will be closed tomorrow because of strike action, No, it's not the teachers who are striking - it's the caretakers and the canteen staff. So how come the schools have to close? There's been plenty of notice, so ample time for parents - or for that matter the schools themselves - to provide packed lunches for those who normally stop dinners. And surely schools can survive for a day without a caretaker - they don't usually do their work during school hours anyway. It all seems to be down to "health and safety" - in other words the fear of being sued if anything were to go wrong. I really think it's about time we started to take a rather more adult attitude to these matters.

Spring is sprung

Thank heaven for some milder weather! The garden's been more or less on hold since the beginning of February. Now you can almost see the buds developing before your eyes. Of course there's always a down-side - it also means that the lawns will soon need cutting!

The price of everything and the value of nothing.

I've commented before on the issue of "pirate" copies of goods, and my views are clear - if your product is being pirated, then it's almost certainly because it's overpriced. But what exactly do I mean by this? The value of an article to me is what I am prepared to pay for it. The price of that article is the amount the producer is demanding of me for it. It's where these two amounts substantially differ that the problem arises. There was a bloke on the telly this morning extolling the virtues of being able to download a copy of "King Kong" for £20 - about the same price as the DVD. Now I'd quite like to watch King Kong, but the question is - how much (in monetary terms) would I like to watch it? Certainly not £20 worth. A fiver - yes, that's more the mark. So if I go down my local car-boot and see a DVD of King Kong for a fiver...? I've got what I want at a price I'm willing to pay (and I'm prepared to accept that it probably won't be an A1 copy). I wouldn't have paid £20 anyway, so nobody's lost a sale. So what's the problem?

The Peter Principle

Looked at from the point of view of the country, rather than any particular individual, Gordon Brown can certainly lay claim to being the most successful Chancellor of modern times. Whether this is a result of good luck or good judgment, or some combination of the two is debatable, but certainly, under his stewardship, we have had the longest continuous period of economic stability of my lifetime. Problem is of course, that there's a general belief that, in a matter of months, he will move from Number 11 to Number 10. And while this may be a good move for him, what about the country? If you've got someone doing a sterling job in a particular post, the last thing you'd want to do is move him out of that post, surely? And yet this is what happens - this is the eponymous Peter Principle. Originated by one Dr. Peter, it states that everyone is promoted to their level of incompetence. You get a job, do it well, and as a result get promoted to another job. You do that job well, and get promoted to another job. You do that job well.... and so on. Eventually you are promoted to a job which you don't do so well, and there you stop. Anyone who has worked in any large organisation will know that this is exactly what happens. So Gordon Brown may come out a winner, but the country may be the loser.

When is a quote not a quote?

Headline in my local paper the other day - Diana's tribute "disaster". This of course refers to the Public Accounts Committee's report on the Royal Parks and the Princess Diana fountain. So what would you understand by that headline? I imagine you would assume that the Committee had said that the fountain had been a disaster. And yet the word "disaster" appears nowhere in their report. They're pretty scathing about it, but that word is not used. So why did the paper put it in quotes? If they hadn't, it would simply have been a reasonable assessment by the paper of the overall tenor of the report, but by putting it in quotes they are representing that that is specifically what the report said. And I'm not just getting at my local paper - there is a tendency throughout the press to attribute apparent quotes to people who, when you examine the reality, never said any such thing. I think it was Thomas Jefferson who said something about the only truth in newspapers being in the adverts!

Jurassic truth

You would hardly think to look to a Hollywood blockbuster for words of wisdom, but when I read or hear about some of the strange and foolish things people get up to, it brings to mind a quote from "Jurassic Park"- I can't remember if it was in the book, but it was certainly in the film - when the Jeff Goldblum character says something like "...you were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, that you never stopped to consider whether you should...".