Month: August 2012

House Of Lord Reform Fallout – Continued

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Not so fast. First we need to preserve democracy by translating the referendum question into Cornish.

 

While Conservative MPs and most right-leaning commentators continue to shriek loudly about dastardly betrayal by their Liberal Democrat coalition partners, the rest of the world has moved on and decided that it is the Tories who are the coalition cheaters in this particular relationship. Quoting a recent YouGov poll, The Spectator reports:

Here’s an interesting statistic from YouGov: more voters think the Conservatives have broken the coalition agreement than think the Lib Dems have failed to stick to it. When asked whether the Tories have ‘mostly kept to their side of the deal they made in the coalition agreement’, 51 per cent said no. For the Lib Dems, 45 per cent of voters thought the Lib Dems had stuck to the coalition agreement against 32 per cent who thought they had not.

So 51% of voters think that the Conservatives have failed to uphold the coalition agreement, while only 32% of voters think the same of the Liberal Democrats.

The ludicrous position in which the Conservative Party now finds itself is entirely due to political blundering by their leadership, and blinkered stubbornness from their grass roots. The Liberal Democrats have, in general, taken far more of a political kicking over the past few years than the Conservatives as a result of their mutual decision to go into coalition government together – look no further than the tuition fee increase furore as a prime example. If, as some commentators say, electoral constituency boundary reform is the most important thing to the Conservatives as they seek to win a straight majority at the next general election in 2015, perhaps they should have read the tea leaves better and realised that thwarting a cause dear to the hearts of their coalition partners might bring about a reprisal that would damage a cause dear to their own.

To clarify my own position: I am no fan of modifying the voting system in this country, and certainly no fan of AV. I’m glad that the referendum yielded a resounding “no” vote. I am, however, very much a fan of having the upper house of Parliament finally becoming a democratically legitimate body, one with equal status to the Commons and thus ending their primacy if possible (though the current bill would not do this).

It is all very well talking about principle and the fact that ministers are expected to support the government in Parliamentary votes. But we are living in interesting times and uncharted political territory. We have a government that no-one elected, comprised of two parties with (at times) very divergent views. The “glue” that holds this together, and the only thing stopping the Conservatives from having to form a lame-duck minority administration or calling a new election, is the threat of political reprisal by one party when the other strays. You squash my policy proposal, I’ll scupper yours. Is it pretty, and is it ideal? No, of course not. Coalition government is not ideal in any way. But successive governments, in their laziness, have failed to put in place a better mechanism for dealing with a hung Parliament, so this is what we are stuck with.

We conservatives screwed our Lib Dem coalition partners on House of Lords reform, and now they have hit us back. We tried calling the waambulance and demanding the sympathy of the British electorate for the terrible things that the naughty Lib Dems did to us, and by a margin of 51%-32% they told us to quit crying and grow up. By and large, no one outside the Westminster village cares about process. They care about outcomes. Referring to a sub-clause in the coalition agreement with outraged, wounded indignity will not win us any more supporters.

So there are two choices now, as far as I can tell:

1. Yet another embarrassing, totally avoidable political U-turn. David Cameron gets tough with his backbenchers and whips them into line to pass the House of Lords reform bill, or

2. Cameron accepts the Liberal Democrat retaliation, waves goodbye to boundary reform and possibly the only chance of winning an outright majority at the next general election.

It’s not complicated.

On Olympic Mascots

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Andrew Sullivan’s blog has been charting the history of Olympic mascots as a response to public bemusement with Wenlock and Mandeville, the London 2012 official mascots.

However, a reader of Sullivan’s blog said it best when it came to “Izzy”, the mascot for the 1996 games in Atlanta:

The reader commented:

If you are going to examine bad mascots, please don’t forget Whatizit/Izzy from Atlanta in 1996.  It was a horrible blue sperm with stars shooting out his ass. It was the disastrous result of too many marketing people throwing everything into the pot. We still are living down the shame of Izzy.

Izzy actually makes Wenlock and Mandeville seem pretty tame and bland by comparison.

Foreign Aid vs Cancer

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I should say from the outset that I do not believe a centralised, taxpayer-funded, government-provided healthcare system is the optimal way to deliver healthcare to a population, though I do appreciate the reasons behind the founding of the NHS, and acknowledge that it does deliver generally satisfactory results when compared with other systems, including the various times throughout my life when I have used the service.

I think that the American “best healthcare system in the world!” method is far worse, and that having a concentration of the world’s best medical facilities does not make up for the fact that these world class resources remain off limits to the vast majority of the population with insufficient insurance coverage to pay for them. I also believe that while ObamaCare fixes some of American healthcare’s most egregious flaws (the huge number of uninsured and the ability of health insurance providers to screw their customers), it leaves other problems (the link between health insurance and employers, for example) totally untouched.

Anyway. Since we do have a national health service in Britain, and that consequently healthcare spending must compete with the myriad of other government and departmental priorities from education to national defence, I would hope we could all agree that since the NHS isn’t going anywhere any time soon (being a realist), it should be made to work as efficiently as possible, the levels of spending on it should be justified in terms of tangible outcomes, and equally that the monies which are spent on other areas, to the detriment of healthcare spending, should be able to be justified by the government of the day.

What does all of this have to do with foreign aid, and the money that the British government spends on aid to developing countries?

Well, as right-leaning blogger Guido Fawkes reports today, Prime Minister David Cameron has just been schooled on this very point as he participated in a radio talk show for LBC:

 

In this video clip, David Cameron is confronted by a caller who (while details of the case are clearly lacking), appears to be in great distress because the additional course of treatment for her cancer is not covered by the NHS, and consequently the potentially life-saving treatment is  unavailable to her. He responds, of course, in meaningless soundbites and platitudes, but the look on his face – much as when Gordon Brown was confronted with the realisation that he had called a prospective voter a “bigoted old woman” on a live microphone – says it all.

Indeed, it is very hard to argue against the caller’s point at all.

There can be no justification that I can think of – none – for giving £1.5bn in aid over five years to a country which spends $31.5bn USD on defence, which has a space programme nominally more ambitious than that of the donor country, and which has explicitly stated that it does not want the funds. None.

And when the government takes such an active role in providing healthcare – not just regulating the system and ensuring universal access, but actively providing the care itself through a national health system – politicians will always be ambushed in this way by citizens who feel that the government’s misprioritisation of resources has let them down.

Music For The Day

Samuel Hooper3 Comments

The third movement from Symphony no. 7, “Leningrad”, Op. 60, by Dmitri Shostakovich:

 

I know many people dismiss the Leningrad symphony as wartime propaganda, and don’t rank it among one of Shostakovich’s better works, but I love this particular movement, especially in contrast to the famous, bombastic opening movement. The almost-alien, plangent, stark opening chords in the woodwind are to me very evocative of Russia, and of the desolation of a besieged city. I also find the way that Shostakovich has the woodwind cut out at the end of their opening phrase, leaving the strings to hold the note, to be a particularly effective trick of orchestration.

The later variations on the theme, embellished by the violins as a mournful dance, is also very moving.

It is also quite fun to follow along with the score on the YouTube video.

Tax Breaks For Gold Medals

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Though neither of them have any intention of doing anything about it, in the run-up to the November elections both main political parties in America are at least making noises about the need to reform and simplify the massively complicated tax code in the United States. This is urgently needed – a thick, impenetrable layer of deductions and tax credits doled out by previous Congresses to the favoured special interests or wavering voting blocs of the day have led to an almost incomprehensible system, one which means higher marginal rates overall for everyone and one which benefits almost no one apart from the well-connected and their tax accountants.

So when “rising star” Republican Senator from Florida, Marco Rubio, proposed a tax break for US Olympic medal winners on the cash bonuses that they receive from the US Olympic Committee, you would think that the “first do no harm” rule might apply, and President Obama and others would shoot down the idea. Right?

No. President Obama actually supports this opportunistic piece of pandering, according to Matthew Yglesias, writing at Slate:

If they gave out awards for dumb new policy ideas, President Obama and Republican rising star Sen. Marco Rubio would both be medaling this week. Their achievements? Rubio’s completely pointless bill offering a tax break to recipients of Olympic medals and—even worse—the president’s decision to hop on the bandwagon rather than show the country he has a firmer grasp on the issues than his adversaries do. In the scheme of things, of course, winning Olympic prizes is not an important sector of economic activity, and the medals’ tax status doesn’t really matter. But the overall shape of the tax code does matter a great deal, and the speed with which a bipartisan consensus emerged around making it worse bodes quite poorly for efforts to make it better.

Yglesias goes on to provide some essential background that some early supporters of this harebrained scheme appear to have missed:

In this particular case, the issue is that the U.S. Olympic Committee—the nonprofit group that organizes Team USA for the games—rewards athletes with cash bounties for medals won. Gold medalists receive $25,000, silver medalists get $15,000, and bronze medalists receive $10,000. That’s income, so come spring of 2013 when medalists are filling out their tax forms, it’ll be reported and taxed like any other income. Their after-tax income will be higher if they do win a medal than if they don’t. There’s no “extra tax bill” waiting for anyone. There’s simply extra income, and the income would be taxed. (Some people have confused this with the idea that the medals themselves come with a hefty tax bill, but the real tax issue is about the cash prizes.)

Precisely. This is not about suddenly being landed with an unexpected tax bill just because you worked hard and won an Olympic medal. This is about the IRS treating the prize money that the winning athletes receive as an incentive from the US Olympic Committee as income, which it is, and taxing it at the appropriate marginal rate.

Of course, the number of London 2012 Olympic medal winners as a percentage of the US population is miniscule, so the policy, if enacted, would do no real harm to tax returns or anything else. But the blatant favouritism of rewarding Olympic athletes alone with this tax break, while making other “worthy” types pay normal rates of tax, would set yet another ridiculous and rather alarming precedent:

In terms of fairness, it seems like a strange slight to winners of other kinds of prizes. Are Olympic medalists worthier than winners of the Nobel or Pulitzer prizes? And of course exempting all prize income from income tax could merely encourage all kinds of people to restructure their income as prizes. The J.P. Morgan Memorial Prize for Achievement in Investment Banking, anyone?

And then the money quote:

The underlying issue is that taxes aren’t supposed to be a cosmic judgment on the underlying worthiness of people’s activities. The earnings of a great artist and a reality TV show producer are taxed the same. That can seem a bit perverse at times, but having Congress try to assess which professions are important and which are bad would be much worse.

Republicans always talk about how the government should stop trying to “pick winners”, accusing President Obama of doing this with his subsidies for various forms of green energy (and apparently turning a blind eye toward their own efforts to help their own favoured industries). Well, I would submit to Senator Rubio and President Obama that the successful US Olympic athletes have already picked themselves as winners through their achievements in London. They are to be congratulated and afforded all the respect due to a champion, but their accomplishments do not entitle them to a tax break, particularly at a time when the tax code is crying out for simplification.