Horner's Corner

Let Michael Caine leave. Fairer taxes must be made to stick if we’re to avoid the cuts in services Cameron has in mind

It’s more than a week since Alistair Darling’s budget, but the howls of protest haven’t stopped for a day ever since. That’s not been the public sector employees facing a harsh squeeze on jobs and pay who’ve been squealing, or the million workers expected to join the dole queues in the next year, or even the majority or people who will have to stump up another half per cent of national insurance contributions every month. No, the outrage has come from the richest 2% of taxpayers who are going to have to part with 50% of earnings over £150,000 – and personal allowances over £100,000 – and later stand to lose top-rate tax relief on pension contributions.

Never mind that the wealthiest taxpayers will still be contributing to the public purse at a 10% lower rate than for nine of Margaret Thatcher’s 11 years in office, or that six of the richest OECD countries have higher rates. From the Mail to the Financial Times, a crusade has been joined against the new 50p tax. This is nothing but a “fiscal lynching”, it’s claimed, a “spiteful” display of the “age of envy”, and a disastrous outbreak of “class war”. Sir Richard Branson, whose business empire is ultimately owned in the Virgin Islands, insisted that 50% would be a “block on the next wave of entrepreneurs”.

via Seumas Milne: This naked display of class egotism has to be defeated | Comment is free | The Guardian.

A nondescript express in from the South,

Crowds round the ticket barrier, A face

To welcome which the mayor has not contrived

Bugles or braid: Something about the face

Distracts the stray look with alarm and pity.

Snow is falling. Clutching a little case,

He walks out briskly to infect a city

Whose terrible future may have just arrived.

WH Auden

Let me tell you the basics of risk communication, and then I want to apply them, a little bit, to bird flu. The fundamental principle of risk communication can be summarized in a number, [which] is the correlation between how much harm a risk does and how upset people get about it. If you look at a long list of risks, and you rank them in order of how upset people get [about them], then you rank them again in order of how much harm they do, then you correlate the two, you get a glorious 0.2. Those of you who remember your statistics know you can square a correlation coefficient to get the percentage of variance accounted for: If you square 0.2, you get 0.04, or 4% of the variance. That is, the risks that kill people and the risks that upset people are completely different. If you know that a risk kills people, you have no idea whether it upsets them or not. If you know it upsets them, you have no idea whether it kills them or not.

more from UPMC here.

via 3quarksdaily.