Fat People Will Pay More

The chieftains at Ryan Air could show the government a thing or two about raising revenues.

Look at this, democracy in action, letting people VOTE how to charge fat people more money to fly:

The Ryanair proposals are:

* Charge per kg over 130kg/20 stone (male) and 100kg/15 stone (females);

* Charge per inch for every waist inch over 45 inch (male) and 40 inch (female);

* Charge for every point in excess of 40 points on the Body Mass Index (+30 points is obese);

* Charge for a second seat if passengers’ waist touches both armrests simultaneously.

Ryanair spokesman Stephen McNamara said: “With passengers voting overwhelmingly for a ‘fat tax’ we are now asking them to suggest which format the charge should take.

So why didn't Alistair Darling unveil in his Idiot's Guide To Losing Money Budget a new tax on fat people too? I mean look around you in England, people. There's positively billions that could be had making fat people pay more for existing.

Why stop at the rich and the pub crawlers and the fat people for that matter?

How about a poor tax?

It's a great idea. The way it works is that children borne to a mother with no job and on benefits or a family already unable to sustain itself, are sold, by the government, to the highest child labour bidder. Just think about it - with the birth rate among people on benefits being what it is Poor Kids And Cheap Labour could become England's new and fastest growing export industry.


"There is nothing worst than the person sitting next to you on the plane taking half your seat as well. It is only fair that these people pay for a double seat."
stan white, leeds, u/k, comments in the article about the Ryan Air fat tax.

Only fair? Why let them fly at all? Why not ground them for life? Should fat people be allowed to fly? It defies gravity. Not to mention the added risk to a plane flying with fat people on board.

I don't think there should be a new surcharge on fat people for flying Ryan Air.

Ryan Air should just be bold and make it a company policy: Hey Fat People, Fuck Off. We Don't Want Your Business.

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Here's the funny bit about the alleged bold fuck you to rich people entailed in Darling's new budget:

Firstly, he's going to raise the planned new top rate of tax on incomes over £150,000 from 45% to 50%.

Then, people with incomes over £150,000 will also see their pension tax relief restricted from 2011, while personal allowances will be scrapped for those on incomes over £100,000 from next April.

Bravo.

Or not.

The Institute for Fiscal Studies has warned the hike would produce far less revenue than the Treasury hoped unless more stringent measures were brought in to crack down on tax avoidance.

Michael Wistow, head of tax at law firm Berwin Leighton Paisner, said: "History shows that increasing tax rates rarely achieves the objective of increasing the tax take, individuals will now look to find other ways of earning money or reducing tax liabilities."

Greed. You gotta love it.

NeoCapitalism?



The FT unleashes another in a series of considered essays on the future of capitalism:

What, then, is capitalism’s future? Our current, damaged system is not, despite Marx’s hopes, to be replaced by a totally egalitarian, communist society (such arrangements might be there in life after death). Our future political economy will probably not be one in which Smith or his present-day disciples could find much comfort: there will be a higher-than-welcome degree of government interference in “the market”, somewhat larger taxes and heavy public disapprobation of the profit principle in general. Schumpeter and Keynes, one suspects, will feel rather more at home with our new post-excess neocapitalist political economy. It will be a system where the animal spirits of the market will be closely watched (and tamed) by a variety of national and international zookeepers – a taming of which the great bulk of the spectators will heartily approve – but there will be no ritual murder of the free-enterprise principle, even if we have to plunge further into depression for the next years. Homus Economicus will take a horrible beating. But capitalism, in modified form, will not disappear. Like democracy, it has serious flaws – but, just as one find faults with democracy, the critics of capitalism will discover that all other systems are worse. Political economy tells us so.

It would be nice to have a few more details as to the restrictions and dictats that are alleged causing banks in America to return their bailout money handouts.



It would appear that other than unfounded allegations of "social engineering" the cuts in executive pay packages and other potential government "demands" don't sit well with bankers who are accustomed to being the ones ramming it to people rather than the other way around.

One of the biggest concerns of the banks is that the program lets Congress and the administration pile on new conditions at any time.

The demands to modify mortgages or forestall evictions are especially onerous, some bank executives and experts say, because they could prompt some institutions to take steps that could lead to greater losses.

Hmmm, piling on new conditions at any time? Putting those receiving funds to take steps that could lead to greater losses? Sounds a little like the way banks treated customers for years and years and years.

Well and truly one must be comforted by the mantra that if bankers don't like it or are against it, it must be good.

Since when are they to be believed and further, given they've already ground the economy into dust with their insatiable greed, what credibility to bankers really have anyway? They're going to lose money? Well, they did a brilliant job of that on their own so the claim rings a little hollow at this point.

Of course, if you're interested in detailed analysis of what the IMF believes is the appropriate fiscal policy for the financial crisis, and you have time to sift through 38 pages of bureaucratic economo-speak, it's there for the reading.

On the other hand, to the delight of reductionists everywhere, the policies and ideas are neatly summarised by the FT as:

temporary spending and tax cuts aimed at high-spending groups will be more effective and less risky than broad tax cuts.

In other words, "sustaining demand", the ironic way that this all works is give MORE money to those who already HAVE more. Think we've heard that one before, haven't we?



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Come to think of it, no point in worrying about economies collapsing or not having any money. We should be saving up for scuba equipment because we're all going to be underwater in a matter of months anyway

Sounds like a good reductionist terror lead for GMTV or BBC Breakfast, both of whom are desperate (perhaps GMTV moreso because their funding isn't predicated on the extortion of UK tax payers).

Sea levels are predicted to rise twice as fast as was forecast by the United Nations only two years ago, threatening hundreds of millions of people with catastrophe, scientists said yesterday in a dramatic new warning about climate change. Rapidly melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are likely to push up sea levels by a metre or more by 2100, swamping coastal cities and obliterating the living space of 600 million people who live in deltas, low-lying areas and small island states.

Low-lying countries with increasing populations, such as Bangladesh, Burma and Egypt, could see large parts of their surface areas vanish. Experts in Bangladesh estimate that a one-metre rise in sea levels would swamp 17 per cent of the country's land mass. Pacific islands such as Tuvalu, where 12,000 people live just a few feet above sea level, and the Maldives, would face complete obliteration.

Oh, I dunno. The hysteria just doesn't seem "real" enough unless it's got a failed and gutless American politician making a film about it.

If you're feeling hopeless, you could always watch Sizzle, a mocumentary about global warming.

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PSST, have I got a conspiracy for YOU!

What if it were the same gunman (or gunmen) here and here?

Samson contractor Greg McCullough said he was pumping petrol at the station when the gunman opened fire, killing a woman coming out of the service station and wounding McCullough in the shoulder and arm with bullet fragments that struck his truck and the pump.

``I first thought it was somebody playing,'' he said

Somebody playing? They sure play hard in Alabama.



And maybe even in Northern Ireland

Northern Irish politics is, as a rule, boring. Think about the material you have to work with. Between Martin McGuinness’ lachrymose banalities and Peter Robinson’s rigid bigotry (there is a great deal of both in Stormont), there is little room to be inspiring. The only occasional frisson is when one of the demented crackpots of the hard right says something unspeakably ignorant and stupid. Sammy Wilson, the environment minister, denies that there is such a thing as man-made global warming, and that ensures that his smug, dopy-eyed, reddened face gets on the news for a week. (Sammy is also, you may care to know, an Ulster Jobs for Ulster Workers guy). Likewise, when Iris Robinson MP, spouse to First Minister Peter, describes homosexuality as being “viler” than child abuse, there follows a brief uproar before the the usual run of anti-gay violence is resumed with vengeance. (Not that Nothern Ireland has a problem with exaggerated machismo - anyone who says it does will receive a boot in the ballicks.) Though I have not visited NI for years, and don’t feel much connection to it, it is hard not to be embarrassed by the kinds of people who get elected in that neck of the woods. They are so obviously unfit for the job. They should be spreading mulch and spouting misanthropy out in the suburbs and farming communities.

Sunday Reads And Listens, etc.

“When a place gets boring, even the rich people leave.”

somewhat fascinating study on how the crash will reshape America and some of the observations therein:

The historian Scott Reynolds Nelson has noted that in some respects, today’s crisis most closely resembles the “Long Depression,” which stretched, by one definition, from 1873 to 1896. It began as a banking crisis brought on by insolvent mortgages and complex financial instruments, and quickly spread to the real economy, leading to mass unemployment that reached 25 percent in New York.

During that crisis, rising industries like railroads, petroleum, and steel were consolidated, old ones failed, and the way was paved for a period of remarkable innovation and industrial growth. In 1870, New England mill towns like Lowell, Lawrence, Manchester, and Springfield were among the country’s most productive industrial cities, and America’s population overwhelmingly lived in the countryside. By 1900, the economic geography had been transformed from a patchwork of farm plots and small mercantile towns to a landscape increasingly dominated by giant factory cities like Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Buffalo.

And, discussing the future, mobility and home ownership versus renting, flexibility and transience:

If anything, our government policies should encourage renting, not buying. Homeownership occupies a central place in the American Dream primarily because decades of policy have put it there. A recent study by Grace Wong, an economist at the Wharton School of Business, shows that, controlling for income and demographics, homeowners are no happier than renters, nor do they report lower levels of stress or higher levels of self-esteem.

And while homeownership has some social benefits—a higher level of civic engagement is one—it is costly to the economy. The economist Andrew Oswald has demonstrated that in both the United States and Europe, those places with higher homeownership rates also suffer from higher unemployment. Homeownership, Oswald found, is a more important predictor of unemployment than rates of unionization or the generosity of welfare benefits. Too often, it ties people to declining or blighted locations, and forces them into work—if they can find it—that is a poor match for their interests and abilities.

As homeownership rates have risen, our society has become less nimble: in the 1950s and 1960s, Americans were nearly twice as likely to move in a given year as they are today. Last year fewer Americans moved, as a percentage of the population, than in any year since the Census Bureau started tracking address changes, in the late 1940s. This sort of creeping rigidity in the labor market is a bad sign for the economy, particularly in a time when businesses, industries, and regions are rising and falling quickly.

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Iva Bittova & Vladimir Vaclavek: "Sto let"



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My Top 4 Favourite Tee-Shirts From Tee-Shirt Hell:


For the Welsh?

For those who've had enough?

just so...wrong

honesty?

To where pretty much anywhere

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More on British Scottish Drinking Habits

Maybe not. Whereas the French sip, Scotland, like the rest of Britain, gulps. A survey by Sweden’s National Institute of Public Health asked how often drinking sessions turned into binges (defined as one person drinking a whole bottle of wine or more). French men reported bingeing 9% of the time, Italians 13% and Germans 14%. For British men, 40% of drinking sessions turned into binges. Women were similarly ahead of their continental counterparts.

Bingeing is not unique to Britain: Nordic countries are almost as raucous, with Swedish men bingeing 33% of the time. But they don’t drink as much in total: annual consumption is less than six litres in Sweden. Britain’s special curse is to combine northern European drinking habits with southern European volumes.

happy march!

Hey, anyone interested in some cathartic reading?

Assuming it is out of the question to hang, draw and quarter Sir Fred Goodwin, pluck out his intestines while they are still warm and wriggling, stuff them into his greedy mouth and then display his severed head on a spike at the Tower of London, could we settle for shooting him instead? Yes, I know, I'm going soft.

The sacrificial goat?

The funny thing is the naivité of anyone believing greed recedes once it is in the blood. These bankers are like junkies, albeit more of a threat to society. They are used to calling the shots, they are used to raking in obscene sums of cash and they are not willing to go off the smack even when faced with the abject failure of their system, their philosophy and their greed.

Step down quietly, gracefully, without pockets so stuffed with cash they can barely walk away? Fuggetaboutit.

On the other hand, the public pillaging of Goodwin could just be a smoke screen to cover up the government's own criminal incompetence

And quickly hidden, too, by the Goodwin pension kerfuffle was the testimony of Lord Turner, chairman of the Financial Services Agency, to the Treasury Select Committee last week. He said of Gordon Brown's watch at the Treasury: "All the pressure on the FSA was not to say: why aren't you looking at these business models, but why are you being so heavy and intrusive? Can't you make regulation a bit more light touch? We were supervising people like HBOS within a particular philosophy of the way you do regulation which I think, in retrospect, was wrong."

His views, which no one in Government has had the brass neck to contest, vindicate Paul Moore, the HBOS whistleblower, and support the thesis that history will probably conclude that the trail of easy credit and light-touch regulation responsible for the present crisis leads to Gordon Brown's front door.

And as the Independent and the Guardian take sides, the Times splits it right down the middle in Is the government being tough enough, or is it using them as a diversion?

It does appear in any event that the Banker Pigs got the opportunities they did through via the government, who either turned a blind eye to the concept of regulation or actively encouraged turning regulation into a running joke in order to continue to take credit for economic growth based on an ever-increasingly fragile house of cards.

And do you think Sir Fred is really quaking in his boots about the government taking his pension from him? In addition to their traditional incompetence, they are virtually powerless, at a legal stand still. And guess who negotiated this pension agreement with Sir Fred to begin with? Hmmm, you bet. Same idiots.

So yeah, Sir Fred should do the decent thing and cough up the pension but now that he's been mainlining cash into his veins all these years, he ent giving up the junk.

Irrespective of whose fault it is ultimately, pity the government isn't listen to Fat John Prescott who says that RBS should unilaterally withhold Goodwin’s pension - “and let him sue us”.

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Ok, to hell with economics - cheap travel, that's where it's at.

Here are four rail trips which won't bust you completely.

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Consecutive weekends have resulted in consecutive rubbish movies taken in. Don't ask why, maybe because they're free, I dunno.

Last night was Australia which was not only predictable, stupid and boring but crikey! it went on and on and on. After like, 30 minutes I was wondering is this over yet and found out there were another TWO HOURS to go! Anyway, this trailer does no justice to how ridiculous this movie is, believe it or not, merely scratches the surface:



And the weekend before, was Clint Eastwood's latest offering, the incredibly gawdawful Grand Torino. You can't really be sure it isn't a parody all along of a pensioner trying to reclaiming his "tough guy" reputation by spewing forth a bunch of racist prattle whilst simultaneously and gradually revealing his hip, sincere and touching heart. A joke. A joke all the way through, HIGH COMEDY, folks, until the bitter end when he compounds the horrific experiece by SINGING. And let there be no doubt, tortured frogs, if they were to be captured on audio tape, would sound like bloody Ceclia Bartoli by comparison.

Nonetheless, if you're intrigued, you can find the trailer here.

Honesty For a Change?

Four senior bankers were grilled by the Treasury select committee revealing their incompetence and lack of qualifications.

One wonders how they were ever in the positions they were in to begin with...

Sir Tom McKillop, the former chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland and Sir Fred Goodwin, RBS's former chief executive, and Andy Hornby and Lord Stevenson, respectively the former chief executive and chairman of HBOS admitted:

•They did not have any formal banking qualifications.

• Hornby was still being paid £60,000 a month to work as a consultant for HBOS.

• McKillop did not fully understand some of the complex financial instruments his bank was using.

Shouldn't this hearing/meeting have come in front of the gallows or guillotine?

Profound and unqualified apologies.

Big fucking deal. How about handing back all that ill-gotten gain and a dozen pints of blood to go with it?

The funny thing is all this rubbish about bonuses and absurdist salaries being required to attract qualified staff and yet all those bonuses and absurdist salaries attracted scum. Well paid, unqualified scum. So should anyone bother listening to anything they are saying?

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Part of the series: Down the Yangtze River
Picture: KEVIN LEE

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And, given the snow and images in the UK over the last week or so, how about a little snowman and a Highland cow?



Picture: PA

Don't Look Now, But What's This? A Sensible Conclusion To The World Crisis?

Imagine this: you've maxed out three or four credit cards, you've got a mortgage for a house which you purchased waaaay above your means, an outstanding loan on a £100,000 auto and suddenly, you lose your job. You've got no way to pay any of the debt back.

You're fucked, right? Not if you're a bank, of course. If you're a bank you just ask your fellow taxpayers pay for you. Give me a BIGGER loan to cover all the bad loans I can no longer afford and THAT will solve the problem.

Right, good luck with that one.

Now comes a sensible approach from historian Niall Ferguson:

"The aim must be not to increase debt but to reduce it. Two things must happen. First, banks that are de facto insolvent need to be restructured – a word that is preferable to the old-fashioned “nationalisation”. Existing shareholders will have to face that they have lost their money. Too bad; they should have kept a more vigilant eye on the people running their banks. Government will take control in return for a substantial recapitalisation after losses have meaningfully been written down. Bond holders may have to accept either a debt-for-equity swap or a 20 per cent “haircut” (a reduction in the value of their bonds) – a disappointment, no doubt, but nothing compared with the losses when Lehman went under."

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From last night's debacle...the morning after:

The Growing Concern These Twats Don't Know Wot They're Doing

Alistair Darling today insisted he was right to use hundreds of billions of taxpayers' money in a fresh bail-out of the banking sector, saying the recession would be much worse if he did not act.

And that's because Alistair Darling doesn't have a clue about what he's doing. The answer is throw more money into it, like a gambler trying to overcome massive losses by continuing to gamble more and more until there is nothing left to gamble with.



Gordon Brown told a Downing Street press conference that the loss showed the consequences of "irresponsible lending"

Consequences to whom? The bank fat cats on multi-million dollar bonuses they will never have to give back?

Brown, demonstrating yet again a propensity for being wrongwrongwrong, claims that his first priority is "hard-working families who are worried about whether they can afford or get a mortgage and businesses who work hard every day to employ people. They need credit and lending to be made. They need the banks to do their job that the banks say they are there to do. What we want to see is for businesses to get the money they need to create jobs and secure the future..."

Brilliant.

So why not give THEM the fucking money instead of the banks who have already demonstrated a clear me-first penchant for irresponsible lending to crony millionaires, most of whom aren't even doing business in the country and continue to fuck over the very people Brown and his Monkey Brigade allege they want to help?

Why throw more money at the banks when £32 billion didn't convince the banks to free up credit?

Just because the only answer Gordon Brown knows is throw money to the banks? Feed the addiction?

Wby doesn't the government tell the banks to fuck off and use these absurd bail-out sum to guarantee savings and create a massive fund for small businesses and hard-working families to borrow from?

Ok, the government are inefficient, corrupt and well, in the pocket of the banks, that's for sure, but logically, instead of giving the money away, dropping it into a black bit bank bailout, why not just admit the banks are fucked and use the money to help people directly?

Ah yes, public anger grows at "irresponsible banks" blablabla - so why are we giving these irresponsible institutions MORE money? And why aren't the thieves and idiots who ran these banks into the ground fighting legal charges to save their lives and having every penny they own sucked back into the government funds?

Frank Dobson, a former Health Minister, said these "severe constraints" should encompass the pay and bonuses of bank bosses, adding that the measures unveiled by Alistair Darling would be acceptable to the public only if they were accompanied by "strict national and international regulation" to prevent further economic catastrophes.

Fuck that. Fuck severe constraints in the future. Make these fuckers pay NOW. They aren't bankrupt, just the banks they ran into the ground. Make THEM pay everything they have, leave THEM penniless, not the rest of us.

Ok, ok. Rant is over.

Nearly.



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On to more pleasant things, better news: Obama's inauguration, a Day for Hope.

President-elect Barack Obama and others participated in a "Day of Service" to help commemorate the birthday of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King.

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Oh yeah, and if you live in Arizona or Pittsburgh, for the next two weeks you're probably going to be happy because YOU'RE GOING TO THE SUPER BOWL

And if you live in Manchester and support Man City you're probably going to be pretty unfucking happy because Kaka ent coming to town.