Snouts in the Trough

It appears that the Tory Party’s token Muslim has been caught with both hands in the till. Of course, this will all be explained away as an “oversight”. I’m not sure what exactly was the “oversight” – that Baroness Warsi had the key to someone’s house but forgot she had it? That the honourable lady slept somewhere and forgot she had done so? That the Baroness then apparently claimed expenses while not incurring any? Or that she got caught? It is actually incredible that someone could be so greedy and so stupid to be caught fiddling what must be the most lax expenses system in the world. A peer only has to spend one night a month in their supposed “main home” to be allowed to claim £300 or so a day every time they come to London. And there’s no need to show any receipts as all peers are so honourable. To be caught cheating this is almost beyond belief.

Actually, we all know that most MPs and peers are liars and thieves. So most of us won’t be surprised by the good Baroness’s venality. But the Warsi farce is dangerous to Liar Cameron because it reinforces the impression of an incompetent, arrogant, dishonest, out-of-touch government full of fools and thieves that is fumbling and blundering at the mercy of events and cannot by any stretch of the imagination be considered to be in control of anything. Cameron is an incompetent, a liar  and a fool. He had the opportunity to rescue the country after the worst PM in our history, Gordon Brown, almost bankrupted us. But Cameron has betrayed us and seems to have spent his efforts enriching his friends and cronies rather than governing the country. He is so despised and even loathed by the majority of people, that he should resign and spend more time with his family. Come on Liar Cameron, do the only honourable thing you have ever done in your miserable, self-serving life and resign.

Today, high-street bank customers will be presuaded to put about £32m into a savings scheme known in the industry as “structured products”. Then tomorrow another £32m will go in and so on, probably for the rest of the year. With interest rates still below the level of inflation, bank customers are easy targets for commission-hungry bank staff out to increase their own salaries and promotion prospects by flogging “structured products” to their customers. Typically, a structured product will promise to return about 120% of any increase in the stock market over about five years, but will guarantee to return the customer’s capital in full if the stock market falls.

The main problem is that over 80% of the benefit of stock-market investing comes from the dividends paid by the companies whose shares you buy – not from any increases in the overall market. Yet these structured products don’t give customers any dividends – often because they never actually buy any shares. It seems that most customers don’t understand this. In about five years there are going to be many hundreds of thousands of surprised bank customers when they find their supposed “savings” scheme has not increased at all. In fact, they will have lost money due to inflation.

However, there may be one structured product that could work. Some banks are offering returns of 8% or more a year if the stock market is higher each year than when customers first invested. With the market down below 5300 at the moment, these products might actually pay out.

Meanwhile, as we learn more about Facebook’s IPO and how the big investors got out while the going was good by “pumping” the share price and concealing poor revenue growth forecasts, once again ordinary savers find out that stock markets are rigged against them. The rich get richer, the poor get fleeced. If you happen to own Facebook shares, be prepared for a fall to around $10 to $15 per share – somewhat below the IPO price of $38. No wonder, Mark Zuckerberg is always grinning.

Every day, pundits and other self-professed ‘experts’ are keen to tell us how to save Britain’s collapsing economy. And now the geniuses at the Taxpayers Alliance (TPA) – many of whom have never had a proper job in their lives – have produced their great solution. They’ve got some things right – for example, the optimum level of tax for an economy to grow is around 33%. Anything above that stifles growth, anything below leaves the public sector underfunded. But the TPA’s proposals are too complex and too wideranging to be implementable. However, there is one thing the Government could do quickly to boost economic growth – scrap corporation tax.

Like the beard tax and the hat tax of the 1600s and 1700s, corporation tax has outlived its usefulness. In the 2000-2007 Brown boom, tax paid by small companies went up by 132%, but tax paid by large companies only went up by 5%. Why? Because large companies can use all kinds of tricks to cut their tax. So the tax burden falls unfairly on small companies, yet they are the ones that can reduce unemployment and boost growth. If every small company took on just one person, unemployment would fall by over a million, benefits claims would drop dramatically and income tax paid would go up. Corporation tax should be replaced by the Government retaining a percentage of VAT that would otherwise be repaid to businesses. This would slash tax evasion (as the authorities would already hold the money) and make large companies and those using places like the Cayman Islands and Jersey as their supposed HQs pay their fair share of tax. Moreover, it would make Britain the best country in the world to base a business, bringing many companies to Britain and creating hundreds of thousands of well-paid jobs. You can find out more in my MoneyWeek article Scrap the modern-day beard tax https://www.moneyweek.com/news-and-charts/economics/uk/david-craig-scrap-the-modern-day-beard-tax-57636 and you could even send the link to the hopelessly out of his depth Mr Osborne

As NATO’s useless, lying leaders meet in Chicago to try to find a face-saving way out of the disastrous Afghanistan failure, our ‘heroic’ PM, David Liar Cameron is pompously/bravely/stupidly (delete as appropriate) announcing that he is ready to send British troops to Syria. It’s truly beyond belief. This total tosser wants to get British troops embroiled in yet another Muslim-kills-Muslim slaughterhouse. After Cameron’s great ‘victory’ in Libya, he has become like Blair after his intervention in Sierre Leone – addicted to war. Unable to do anything to improve Britain’s economy, Cameron wants to use force in foreign interventions to show what a great international statesman he is. Have you understood nothing, Mr Cameron? Have you learnt nothing, Mr Cameron? If the Shiites hate the Sunnis hate the Alawites hate the Hittites hate the Palestinianites etc, it’s not our problem. If they want to kill each other, we should sell them the weapons and let them get on with it and long may they continue massacring each other. If we try to stop the Stupidites all killing each other, they’ll just start hating us even more than they hate each other.

So, Mr Liar, bring our troops home and put them to work in our schools and on our council estates to help improve our collapsing society. And, as for the economy – put all civil servants on a 3-day week; set a maximum public-sector pension of £25,000; set a maximum public-sector salary of £100,000; cut the number of thieving, pointless MPs from 646 to 250; abolish corporation tax completely; demand the EU cuts its budget by 5% a year for the next five years; extend Britain’s fishing limits to 200 miles around our coasts; build some nuclear power stations; scrap the high-speed rail project; get rid of your advisers as they’re as hopeless as you; scrap the Equality and Human Rights Commission; scrap the incompetent Office for Budget Responsibility; demand Ofwat and Ofgem set a maximum profit level of 10% for water and power companies; declare all water and power resources a strategic national asset that can only be owned by British companies based for tax purposes in Britain; take legal action against Fred Goodwin for misleading shareholders, false accounting and fraud – basically, Mr Liar Cameron, do something useful for Britain. Oh, and one other thing, the most useful thing you could do would be to resign as most people in Britain view you with derision and contempt. LOL

As the politically-correct BBC gushes about Britain’s “Olympics triumph” and multimillionaire olympocrats become ever richer wasting our money, it’s worth remembering that we were once promised the Olympics would only cost us around £2.4bn. Mysteriously, as the BBC and Olympics bosses tell us that they are “on budget”, the cost has actually rocketed up  to around £10bn. That’s about enough to pay the salaries of around 30,000 police officers or nurses for 10 years.  As other countries have to cut public spending, the rest of the world is laughing at us for being stupid enough to waste so much money on so little while hugely enriching a few Olympics insiders. Here’s a spoof ad for the Olympics I saw recently when I was in Australia. Enjoy and send the link to your contacts if you think they might be interested.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_G34SK3dkc