mirage

True, but most of the value of a house is in the residential-designated land and your objection appeared to be nothing to do with this point.

I think 57% said that they favour a lower income tax, i.e. a shift from taxing income to land wealth. The arguments for taxation of land (in preference to income) have been well-rehearsed on this site and seem pretty compelling to me.

Just pissed-off that after months of waiting I'm too busy to really get involved in this. And I still haven't put on a short AUD/USD!

I'm contributing!

Genius!

That only ever goes from left to right.

GDP is reported adjusted for inflation by the GDP deflator.

And how do you decide what each episode of care would have costed in the NHS?

Costs don't increase linearly with transaction value - why should fees?

Re....covereh?

Market failure? Impossible!

I don't know yet Sceppy! Got any suggestions?

Thanks, a very interesting answer indeed.

I take your point, but I see this as just describing Wester sheeple rather than a special breed of super-entitled sheeple. I don't see much difference between the UK and the US or France, neither of which suffered New Labour.

He doesn't give any justification, source or working; this alone is a damning indightment of a 30+ page report. However, it seems he has just discounted the recurring liability for pension pay outs without considering the revenues. Public sectors pensions will require some additional contributions from general taxation for a few years, then decline as a percentage of GDP thereafter if you believe growth estimates (which I don't, but that's a different argument). No matter your pessimism on the affordability of these commitments you can't just consider the future bills as a liability without considering future income. Even public sector pensions running huge deficits filled by Treasury have some income from taxation associated with them. That as I said would be directly analogous to regarding all future public sector spending as an unfunded liability.

I don't know about the veterinary system, but surely insurers give a frack about the price, since it comes right out of their profit margin?

Yes of course it would be cheaper for healthy people to opt out of a universal insurance system. It would be cheaper whilst you are healthy, that is. You will have to persuade the a majority of the voting population out of universal insurance funded from progressive general taxation. That battle doesn't have much to do with how efficient or otherwise the NHS is as a healthcare system.

In many cases NHS doctors do private work for NHS trusts for no additional remuneration, as trust employees in other words.

One good way the NHS could be privatised is simply regard it as a single competing health insurer. Allow private organisations to offer universal coverage with universal acceptance criteria on the same basis as the NHS and see if any can do it cheaper or better. Anyone who opts out of the NHS gets (1/UK population) of the NHS tax burden as a tax rebate. I'm sure there will be companies queing round the block to offer the service the NHS provides. If you are just talking about private companies cherry-picking the easy stuff and leaving the NHS with the loss-making complexities then you aren't comparing apples with apples.

Decentralisation and marketisation are only an improvement in some areas. The obvious benefit of the a market is competition. The obvious down sides are fragmentation, lack of coordination, duplication of effort and supply failure or cartel formation where there are high barriers to entry or poor visibility. In general, the organisational (as opposed to technical) changes in healcare that deliver the largest benefit are an increase in scale of integrated systems. For example, cancer networks have been organised that integrate care, particularly exchange of information, between GPs and across multiple secondary and tertiary centres and multiple specialities. This has positively transformed cancer care. Another thing that has transformed cancer outcomes are national screening programmes, which are centralised national programmes. Within these, for example cervical cytology screening, the evidence is that larger specialist centres deliver better output, and the move is towards further centralisation there. Similarly in cardiac care, results have been greatly improved by integrating emergency cardiac catheterisation centres with ambulance services accross entire regions. There is no reason or evidence to suggest that introducing markets at this level of the organisation will deliver efficiencies. Sure, private providers may compete and drive up standards for small discrete proceedures that can be easily commoditised. It is perfectly good for providing glasses or perhaps cateract operations. These things don't require massive coordination to deliver the best results. This is analogous to massive private sector organisations. Google delivers its service by means of a single integrated global infrastructure. So does DHL. You can compete with Google or DHL but you will only do so with investment of massive resources producing a parallel system, where you will compete side by side. A similar argument could be made concerning some of the more efficient large private healthcare systems in the USA, such as the Keiser-Permanente, which is similar in scale to the NHS. You will not increase internet search efficiency by forcibly breaking up Google into a hundred "competing" companies and imposing some competitive bidding system for services that parts of the company do for each other. Whilst I don't deny that market mechanisms are fantastic in many contexts, free market puritans often seem to miss the very mechanisms delivering efficiency for some of their private sector champions. Sometimes it seems to me that people advocating privatisation of aspects of the NHS are analogous to shareholders of a major company advocating break-up and competition between different bits of the company. Well sometimes that is the right thing to do, but when a break-up cuts across large-scale well integrated systems requiring lots of information transfer, it can be a disaster.

You could redefine pay freeze to mean increment freeze and I'm sure many would find that more understandable. However, for clarity, there is a freeze in the payscale but not a freeze on incrementation. Yes but the cost of an incremental pay system doesn't go up year after year. It is getting cheaper in real terms. I know that you are a bit bitter that they are getting paid much more than you, and I don't dispute that. They are getting paid much more than you. No doubt a pay cut is in order. That was it! Utter classic! You didn't show any sign of having an idea about GR or BB theory yet you don't buy BB theory! I think that makes you a bit of a eegit, however certainly no worse than some doctors of my acquaintance. So in terms of purely intellectual ability, these pay levels are indeed unfair.

That's obviously not true, is it Blu? Payscales are neutral over time as the most expensive drop of the end and are replaced by the cheapest. I think you are confusing yourself by thinking of the average consultant pay as the first increment on the scale. Average pay is of course much higher than that, but is frozen. Just think of all that lovely money! Maybe we should retrain and walk into a consultant psychiatrist post! BTW - what was that silly thing you revealed you believed a while back that I took great exception to? I can't remember. Edit - Just remembered! You were "sceptical" of the Theory of Relativity without demonstrating any understanding of it! Took me three days to remember that! Quality!

Bad luck - you're not Steve Keen are you?

I forgot to follow that up - yes, you are right, it is simplistic to blame the bubble solely on central bank interest rate policy, though you could argue that they have been too low over the longer term - the bubble started in the 90s. However, the broad point is that it is a debt bubble.

Know even less about horses.