SaintBobby

Do you have the stats anywhere? Genuine question. I haven't seen any evidence at all to suggest we get more training injuries than other clubs. Have you?

I'm now in the Nigal out brigade, as well. Sack Atkins as well while you're at it.

Genius. Pure comedy gold. ***t.

Very, very weird indeed. I'm just trying to work out what possessed anyone at the club to think changing our programme sellers was any sort of priority at all. It's stuff like this that inclines me to feel that there is a certain deep steak of "mentalness" in the Cortese administration, despite the many triumphs and upsides.

I think there's a strong case for looking into whether we can pick up a new centre back and full back on a free. Pretty dreadful game between two very mediocre teams. On the upside, at least it's obvious where our weaknesses are. November looks like a huge month.

I guess one consideration is how much extra money we make out of each attendee. If the average ticket price in a larger stadium is lower, but we have an extra 10K people drinking/eating/buying stuff, that helps. There's also the issue of whether bigger crowds help the team on the pitch. I assume home advantage is greater with 40,000 people paying £30 each than with 4,000 paying £400 each (although revenue is higher in the second case). It's all moot at the moment there as SMS seems almost exactly the right size and the club seem to have got the pricing just about right. Just a few tweaks needed.

Very good results all in all. I'm starting to think Norwich, Reading and QPR are favourites for the drop. Table will look much. much better if we can grab 3 points tomorrow.

The screw up in corporate and players seats in block 5 must be costing us 500 seats a game. The club's marketing seems deeply crap too. The only posters in town are from Barclays welcoming us back to the Prem. Our early results have been on the poor side. Seems to me that 32K is about the right capacity for us. But it wouldn't take an enormous amount (an upturn in form or staying in the Premier League for a season) for demand to increase quite measurably. Of course, demand has to increase massively before any stadium expansion should be considered.

I understand the tax dodge is that loans can be written off in some tax deductible way and donations to a club can't be.

I'm a little reassured by what I've heard this evening. This isn't any ITK knowledge at all. But I am told this would be a be highly tax efficient way of injecting cash into the club (considerably more tax efficient that the Liebherrs writing a cheque for the same amount, by way of hypothetical example....)

I'm glad there are no programme sellers anymore. Gone are the days when I had to pay the parking fee in order to run over to the stand to buy my programme. I thank Nicola for stripping away this temptation from me. Top stuff.

Hopefully, if we do sell more than 30,000 seats we might be able to afford to restart the building work at the training ground? If we get to 31,000, maybe the club will have the money to employ an architect to put some drawings together that we can all mutually w@nk over. I'm sure you'll all with me on this one. Unless you have a tiny, Dell-sized penis.

So far, I'm pretty untroubled by this. (although it may indicate that the Liebherrs aren't writing blank cheques). A simple explanation would be: 1. In order to have a fighting chance to stay in the Prem, the club judged it needed to spend £30m on players. This is an upfront cost, the potential benefit of which is spread over four or five years. 2. If we stay up, no problems. We pay off the loan and keep getting huge premiership TV wonga. 3. If we get relegated, we sell off players to payback the loan. So, Ramirez gets sold for, say, £12m+. Lallana for £8m-ish and we rebuild from the Championship.

You are aware that housing benefit isn't just for the unemployed, right? It's mainly claimed by those in work. The key thing is to taper benefits, not guillotine them. (e.g. for every £1 you earn, you lose, say, £50p in benefits, not £1.20!) The government is taking some tentative steps in this direction, but not sufficient steps.

There is a problem here, but it's not property being owned by private landlords. It's the antiquated and absurd planning system. Only 10% of this country is developed and only 5% under concrete. Getting something built is harder than anywhere else in the developed world. We therefore have a ludicrously limited housing stock, which pushes property and rental prices up to obscene levels.

Can't tell you how much I disagree with this. Yes, there are crooks and there are sharks. Yes, we should never have got ourselves into the insane position whereby the taxpayer had to bail out the bankers. But, in a world of voluntary, free contracts (and most are), the profit motive is fantastic. I have to give people what they want in order to make money. If what I make or do is unwanted or crap, I go bust. This free market position doesn't guarantee utopia, but it is a much better of producing decent goods and services than some central committee or bureaucratic structure deciding how much milk or bread people need and at what price.

Nope, I don't follow that line of argument. I'm concerned about the absolute position of the poorest, but not the gap. If the poor are getting a bit richer and the rich are getting a lot richer, that should diminish need for welfare support even though inequality is rising. The poorest 10% in the UK today are much better off than the poorest 10% were in 1990. Yet welfare support has spiralled upwards. Something is going badly wrong.

The percentages are right, I'm sure. But if you look at total spending, it has more than doubled. Any shift from 23% to 46% of GDP would have been around about a quadrupling of spending... I don't quite understand your point on inequality. Surely, the welfare state is there to address poverty not inequality. For example, a society in which half of us earn £1m pa and half of us earn £100m pa is much less equal than today, but surely doesn't need a welfare state??? Even if you are concerned about inequality, rather than absolute poverty, the last Labour government more than doubled welfare spending, without any discernible effect on inequality. So, high welfare spending doesn't obviously narrow the income gap anyway....

The stats are accurate. 40% of GDP today is vastly more money than 40% in 1980. Amazingly, as the country gets richer and richer over the decades, the welfare state seems to need more and more money. Logically, the opposite should be true.

The Trust have the credibility - or even ability - to count to 1,000 and claim they are the difference? You disgrace yourself, sir! :-)

His article is wonderful. So funny. "Oh no...we're all turning in on ourselves". Embargo was broken in error as Saint Balram will be confirmed as new owner at 9am, so sad Neil filed copy and the techies put it up straight away. Bless. I wouldn't want to be applying for a press pass if I were him! So, so glorious.

I'm a low tax, low spend, applaud the wealth creators sort of chap. Here's my 2p worth (although I can probably afford more). 1. Most economists agree that squeezing 40% out of the economy is the absolute maximum that can be borne without reducing the overall size of the economy (people stop working at certain tax rates or emigrate or retire earlier etc). There are good arguments for government spending being much below 40% (the fastest growing economies tend to have a public sector of about 25% of GDP) 2. Most tax avoidance is widely misunderstood and is often just a matter of time-lags. For example, the reason Warren Buffet pays less tax (as % of his income) then his cleaner is that he has wrapped up a collosal proportion of his income into unrealised shares on his balance sheet. When he cashes these in, he will face an enormous capital gains tax bill. People think there are rules in the tax code saying "if you're rich and don't want to pay, that's fine". This is a massive oversimplification. 3. The government often actively encourages tax avoidance. One reason taxes are high on tobacco and low on fruit is to encourage you to become a tax avoider by cutting back on cigarettes and eating more apples. 4. A government in a relatively affluent society should be able to achieve its objectives by spending only about 25% of national income. If this isn't enough to relieve poverty, defend the realm etc, then the government is doing something very badly wrong with the money. UK expenditure is presently about 46% of GDP (government spending having roughly doubled under the last Labour government to a bewildering lack of effect) 5. The tax rules in the UK are absurdly complex, stretching to something like 15,000 pages. This is the longest tax code of any country on Earth. The rules should be laid out in no more than 15 pages and should adopt the principles of being (a) low (b) proportionate © easy to understand.

If the goal under discussion is the first Saints goal at Leyton away, the assist WAS Harding, not Dickson.

I voted Boruc, but hadn't appreciated he has not played since April. So, I guess I'd go for Gazzanigga.

I'm lovin' it. (copyright McDonalds....which might well be built on their dead ground in a few months time)