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politicalbetting.com » Blog Archive » Astonishingly Roy Moore remains the odds on favourite to win the Alabama Senate race
Latest Alabama polls have Roy Moore leading by 6% and 2%. https://t.co/DuVvdOjH4U
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https://www.rte.ie/news/brexit/2017/1123/922191-brexit-embassies/
Which may explain their boldness.....
IFSVerified account @TheIFS
Many first-time buyers gain, even if house prices rise by more than their stamp duty falls #Budget2017
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Jeezuz. Property prices go up by more than the stamp duty but you can now borrow more money to buy the thing that's gone up in price.
According to the IFS, you've gained.
No. No you haven't.
Your future children - who you probably won't be able to afford to bring into the world - are weeping.
The most important thing in the budget going forward was of course the reduction in growth forecasts. On the face of it this looked very bad news for the government but having listened to the chatter whilst driving to and from Aberdeen (after close of play, natch) it seemed to me to be having 2 favourable effects.
First, the link between our standard of living and our productivity has been reestablished in the public mind in a big way. The government is trying to help with this (arguably a little belatedly) but it is not ultimately a government problem.
Secondly, the consequences of this make the Labour plans to spend more on everything look frankly frivolous and silly, hence their more difficult interviews over the last couple of days. No one is happy about the appalling record on real wages but there seems to me more of a recognition that this is the world in which both we and the government are operating and it’s tough. Waving magic wands to make it all go away just isn’t going to cut it.
Is this gross over optimism from a semi detached supporting rter? Maybe but it will be interesting to see how the polling moves from here.
I agree with your reading of the IFS' commentary on its own prediction.
"This won't help first time buyers getting a £500,000 home!"
I guess a lot will sit on their hands.
Sorry to go O/T so quickly but having talked LDs all morning on the previous, I thought I should comment on the Budget.
One is tempted to think "Much Ado about Nothing" rather than "As You Like It" if being all Shakespearean but in truth it was as always more about the politics than the economics. Reading the speech on gov.uk with the political knockabout removed it comes over as a bit of weak sloganizing but no more than any other Chancellor.
I'm not too impressed with the stamp duty measure - it didn't work well before as all it does is inflate prices (our old friend supply meet demand) in the band where the holiday is. I heard almost nothing about addressing the fundamental issue of housing and to say one or two on here actually defend the house builders who are sitting on thousands of plots of land with planning permission is just absurd.
It almost seems as though Government and the house builders are colluding to keep the value of land high - what a ludicrous notion, it sounds like a good excuse for LVT. From LVT to DVT and good news for cattle class flyers and not so good for those of us who want to arrive alive and functioning.
The downgrade in growth forecasts was inevitable and while Hammond talked about productivity, the fundamental problem of the availability of cheap labour and the reluctance of companies to invest in technology remains unresolved for now. We need, I think, in terms of our immigration policy post-EU to put the onus much more on employers to not only justify but to actively contribute toward the cost of incoming labour.
The other aspect and part of the appeal of the Corbyn alternative is people are ground down by stagnation (as they see it) with long hours for little improvement in pay and therefore little ability to advance in their lives.
It's also possible they're just morons, as per a 0.1% spike in inflation.
Doster said Wednesday that John Rogers didn't have the experience to deal with the level of scrutiny brought on by the national press, and the campaign had to make a change.
He added that Rogers had not been dismissed but that he "didn't like playing second fiddle on the communications side."
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/22/politics/moore-communications-director-resigns/index.html
However divided we are, I don't think any UK electorate would entertain voting for a child molester because he was representing the "right side". Equally, I don't think you could ever be a leader here if you were to openly mock the handicapped.
We should be grateful for small mercies.
Undermining confidence in a negotiating adversary is fairly standard practice. This is one way of doing it.
If the UK government was anyway competent it would have
1) Come up with a solution to the Northern Ireland border problem already.
2) Would never have agreed to the EU's sequencing of the talks, You'd insist the Irish border deal occurs as part of the trade talks, coming up with a border deal seems illogical when you don't know what the trade deal looks like
David Davis knew this, which is why he promised us the row of the summer over it, then meekly surrendered like the French in 1940
Right, Hard Brexit it is.
The EU is not Europe.
The net effect of what has since transpired may be that more people in the UK now think the EU is being unreasonable. It also gives both sides the option of a slightly artificial "breakthrough".
On the Northern Ireland border - I think you're expecting a lot. There is blame but ultimately it's a tricky problem.
Firstly, remember Cameron told civil servants not to prepare. Then there's the added complication that thanks to your disastrous decision on an early election, you need the DUP to stay in power... so you can't screw them over and have a border in the Irish Sea.
Krakòw 2000
Prague 2000
Istanbul 2010
Except I'd say it's not a small mercy at all - it's a rather large one.
Would the Dems do the same? I like to think they'd turn on a candidate like Roy Moore.
But who knows!? They largely stuck by Bill Clinton who certainly had enough rape allegations...
Just more eurotwattery, then. Particularly puerile to wait until submissions are made before ruling them out.
To be fair I think the European City of Culture is a typically twattish form of eating public money that the EU seem to love so I am certainly not exercised by this. I just love to see them tying themselves in knots trying to justify these decisions.
If they can't get that - and they probably can't - then their fallback is to try and scupper Brexit altogether and this means pushing the UK closer to the cliff edge.
Perfectly logical for Ireland to take this position - and perfectly illogical, though not surprising, that the UK government seems not to have anticipated or prepared for them to do so.
No they haven't. That's not possible. It's bollox.
The change means FTB'ers have been simultaneously enabled and required to borrow more. They will own an asset on which they have a larger debt to pay back. It will take them more months of repayments before the mortgage is paid off.
No?
Am I going completely mad here?
So what do they mean? My guess is that 'chaotic' is being used as a synonym for 'inability to agree or progress' and that once again the two sides are talking in different languages - the fundamental problem of British membership ever since Day 1.
https://www.ft.com/content/72ead180-229a-11e7-8691-d5f7e0cd0a16
David Davis, Brexit secretary, does not accept that the two agencies and roughly 1,000 staff will have to move from London’s Canary Wharf, even though the EU is about to run a competition to relocate them.
A UK Brexit department spokesman said: “No decisions have been taken about the location of the European Banking Authority or the European Medicines Agency — these will be subject to the exit negotiations.”
https://twitter.com/dampscot/status/933686887004409857
https://drillordrop.com/2017/11/22/shale-gas-will-bring-wholesale-industrialisation-and-change-the-countryside-for-decades-tory-mp-tells-debate/
In scenario one they bought a house for 300k and paid 5k stamp duty.
In scenario two they bought a house for 310k and paid no stamp duty.
In one scenario they lost 5k buying a house. In the other scenario they lost nothing.
They have more debt... but in theory they have a more valuable asset to compensate.
I think that's what's going on anyway...
Stamp duty is an up-front tax that they need to pay 100% of and they have no extra asset after paying for it.
House price is paid over 25 years and they need to pay a small percentage of it up-front (the deposit) and however much they pay they have an asset worth that much afterward.
In scenario two then the mortgage will cover the bulk of the extra 10k. At 10% deposit they'd need just 1k extra up front meaning their deposit is 4k more than it would have been otherwise.
They are rattling the cage at present because they think it's probably the best time (prior to trade negs) to get something in from the UK as the pressure might build on them after that to fall in line.
As for sticking a border in the Irish sea? How likely would the French put one between Nice and Corsica? Why would the Conservative (and Unionist party) sell out NI anyway, let alone the DUP with the current Parliamentary arithmetic?
There is some constraint on the DUP though not to push it all to the nth degree given the chances of another GE resulting in the perfect sweet spot they are now in are pretty remote.
Probably good to buy shares in the Rosslare to France ferries (all two of them?), as the Irish stare down how vulnerable they really are if this goes badly sour, and look for way round it (literally!)
Mr. Owl, indeed.
But yes you're right - that was an understatement.
A decent primer.
Politically the DUP won't like it (slippery slope) though they do want an open border with the ROI.
Two options for the DUP.
1. Trenchantly oppose the border in the Irish Sea and risk a hard Brexit or the UK Government
looking for support elsewhere in Parliament for the Irish Sea border solution.
2. Push for a customs union for the whole of the UK with others in Parliament and defeat the Government on this point so solving the Irish border problem without introducing a transparent frictionless border in the Irish Sea.
There was an interview on the BBC with a labour spokesman and it became apparent that labour's spending pledges and huge borrowings do not address the issue including cancelling student fees, public sector pay rises and nationalisation
You do wonder if the penny has dropped and McDonnell's recent car crash interviews maybe a result of him realising that he has a much harder, if not impossible, task of selling his policies to an already sceptical public
In fact, it's one of the odder aspects of a very odd election that despite Trump shouting the claims from the stage in a debate, it never really became an issue.
People occupy homes. There is a general view in the UK that it is better that they own these homes. (People who own houses tend to be more responsible, it's good to give people equity and a stake in society etc. On the other hand, they tend to save less - because they believe in ever rising house prices - and if there is a sustained period of time when house prices fall in value, then labour mobility can be much reduced.)
But let us go with the view that it is desirable for people to own their own homes.
We therefore need to make sure that the market operates in such a way that:
(a) there are sufficient homes available for people who only want one home
(b) that it is affordable for people to own homes
With regards to (a), there is clearly a supply and a demand portion. Increasing supply means encouraging building of new homes, especially in areas where there is lots of demand growth. Decreasing demand means improving the efficiency of the the market: perhaps by encouraging older people to trade down (no stamp duty on people trading down?). It also means having a tax and benefits system that makes it financially advantageous for people to
stay married (slower new household formation). Finally, of course, it means that population growth needs to be curtailed, with restricting immigration more politically palatable than euthanasia.
Looking at (b), the important bit is to rebalance demand between landlords and owner occupiers, by adjusting the tax system appropriately. However, it's equally important to do this while remembering that some people want to rent because their jobs move them around a lot. Reducing labour mobility by jamming up the private rental market is not good for the economy generally.
You need to tackle all these things in a joined up way.
Just had a massive panic attack about my own chain
Alabama has not had a Democratic Senator since 1992 and has voted Republican at every Presidential election since 1976, one of only 13 US states to do so.
Instead the race is still almost neck and neck in a state outgoing Senator Jeff Sessions won for the Republicans by about 30% in his last contested Senate race.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_special_election_in_Alabama,_2017
Unless it's Apple shares half off I'm not interested.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-42100620
I suspect that would have majority support inside and outside Parliament. There is only a fringe group who fulminate about the ECJ (or even know what it is) and immigration can be fudged/managed.
Edit: A very long transition would solve it. A very long transition.
Being inside the EEA and CU we would be under all the restrictions that made people against the EU but without any element of control via being able to vote on issues within the EU. We would have all the negatives of EU membership without the positives.
There is no way to manage immigration or anything else inside the EEA and CU as the EEA has the full Free Movement requirements that the EU has.