Political Penguin

“If we had a budget surplus we could do more.” Indeed we could dear Davey boy but while the Gordon is off leading the world tackling the global financial crisis it is more telling of how economically illiterate and bereft of ideas the Tories are right now.

So here’s the rundown on how to produce a budget surplus of which I fully expect David Cameron to announce as Tory party policy at such time in the near future when he needs to get his mug on the telly.

Lessons on Swedish tax for starters. Swedish income tax is collected in two parts. Locally and nationally of which the local rate is between 30-33% yes, high isn’t it and if we add on the state income tax of between 20-25% then they could be paying anything from 50-58% income taxes. Of course if you’re of a religious nature you could always pay that tax too so add on another 1-2% an lets not forget burial taxes.

Of course Cameron could be trying to big it up on the Swedish Liberal Government’s recent announcement to cut corporation tax from 28% (same as the UK rate) to 26.3% but he might just be forgettng all the local taxes and signifcantly higher employer contributions to employees pensions.

That said, it’s easy to argue till the end of time about how much different allowances and rates are worth so we’re left with the best comparison method available to us. The good old tax take as a percentage of GDP which rather helpfully five days ago the OECD produced their latest comparison tables.

I’ll give you a hint, the press release on their website is called: “Denmark, Sweden still the highest tax OECD countries” and you can read it here.

So yes Dave, you can build up a budget surplus if you’re taking 49.1% of your entire country’s GDP in tax revenue which is probably a bit more tricky when you’re taking just 37.1% like we are here in the UK. (figures are for the last confirmable period from 2006 although the projections for 2007 don’t change much either).

Of course if you do have that much money to spend from taxation then it’s amazing what you can get for it. One of the best health and education systems in the world, some of the lowest inequality rates, basic state pensions worth nearly twice the amount British pensioners live on and of course one of the highest standards of living and life expectancy in the world but God forbid any of that hideous old fashioned tax and spend nonsense heh?

I’ve been meaning to get round to a good mobile blogging solution for a while now but haven’t really had the time.
There’s plenty of options and strategies but partly my reason to switch to straight WordPress was based on a desire to get away from the slightly more long-winded approach to mobile blogging on the old system.
Unfortunately it would appear that anything above WordPress 2.5 doesn’t like either of my mobile browsers (box standard Nokia Webkit and Opera Mini) the former crashing on encountering the backed of the site and the latter not being able to select the content section for editing so I’ve been looking around for other solutions.
An interesting solution looked to be a little S60 app called Scribe but although others seem to have had success, it just doesn’t work for me although I’ll keep an eye on it if the Python issues are sorted out.
Finally I’m back to the web based approach with a little plugin called wPhone that simply re-renders the backend for mobile use and as I’m typing this here now it seems stable so without further ado lets try to post this and see how it goes.

As I wait for whatever bit of software I have to re-install on this system tonight does it’s thing Sky News is on in the background.

I’m thinking that if the lighting that struck that American dude filling up his motor at the petrol station didn’t blow the place up then why do we still have rules banning mobile phones from the forecourt? I’m sure a bolt of lightning has a bit more oomph than the 3.7 volt battery on my handset.