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Donald Trump and the SNP have a lot in common – politicalbetting.com
Donald Trump and the SNP have a lot in common – politicalbetting.com
Yesterday I wrote about how the SNP’s ongoing legal issues are impacting their finances which could see them do worse than the polls suggest and over the pond Donald Trump is experiencing similar issues, the Telegraph reports that
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ETA though I accept the header's point that a shortfall from grassroots donors could mean they don't vote either.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/jeremy-hunt-new-great-british-isa-investing-ian-cowie-nl3sckvss (£££)
The Sunday Times might be missing the reason for the tax concession.
...
A spokesman for Foreign Secretary Lord Cameron said it was a "private visit" but that Mr Johnson texted him when he was on his way.
Mr Johnson's office declined to say who paid for the private jet that flew him to Venezuela, saying: "Now that he is a private citizen we don't comment on any of those issues, only to say there was no cost to the UK taxpayer nor the Venezuelan government".
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-68526317
Boris Johnson, the thinking man's Jeremy Corbyn.
F1: better race yesterday. Mildly aggrieved Magnussen had the pace to win his group but decided he preferred to go on a penalty-collecting expedition instead. Very good stuff from Bearman.
A good driver, even a great driver, in his heyday, but his heyday was over some time ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akCDcwTHFVo
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/former-us-president-trump-has-spent-40-million-legal-fees-reports-2023-07-30/
And that was *before* the court cases got under way properly, although before most of his capable lawyers walked out on him.
Of course, money does not buy everything even in US politics, but a lack of it isn’t going to make the Republicans’ task any easier and candidates wouldn’t be human if they didn’t feel resentful on the money that could be used to help them achieve political office was being wasted on defending Trump’s many admitted crimes.
In the real world, it might show Boris's world king ambitions are not quite dead, whether or not he is freelancing.
Netanyahu has come up with a more inventive idea - build a road. And has done it.
IDF completes road across width of Gaza, satellite images show
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-68514821
Hard to imagine that they would have bothered if they weren’t planning some kind of control zone across Gaza. If they don’t control it, Hamas or their successors would simply blow it up.
Gove is a dangerous man.
Well, it's a view.
And again, we come back to it's not just about him. How are any of the downticket candidates going to get airtime if they can"t pay for it? (Although truthfully if they're all as mad as Lake, Greene, Jordan, Trump himself and the governor of North Carolina this may be a good thing in itself.)
And finally, it would be much cheaper to buy airtime anyway, so your claim still doesn't add up.
contributions, but since the conservatives on the Supreme Court gutted campaign finance rules ("money=free speech"), there are no real limits.
You can give as much as you want to a "political action committee", and there are no limits on what a PAC can spend independently of a candidate or party.
Trump's PACs spent over $50m on his legal bills last year.
I'm assuming you refer to the inaction of raising tax bands in line with inflation but let me know if that isn't the case.
That affects everyone including the lowest paid.
I understand the reason - it's just a highly inefficient way of achieving the aim. A gesture rather than a substantive measure.
On topic, more or less, enabling extremely rich people to influence elections at the sort of level discussed is a negation of democracy. As far as the USA is concerned, I’ve long been convinced that it’s claim to be a democracy isn’t borne out by the facts.
I doubt this miserable scheme will survive for long.
But it's further evidence of his arrogance and bad judgment.
"The 1987 repeal of the fairness doctrine enabled the rise of talk radio that has been described as "unfiltered" divisive and/or vicious:"
Rush Limbaugh was an example of the right wing 'shock jocks' that the repeal allowed. Would Fox News have happened without this?
Reagan is partly responsible for where the Republican Party is now.
That's quite a few major party donors and their beneficiaries in the jail then.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
There's long been a tussle in the U.S. between the right of the rich to spend on politics as they wish, and the idea that they shouldn't just be given free rein.
The McCain bill was a huge and consequential reform, which had placed quite strict limits on what individuals or corporations could donate.
With huge pressure to do it online.
And fines of £1000 if they don't, irrespective of the actual sum involved.
Sure, HMRC could do it automatically - except that DWP doesn't do PAYE on state pensions. And HMRC always get it wrong, more or less, now they don't deduct at source on bank interest.
In the old days I had to help the odd elderly relative or neighbour fill out the forms to recover overpaid tax on interest, or get the bank not to deduct interest at source, but that was at least safer in terms of potential penalties. Which, as discussed here resently, were never more than the actual sum owed. Until the recent and utterly malicious change.
The proposal includes forcing local authorities to do the same.
It's effectively extrajudicial sanctions applied by ministerial whim.
More to the story, reportedly ...
'While the government has said that Donelan was given official advice and lawyers were involved, it remains unclear whether she was given clearance to publish the letter on social media. There also appears to have been a puzzling urgency to putting the letter together: emails uncovered using the Freedom of Information Act reveal that civil servants and lawyers were working until midnight on a Friday night to edit and vet it.
The process is said to have involved “firm steers” from Donelan, though it is unknown exactly what she ordered to be included.'
Check the legend at the bottom. Literally every state requires the polio vaccine.
https://twitter.com/bobcesca_go/status/1766628143475929129
Be grateful no-one will come for arrears on the extra they should have been paying for years.
Not everyone has a full SP, sure, but lots of people have a small occupational pension and some savings.
This time, that she used a story from Bush's presidency and updated it to pretend it happened under Biden.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/03/09/katie-britt-unrelated-sex-trafficking-story-state-of-the-union-rebuttal.html
To be fair, I don't know why anybody is surprised. She's a Trump supporter, and Trump's very first press statement as president included the phrase 'alternative facts' to explain his lies about the number who attended his inauguration.
Ursa Major and @Stratolaunch achieved a major leap forward with the first flight of a privately funded reusable hypersonic vehicle during today's test over the Pacific Ocean.
https://twitter.com/ursamajortech/status/1766600038266875963
If so it may be a silly policy but you can understand why it might look attractive.
https://x.com/jeffstorobinsky/status/1766685696947851420?s=20
libel - and she should resign.
The real problem is NI. Which is an extra - and which we are repeatedly told is not a tax - that they have been paying for years to get the state pension at all.
Which satisfies your conditions ...
It's going to be lethal for the Tories to sort this out, given their voter base.
On the other hand, if you are a working age couple with a single earner on £20k, your take home is substantially less than that, as you'll get hit for about £1500 in income tax and £500 in NI.
You also are virtually forced to put 5% (£1000) into a pension as otherwise you'll miss out on 3% from your employer. So your actual take home will be around £17k, or 15% less than our pensioners.
She has been utterly wasted in every role she's played up to now if that extraordinary talent has been lurking within all the time.
Private schools?
I don't complain I didn't get anything out of them moving the VAT threshold, despite owning a small business that still has to charge VAT. I'm not complaining that they've moved the child benefit withdrawal threshold, despite the fact that I don't get child benefit.
Complaining that you've been "screwed" by a tax cut on a tax *you don't need to pay anyway* is simply rediculous.
Did this story get discussed yesterday? I predict there will be no meaningful punishment. But it is nonetheless impressive the way that labour have taken the issue up. The right are starting to make gains in the 'war on woke'; the people that carry out these acts are helping the opposition, but the radical mindset is such that they will keep going.
Two very wise women explained why here - https://www.legalfeminist.org.uk/2024/01/14/the-worst-can-and-does-happen/
The reasoning varies boomer to boomer, but the meme is born. It's difficult to think of a voting cohort that Sunak hasn't managed to alienate.
We both pay a marginal rate of 20% on our incomes. Income tax, nothing else. We were paid to go to university, so no student loans ever. We have no housing costs, having long ago paid off our mortgage (having been fortunate to start out on the housing ladder when properties were cheap, we never had a mortgage of more than £50k.) We have no family to raise. So our incomes are more than enough to live on, indeed our savings our going up and we spend freely.
Now compare that to my son and his wife, in their early thirties, whose gross income is about the same as ours. They both pay 20% income tax, 10% NI currently, 9% student loan repayments (probably lasting 30 years) and pension contributions of 5% and 6% respectively. So they face a marginal rate of 44%-45% deductions from their income. Whats left goes on a £200k mortgage for a very modest house and raising one child so far. They struggle to make ends meet and have to watch every penny. Luckily for them they have Bank of Mum and Dad to fall back on, but others are not so lucky.
If this Chancellor and any future Chancellor want to level the playing field between my privileged retired generation and a generation of young adults in work who are struggling to make ends meet, through cutting NI and raising income tax by stealth, then I am all for it. The principle for me is that two people on the same income should pay the same rate of tax on it, regardless of the source of that income.
And the new system is unfamiliar, above all the online one. A lot of old folk won't cope. Some will, some won't. For instgance, I've had great trouble dealing with one relative panicked by an £2 underpayment and the ensuing threatening letters from HMRC when the payment didn't go through at the bank (took three payments for one to work, because HMRC had downgraded the bank payment system to try and bully people into using computers). Totally non computer literate, not even a mobile.
You might support the NI cut (I think it makes economic sense), but squareroot is perfectly entitled to complain about it.
And if the person who did it and the one filming it are students of the college, presumably the college can also take disciplinary action.
Sadly, Labour must do everything possible to keep pensioners on side if they are to win the election. This cohort are extraordinarily sensitive to things like social care reform, pensions, capital gains tax.
I have limited sympathy.
He's successfully bumped the cases that would be most damaging and risky for his election prospects.
It all comes down to independents, who we'd hope would be following the cases and disgusted by what they see. But his base already don't believe elections, why would they believe court cases? And he will get 95% of Republicans, I have no doubt.
The fact that DWP do not issue P60s or PAYE is a real concern.
And objectively, making many more pensioners do tax returns in a system which is already failing to cope won't do the Tories any favours.
This goes further than just exercising their democratic right to protest.
The bigger reality is that the country is in a financial hard place, and policy making is necessarily going to be less than ideal for many of us, whoever is in government. For quite some time.
https://twitter.com/maggieNYT/status/1766607114166813173
Trump's insults are where he tells the truth about himself.
And the nutters are asking "What is wrong with Louis' fingers? Is it AI?" and "Why isn't she wearing a wedding ring?"
Trump describes E Jean Carroll's claims against him as "false accusations" even after a jury found him liable for sexual assault
https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1766615422504190131
The bottom 40% don't earn enough for the NI cut to counteract the threshold freeze, the next 50% do and the more they earn the better. Then there's the child benefit thing- fiscally the right thing to do, but the people affected are pretty well off in the grand scheme of things.
Right now, "better off workers" is where the frontline is, the best chance of Conservatives improving their position.
There is sure an incredible amount of rich whining bollox on here by green cheesed arseholes.
a. does the law get enforced
b. Is there any punishment.
Or is it a case that reasons are found not to pursue either of the above in any meaningful way - which would be percieved as evidence of favouritism from the authorities towards progressive causes. That is why it is interesting to hear labour get on to this issue.