Neighbourhood Watch Returns

Hello again faithful readers!
You might well have been wondering where I have been of late and what I have been up to. Well truth be told it has been a fairly busy few months in Rushmoor Council-

• We have been working with St Modwen on the new town centre to make sure that despite the recession that the town centre development will go ahead as planned and to schedule. This has been quite a success- St Modwen have promised us that we will get the cinema, Sainsbury's and store units we are expecting, and on schedule. We are of course still waiting to see who fills them but we are feeling positive.
• We have been working hard with the local beat officers to achieve the ward priorities on cycling, neighbourhood watch expansion and Queen Elizabeth Park (where a new CCTV camera is due to go in soon)
• We have been working on the council budget to ensure that council tax rises are kept to a very minimum- the Westminster government is up to its old tricks of using unfunded mandates to make us pay for more of what they promise, thereby taking more money out of the pockets of council tax payers in Rushmoor- so we are trying to find local economies to compensate
• And a lot more...

For the near future though our top priority will be setting up neighbourhood watches- especially in the Marrowbrook area and the streets off it.

The police have quite a backlog of watches to set up but we are not going to be resting on our laurels and are still striving for 100% ward coverage.

So the chances are, if you live in that area you'll see me on your doorstep again sometime soon!

The Emperor Has No Clothes!

Here Boris Johnson says it like it is.

The outrageous hubris of this government seeking to blame George Osborne for the fall in the pound can only really be compared to the idea of the royal courtiers and tailors in The Emperor's New Clothes blaming the little boy for the fact that everyone is laughing at the Monarch.

Gordon Brown and his cohort of identikit incompetent ministers have denuded the pound of any value and made the UK a truly dreadful place to do business.

When no one wants pounds because there are no British goods to buy and when no one wants to keep their savings in pounds because interest rates have had to be slashed to their lowest rate for fifty years it really takes some gall to blame the Shadow Chancellor for pointing out that something's not quite right here!

Get a grip Gordon! Preferably on something with a considerable voltage going through it and let someone who knows what they're doing take over- NOW!

UPDATE- At last! Since Brown never intended to stick to his borrowing projections it's about time that we ditched his spending plans! Good work DC- now let's see those taxes going down and spending re-entering stratospheric levels!

Taxation

I have just received this as an email forward. I am genuinely impressed. This is a point that really needs to be made a lot more often and a lot more clearly:

Bar Stool Economics

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for beer and the bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh would pay $7.
The eighth would pay $12.
The ninth would pay $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that's what they decided to do. The ten men drank in the bar every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. 'Since you are all such good customers, he said, 'I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily beer by $20. Drinks for the ten now cost just $80.

The group still wanted to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes, so the first four men were unaffected. They would still drink for free.But what about the other six men - the paying customers? How could they divide the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his 'fair share?'

They realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would each end up being paid to drink his beer. So, the bar owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same amount, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay.
And so:
The fifth man, like the first four, now paid nothing (100% savings)
The sixth now paid $2 instead of $3 (33%savings).
The seventh now paid $5 instead of $7 (28%savings).
The eighth now paid $9 instead of $12 (25% savings).
The ninth now paid $14 instead of $18 (22% savings).
The tenth now paid $49 instead of $59 (16% savings).

Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to drink for free.

But once outside the bar the men began to compare their savings.'I only got a dollar out of the $20,'declared the sixth man. He pointed to the tenth man,' but he got $10!

''Yeah, that's right,' exclaimed the fifth man. 'I only saved a dollar too. It's unfair that he got ten times more than I!

''That's true!!' shouted the seventh man. 'Why should he get $10 back when I got only two? The wealthy get all the breaks!

''Wait a minute,' yelled the first four men in unison. 'We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!'

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up.

The next night the tenth man didn't show up for drinks, so the nine sat down and had beers without him. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important. They didn't have enough money between all of them for even half of the bill!

And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.