shurlock

Why? Classic liberals, even Adam Smith and David Ricardo (shock horror), argued for the taxation of property where increases in value stemmed not from individual labour or contributions i.e. renovating your house but natural and social circumstances i.e. broad rises in market. For them, the distinction between earned and unearned income was a matter of fairness and justice. It's not a surprise that it was the lib dems who first tried to reconnect with this tradition. Perhaps worth reading up before getting your kickers in a twist and frothing about class warfare and the politics of envy being the only things that motivate such policy ideas.

No I genuinely read three weeks, jeff. I know how policy works just as you know how retail fashion works. You'll just have to defer to my superior knowledge on this one

I don't really get your point, though. House price growth in the capital is clearly slowing and converging on the national average of 5% annual growth (and in turn that is slowing). On one level, this is all moot: flexibilities will almost certainly be brought in so that the threshold will adjust to changes in house price. So no jeff, the bogeyman of a london bedsit in Dagenham suddenly falling foul of the mansion tax ain't going to happen anytime soon. That said, the gaffe in Telford Park is pretty nice.

My mistake and some very clunky syntax, I construed "in these 3" as Jeff saying three weeks. HTH

Happy to bet that all three won't be worth > £2m by the time any tax might come in. But keep plodding away.

House prices are going to increase 25% in three weeks? Now that really is creating things 'out of thin air'

No bodge. The season's been stalling since the swansea, liverpool and wba defeats. Psychologically, seeing the bigger clubs finally pass us must have also taken a toll. Most important, the players you mention are defenders or defensively-minded players -all of whom continue to contribute to the best record in the league and keep us in games (Jrod doesn't count as he hasn't played). Rather, our problem is creating and scoring goals: 10 goals (excluding the OG v. Burnley) in 14 games since the turn of the year is dreadful, however you cut it. Over a season, it would put us bottom of the league in terms of goals scored. Without the defense bailing the team out, we'd be closer to relegation candidates than a top 8 side.

Wasn't Wanyama left out against Wham (a),because he reportedly threw a wobbly in the run-up to transfer deadline day?

This is like a post about Richard Chaplow reimagined for the Lounge. Stirring stuff.

Not sure what you've been watching. And if its training or coaching based, then clearly the other players aren't listening as they seem to be on a different wavelength. Consider a few examples from saturday: You'll remember Bertrand put in a peach of a cross in the second half which was begging for someone to meet. Invariably Pelle had pulled off and was nowhere near it. For a target man who's scored only one header all season and rarely looked like scoring from a header (i can only think of his chance at newcastle which hit the bar), this isn't a one-off. He's shown a bit more purpose when the ball has been played low and hard at the near post, though it also means that the angle is tighter. Another ball was put in from Bertrand's side, this time from a deeper position. What is interesting is that both Pelle and Davis occupied similar starting points, just outside the box; yet it was only Davis, the supposed plodder, who anticipated the ball and came close to reaching it. Or consider Tadic's chance. If anything, Pelle was closer to Mane and the preferred option; but because he checked his run, Mane bypassed him went for the more dangerous yet difficult ball to Tadic. On another occasion, Mane enjoyed space down the wing -rather than moving to a more central position which would have put the defender in two minds, encouraged Mane to drive into the box or simply given him the option to release the ball, Pelle stood still and threw up his arms. Mane got squeezed and the play broke down. Its hard to know what Pelle is trying to achieve by taking up these positions. You'll recall that he did receive the ball in his preferred position and got his shot off; but being nearly 18 yards, he was never going to test Begovic, even with a clean shot (to be fair, he got a decent connection; but hit the ball into the ground which took the pace off). In fact, he probably missed the better option as one of our players was drifting to the far post.

The famed black box seems to be unearthing a lot of eredivisie players lately.

Agree, Gardos was poor as the RCB against WBA. Not seen a centre back struggle so much to find his fullback/wingback, opting everytime to come inside. Saying that Gardos was only in because Toby was out injured.

Your analogy is misleading insofar as it assumes that a car accelerating from 20 to 30 stops at the 30mph speed limit. But there is no evidence that household debt would not have continued to climb: a recessionary shock, not wise Tory policy forced households to deleverage and save. In the same way, household debt began to fall after the crisis under Brown; now it's rising again as the economy is fitfully recovering and all the signs are that debt ratios will leave anything presided over by Labour trailing in the dust. The sooner you concede that household debt dynamics have ebbed and flowed with the economic cycle and the supply and demand for the housing (aka reflating the bubble) -rather than which party is in power, the better. Of course, measures such as Help to Buy that artificially inflate property prices by making debt financing more available havent helped;) More generally, nobody disputes that heavy debt, whether household or government, weighs on economic performance; but there is no magic trip wire, some sudden discontinuity where debt suddenly becomes unsustainable, as you imply (see the near universal criticism of Rogoff and Reinhart). Indeed causation may travel in the other direction: low growth reduces tax receipts and therefore causes high debt ratios. Either way, it's not one way traffic. History also shows that theres no stable relationship between public debt and GDP growth: much depends, for instance, on whether the economy is operating at capacity. In the wake of the crisis, private investors flocked to gilts and other sovereign bonds -despite low, even negative yields- for want of other safe assets. An ageing population and the need for pension funds to immunise liabilities only adds to to this demand. http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/01/government-debt You might not like the word austerity -perhaps it conjures up nasty images of Natalie Bennett having an episode of Tourette's. But the essential fact is that economies are still not out of the woods, as low interest rates indicate. Try 'secular stagnation' if you don't like talk of austerity. When savings exceed investment and remain a constraint on demand and growth, my preference is for governments to borrow to finance the kinds of investment that will drive your third industrial revolution. Never mind that the UK can borrow money for less than half a percent for the long term in its own currency. Your alternative -to live within one's means- isn't really an alternative when the risk is of another stall.

Oh dear, Johnny. Not sure whether you're being disingenuous (the chart is pilfered from the Mail) or just naive (I'll go with the latter - I'm the charitable type); but it's somewhat convenient that your chart starts in 1990, coinciding with the early 1990s recession, another period during which households retrenched and decided to pay off their debt. Prudence was passing, not permanent. Had your data gone further back to the boom of the 1980s, you would have seen that debt to income ratios were accelerating at a similar rate as they did under Blair and Brown, albeit from a much lower base. Arguably, the boom under Labour, aided and abetted by advances in securitisation, the hunt for yield by institutional investors and the supposed wisdom of independent -yes independent- central bankers in taming the business cycle, simply allowed trends inherited from the conservatives to resume with a vengeance. It's also worth pointing out that the vast majority of household debt is secured mortgage debt. Housing issue is ultimately a structural challenge which partisan politics does more to obscure than enlighten. Still, cliches about maxing out the credit card and references to lottery winners, coke, whores and 60"4K TVs are always good for a giggle. We now know that elements of Labour's economic model were built on sand. The obvious retort that the conservatives would have done things differently had they been in government in the mid nineties and noughties. Curious then that, even with the benefit of history, household debt is rapidly climbing back up (the partial flip side of government austerity) and is predicted by the OBR to reach 171% by 2019, higher than the precrisis peak. To paraphrase Albert Edwards, the SocGen strategist, at least in 2008, the UK was not alone in reaping the sour fruits of economic mismanagement. This time, the UK seems to happy repeat the same mistakes, more or less alone.

Edit

He was playing as CB at United and was untouched - pulled his hamstring as he tracked a dangerous diagonal ball for Di Maria IIRC.

Central banks are independent (though those lines have been crossed in some countries e.g. Japan); but they have also been put in an invidious position, compelled to respond to the crisis because other policy tools have been effectively removed from the table which is a party political decision. The impaired ability of banks to lend may be one reason why QE has not always washed through the system; but as time has passed, a more persuasive reason is that indebted households and to a lesser extent businesses have been deleveraging and have not wanted to borrow. In other words, the phenomenon is more demand than supply driven. As to your suggestion that political parties are not interested in innovation -an industrial revolution for the digital- that's plain lazy. If anything, it's the one area that commands an impressive degree of cross-party support (in terms of means and ends). Plenty is going on behind the scenes - alas the reasons for its limited traction (at least for those who can't be bothered to look) touch on a whole host of bottlenecks and behaviours that are not directly amenable to policy intervention. The parts that can be influenced are partly foreclosed by the kind of moralising about debt (and the public sector) that is implicit in your posts. HTH

The distributional consequences of inflation are more complex; but in general, I agree. Another solution which some serious thinkers -not just those on the left- advocated during the crisis and its aftermath was debt relief/forgiveness for the poorest and most leveraged. Of course, that wouldn't fly politically with the moralising majority, even if it's effects are seemingly far more positive than bailouts for bank creditors/shareholders and monetary experiments in QE. See Mian and Sufi's excellent book 'House of Debt'.

Or inflate it away -and a dose of inflation might actually be a good thing in some places at the moment.

What do you think authorities around the world have been doing for the past five years - what do you think the Tories much vaunted economic record is in many ways attributable to?

Yep, a big miss for me as well.

See nobody's mentioned Better Call Saul in a while - thought the rest of the first series was excellent, even if some sub-stories meandered with no real payoff (e.g the Kettermans). Mike's backstory was a highlight. The relationship between Jimmy and his brother was done really well -probably more sensitively than anything in Breaking Bad which on one didn't leave much room for ambiguity once Walter crossed the moral rubicon. By the same token, it probably means that there won't be the same fireworks in future seasons as in BB but that's no bad thing.

Jammy

The scousers have been awful. :lol:vren

Own goal