Utopia, you are standing in it!

Ten days ago, I shared some data and evidence illustrating how redistribution programs result in high implicit tax rates and thus discourage low-income people from climbing the economic ladder.

Simply stated, why work harder or work more when an additional dollar of income only leads to a net benefit of 10 cents or 20 cents? Or why work harder or work more when you can actually wind up being worse off?

Or why work at all if the governments provides enough goodies?

But don’t ask such questions if you’re in the same room as Helaine Olen of the Washington Post. She is very upset that some people think welfare payments discourage work.

It’s a dangerous myth, this idea that government help causes some people to just loaf off. It’s also untrue.Reminder: Before the pandemic, most working-age people receiving benefits like food stamps worked. They just didn’t…

The UK shut down cheap coal, refused to drill for its own gas, and failed to replace its old nuclear power stations then, when gas suddenly becomes expensive, is caught with its proverbial trousers down. So much for ‘world leading’ climate policies.
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As energy prices in Europe go through the roof, factories are beginning to shut down and food is disappearing from the shelves, say The Times & The GWPF.

Welcome to green Britain, offering a foretaste of what life will be like under Net Zero conditions – poorer, colder, hungrier – unless Government changes course.

Acute food shortages were feared last night after high gas prices forced most of Britain’s commercial production of carbon dioxide to shut down.

Emergency talks were being held between government officials and food producers, retailers and the energy industry with warnings of a “black swan event”, an extremely rare blow with unpredictable…

I have no doubt that our labour market has been tight and that core inflation has been rising (finally above the target midpoint). It won’t make that much difference in the long-run, but it is a shame the “Level 4 lockdown” didn’t come a day or two later because if it had the Reserve Bank would, appropriately enough, have raised the OCR. I also don’t have any reason to doubt that there was a lot of GDP growth in the June quarter.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some puzzles.

According to the official data the New Zealand economy is quite a lot bigger than it was pre-Covid, Of the two quarterly measures of real GDP, one was 5.3 per cent higher in the June quarter than it had been in the December 2019 quarter and the other was 4.3 per cent higher. Average the two and the best guess…

The key to good comedy is timing, someone once said. If that is the case John Cleese and Connie Booth must have the best sense of timing ever.

As the title suggests I am talking about ‘Fawlty Towers’ although it may seem there were hundreds of episodes, there were in fact only 12, spread over 2 seasons.

The first episode of Fawlty Towers aired on 19 September 1975. Audiences were keen to see what John Cleese would do after Monty Python, but at first the situation comedy received some less than enthusiastic reviews. However the strength of the writing and casting – with Cleese as hotelier Basil Fawlty – ensured the series was a great success.

The series is set in Fawlty Towers, a fictional hotel in the seaside town of Torquay on the English Riviera. The plots centre on the tense, rude and put-upon owner Basil Fawlty (Cleese), his…

Anyone telling you that wind turbine noise isn’t soul-destroying, has never lived with it. The plaintiffs who are pursuing $millions in damages from a Victorian wind farm operator at Bald Hills (see our post here) have been telling a Supreme Court Judge, Justice Richards all about it over the last couple of weeks. Here are a couple of reports on what one of them, John Zakula had to say about trying to live with 52 giant industrial wind turbines thumping and grinding away in his backyard, every night.

Wind farm neighbour had to sleep at the beach
Sentinel-Times
9 September 2021

SO LOUD was the roaring and constant “woosh, woosh, woosh” of the Bald Hills Wind Farm turbine blades, after they became operational in 2015, that neighbouring landowner, John Zakula, had to clear out at night, on dozens of occasions, especially during winter, and sleep in his car at…