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What worked well – giving unemployed people more support
What didn’t work well – sanctions and market-based incentives
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Ann Pettifor puts government debt in perspective on her Debtonation blog
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Brendan has a piece on our thoughts for the National Minimum Wage over at Comment Is Free. A rise would help a million Britons to escape from poverty, save the Treasury money – and stimulate the economy
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Philip Pearson
While European leaders try today to agree how much the EU should pay to help developing nations fight global warming, we join 50 Department of Energy and Climate Change stakeholders for a One-Year Anniversary Discussion. It’s a year since DECC was set up. How’s my driving? so to speak. The focus today is The UK’s Low Carbon Transition Plan, DECC’s July White Paper, weighing in at 220 pages.
Q. What do we think of it?
A. For the stakeholder community, it’s good in parts. -
Nigel Stanley
The official Occupational Pensions Survey results are out today. I’m sure great efforts have gone into making sure these are accurate, but they do not quite measure the right thing – or at least will be used as a measure of something they are not. Inevitably they will be used to fuel the attack on public sector pensions.
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Nigel Stanley
The Times Diary reports a new City fad:
“An organisation is trying to organise “flash sushi” parties, at which you get to eat raw fish off naked women’s bodies. You pay your fee and only 24 hours beforehand do you learn where the party is taking place. This is the done thing among very rich Japanese, and I suppose three years or so ago it would not have turned a hair in the City.
But it is surely inconceivable that anyone today, however overpaid and stupid, could sign up for such a degrading charade. Isn’t it? Oh. I see the first four events are sold out.”
They just don’t get it, do they?
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Adam Lent
Anyone who watched the BBC’s engaging documentary about Warren Buffet on Monday night would have been struck by his refreshing views on tax. Buffet has made himself into one of the very richest men in the world by ignoring Wall Street fads and hysteria. Instead he has invested big and long in companies he understands with managers he trusts without any borrowing any money to do so. He also clearly has no time for the whining about tax we hear all too regularly from our financial classes. Buffet asserts that the rich are only rich because of the society in which they operate not because they are anything special as individuals. As he points out pithily, many of those so proud of their fortune, would never have done so well had they been born in Bangladesh. They ought to be expected, and they ought to expect it of themselves, to pay tax to help those who have not been so lucky. One should keep in mind that Buffet is currently worth around $40 billion. So he has paid a very large amount of tax over his lifetime.
Buffet seems to me to sum up very well some of the core ethical principles behind a progressive view of tax. If you are inclined to see how far the right are from Buffet’s wise (and personally modest) position, read a piece written by Jeremy Warner, the Assistant Editor of the Daily Telegraph, today.
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Professor Ian Cole, the project director, commented: "Having followed the lives of a range of people living in deprived neighbourhoods, it becomes clear that work at any price, is not necessarily a route out of poverty. Many people have to juggle low pay and long or unsociable working hours with the demands of family life and they can barely make ends meet. There needs to be a stronger focus on the quality of work on offer. Government and employers should work together to improve terms and conditions so that work can break the cycle of poverty and support family life. Policy-makers also need to take into account the reality of how difficult it is to find work in areas that were struggling even before the recession hit."
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The House of Lords debates the need for an extension of the remit of the Gangmasters Licensing Authority
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A Guardian leader backs our campaign
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Philip Pearson
Radical reforms to the tax system are needed to meet our climate change targets, shifting the tax burden from labour (income tax, NI) to carbon emissions, according to the Green Fiscal Commission. Launching the report, Commission chair Prof Paul Edkins called it a “tax shift, not a tax increase.”
Welcome though these ideas are, they involved unresolved impacts on jobs and fuel poverty.
The numbers are huge, £150bn shifting away from labour to carbon taxes by 2020, including 10% off NI, the basic rate cut to 18% or lower, 10% on petrol duty and the widely reported £3,300 tax on new cars.
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Nigel Stanley
George Osborne has called for a cap on bonuses in retail banks of £2,000 with any balance paid in shares that have to be held for at least three years. The Evening Standard has a good round up of the reaction, which seems universally hostile.
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Brendan Barber has a post up at The Commonwealth Conversation, highlighting what the TUC want to see from next month's Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM).
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And this is Management Today!
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