Randomly Selected Article or Link

image63
Originally uploaded by acme

Yep. It has no alcohol until the bottom of the bottle. Hic! It's sweet and tasty. You could give it to a child in place of cough mixture. Definitely a gateway drug. Why are they allowed to sell it by the litre? No wonder they advertise it using prisoners!

If you're conscientious you should even manage one of your daily portions of fruit or veg in every glass.  But for me, I figured that frozen sweetcorn just wouldn't be nice in it so didn't boher!

ALTER (the Lib Dems' Land Value Tax and Economic Reform group) have spent the time over the holidays preparing arguments for the "Tax Commission II" which will focus, amongst other things on that bit of tax policy that was left hanging at Conference - the details of how to implement Land Value Tax.

One thing I noticed just before Christmas which didn't seem to be picked up anywhere else was some research from "Inside Housing" magazine, also reported in the Telegraph, that in some places up to 50% of new build housing is standing empty, bought up, often "off-plan", by speculators who just want to hold it and hope to make a turn on it selling it on after a year or two, but not even putting tenants into them because they don't want to have to carry out any remediation work before they sell and don't want any "vacant possession" issues to affect their choice of timing.

It particularly affects apartments, and so disproportionately also those trying to get onto the housing ladder.

The Lib Dems already have policy to shift the Uniform Business Rate to a Site Value Rating basis, and at conference as part of the tax paper it was agreed that this should also apply to vacant brownfield sites to encourage development.

Anyway, as one way of beginning a shift to LVT more generally as the main, or hopefully only, property based tax, we are suggesting that once land is in the SVR system it should stay there. So new homes would attract SVR even after purchase rather than Council Tax or anything else. This would provide a huge disincentive for people to "abuse" the new housing market in this way. At the moment, and even under Local Income Tax, most of these buyers would pay little or nothing while the properties lie empty, but if they attracted SVR from the moment they got planning permission, such buyers would have to factor in a tax bill when deciding to leave them empty.

Problem solved?

I had hoped to have the Liberal Democrat blogosphere to myself these next few days (well, not really, but while everyone else is away discussion new things I was going to put the boot into existing policy...:)

But, I have I believe fallen victim to a really nasty piece of software by a large and normally respected manufacturer of graphics and designs software. It's put a nasty file in some unicode file name format that has caused my Mac hard disk severe corruption and it looks like I am going to have to wipe and reinstall OS X from scratch. So every spare moment is likely to be spent getting my machine back to where it was as of last night.

Thank goodness I took the precaution some months ago of getting some synchronising software so all my stuff is backed up till Friday night.

But what a load of poo. Which is about as close as I dare to get to naming the software vendor concerned.