In the English film industry, the stunt men work in the accounts department

One of the oddest stories I've seen in the newspaper in months was that of the "fake" film gang who claimed to be making a Hollywood movie in order to obtain some ridiculous sleb-welfare lolly that the (broke) British taxpayer doles out.

The gang submitted claims to HMRC, explaining that they had spent millions of pounds on the film: paying actors and film set managers. Under the tax relief regime for film-makers, they reclaimed £1.5 million in VAT, and nearly £1.3 million in film tax credit claims.

[From Five jailed for fake Hollywood film tax scam - AOL Money UK]

Now, it's absurd that film makers should get this ludicrous subsidy at all. But what's truly absurd about this story is that the film, which went straight to DVD, wasn't that bad! It won a "Silver Ace" award at last year's Las Vegas Film Festival. Compared to an actual British film made with taxpayer money such as Sex Lives of the Potato Men (an unbelievable million quid of funding from the Lottery via the Film Council), it's Citizen Kane.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.

Transparency next step

I read in today's Telegraph (but can't find it online) that the average farm in the UK had an income of £25,000 last year and that four-fifths of this income comes in the forms of EU subsidies (that rob taxpayers in two ways: by spending their tax money and by artificially raising the price of food). If you want to know how much your friendly local Farmer Giles gets from this racket… you can't.

European rules forcing the publication of details of the people who received farming subsidies and how much they received breached those people's rights to privacy, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled.

[From Farming subsidy database 'breaches privacy rights' • The Register]

So now farmers can keep their looting of the public purse to themselves. This seems wrong, especially when the terms for applying for these handouts clearly state that the amounts will be published. The right solution is, naturally, to abolish farm subsidies at the earliest opportunity, but, failing that, we should at least be allowed to see where the money is going.

Here's a positive suggestion though. I see today that the government is proposing to send taxpayers a pie chart of where the money went with their tax demand, a bit like the pie chart you get from Woking council with your enormous council tax bill. Not a bad idea - at least people can see where their money is going. But why not put this on food too: you're Waitrose bill could tell you at the end: you spent £35.45 of which £1.41 went on VAT and £24.21 went in EU subsidies and £2.91 went to Waitrose profit and…

What's wrong with some transparency?

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Just the facts

There's a really interesting article about football by Danny Finkelstein in this month's Financial World. His piece, which is about using data and statistics instead of punditry in soccer, contains a number of interesting snippets, but the most interesting part to me was the graph relating wages (as a proxy for total wealth of the soccer club) and the premier league points gained. The curve is clear and asymptotic: money does buy success and, exactly as you would suspect, the more money you spend the lower the marginal return.

Teams above the curve (eg, Portsmouth) have something (generally speaking, a manager) that enables them to outperform the players alone whereas clubs below the curve (eg, Manchester City) will have to spend a huge amount of money to get additional points that the players aren't earning them. Fortunately, Manchester City have absolutely the hugest amount of money imaginable and they apparently bid ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY FIVE MILLION POUNDS to bring Kaka to Middle Eastlands (as the City fans were signing earlier in the season, "fill up your car, we're buy Kaka").

As well as a world-record transfer fee, City’s owners are reported to have offered the player a £75 million signing-on fee and wages in the region of £250,000 a week.

[From How can AC Milan spend £100m on Kaka in a recession? - Telegraph]

As a lifelong blue, I have to say that I hope they fail to get him. There is something utterly obscene about spending that much money on a footballer, something just plain wrong.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Back to the whelk stall for all of them

Now, I don't really want to make a political point here, but it's a fact that most people in the government have never had a proper job of any kind, let alone run a business, not even a corner shop. But how does it happen that today we (ie, taxpayers) became the owners of RBS after the government paid 65.5p for shares that were trading at 55p in the market, meaning an instantaneous loss of £2 billion. It's getting beyond a joke: I doubt that my children will ever be able to pay this debt back, which is why I'll be encouraging them to move overseas. The Prime Minister was busy writing to X-Factor finalists today, so perhaps he took his eye off the ball on this one.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Another solution to the North-South divide

Well, money, obviously. But maybe not the way you think.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Undeserving

I happened to be reading an article about a new book by Polly Toynbee (of The Guardian) and her partner David Walker (fo The Guardian). It's called Unjust Rewards and it's about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer, that kind of thing. But something struck me as odd while I was reading it. While conservatives are criticsed for "Victorian" views of the deserving and undeserving poor, it seems to me that the views of the media elite are founded on similarly outdated notions of the deserving and undeserving rich: Some people who earn more than, say, five times the average wage deserve their money (eg, Guardian columnists) whereas other people (eg, lawyers and bankers) don't. I have a family member who is a lawyer, and I can testify that he works far harder than I do and definitely deserves his money. I don't have any family members who are bankers, so I can't say whether they deserve it or not.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

Truly shocking figure

Pottering around on the interweb, you now and then come across some news (ie, a fact you didn't know before) that is so shocking that you can't stop reflecting on it. The most recent case of this came when I was browsing the news headlines and saw a sidebar link to the NPR story:

In 1850, a slave would cost roughly $30,000 to $40,000 — in other words it was like investing in a Mercedes. Today you can go to Haiti and buy a 9-year-old girl to use as a sexual and domestic slave for $50."

[From Author Struggles to Stay Removed from Slave Trade : NPR]

I have no idea why this keeps bothering me so much, when you read about so many horrible things going on the world every day, but I think it's something to do with the fact that we congratulate ourselves on ending slavery -- William Wilberforce, Amazing Grace and all that -- but we haven't even come close to ending it. We shouldn't be so smug sometimes. Anyway, sorry to lecture. I'll be back to moaning about travel shortly since I will be flying into Terminal 5 for the very first time in a while.

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.
[posted with ecto]

You can't hold a candle to them

This really is beyond parody. We are getting desperately close to the point where even the most dedicated and vicious satirist is going to have to abandon their profession in the face of European Commission pronouncements. This morning, I hear...

European candle makers, from Germany, the Netherlands and other countries, complained to the European Commission in January that they were being damaged by illegal pricing by Chinese rivals, accusing them of getting unfair export aid.

[From EU starts dumping probe of Chinese candles and steel | Business | Reuters]

I assumed that I was hallucinating under the influence of Lemsip, and that my brain was feverishly conflating snapshots from economics text books with the memory of my dreary trip to Brussels last week. But I looked it up at Reuters, and it appears to be true. The candlemakers are complaining about foreign competition. Far be it from me to sneer as the European economy is about to be devasted, but who didn't hear or see the report and immediately think of Bastiat's famous "Candlemakers' petition"...

The Candlemakers' petition is a well known satire of protectionism written and published in 1845 by the French economist Frédéric Bastiat as part of his Economic Sophisms. In the Candlemakers' petition, the candlemakers and industrialists from other parts of the lighting industry petition the Chamber of Deputies of the French July Monarchy (1830–1848) to protect their trade from the unfair competition of a foreign power: the Sun.

[From Candlemakers' petition - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia]

And for those of you unfamiliar with this landmark in economic history, the petition claims that

We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion

[From Bastiat's famous Candlestick makers' Petition]

Today, as is the spirit of the times, the inscrutable Chinese have replaced perfidious Albion as the crucial "other", but other than that, what has changed?

In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.

[posted with ecto]