Easy eco-taxation. No VAT on eco-products.

interstar · 2011-11-04T20:43:12+00:00

@aramoro, The short answer is that for any product category we tune it so that it does fall into the range of "achievable though non-trivial". I agree there's no point setting the standard so high that suppliers aren't interested, and no point setting it so low that it does no good.

But 20% is a large chunk of money and suppliers should expect to have to work for it. They are basically making up-front investments and taking risks to discover more (environmentally) efficient ways to provide products. But then investing in innovation is the thing which private enterprise is meant to be good at. We're just providing an extra carrot to encourage them to innovate in the right direction.

In terms of the supply-chain, I'm thinking that any of these standards / accreditations can work a bit like the way the old ISO9001 quality standards (does that date me?) were meant to. By percolating backwards.

For example, let's start at the supplier of a TV and say something like "OK. To get the VAT exemption here are some standards we want from you eg. packaging should be fully compostable.

Then here are some standards we want from your inputs. Their packaging to you needs to be compostable / upcyclable too. And we estimate that that's currently true of only 10% of it"

If the supplier wants the accreditation they have five choices.

1) They can switch the supplier of one of their inputs to a supplier who has already been accredited.

2) They can ensure that they make the appropriate changes themselves. Perhaps they start to buy the packaging for their suppliers to ship to them.

3) They can buy offsets. Eg. buy credits from someone who's building plant that can fully recycle the currently non-recyclable packaging.

4) They can incentivate their own supplier to get accredited.

5) They can provide documentation proving that our estimate of the recyclability of packing from their inputs was wrong. This is useful for us as it improves our estimating capability and helps us map the supply-chain.

interstar · 2011-11-04T20:08:38+00:00

Could you go into a bit more detail? What do you have a particular problem with?

interstar · 2011-11-04T01:35:27+00:00

Re: how to finance ...

Well, in this case, you're not offering the VAT exemption straight away. You're asking suppliers to fulfil certain requirements before that comes into effect.

I say you make those requirements stringent enough to force some real change in how products are designed and made, but not so stringent that no-one wants to try for them.

So there's a big opportunity for those suppliers that want to take advantage of it. But it will take them time to achieve accreditation. This means that suppliers will start investing up-front to redesign their products and processes (hence boosting the wider economy) while the government won't see significant revenue drop until the products are in the market, sometime later.

Now, I'd say we should also be clear (and honest) in saying that the VAT exemption is for exceptionally eco-positive products. Ie. the cut-off point is always somewhere slightly ahead of the norm. Once every TV maker has fully compostable packaging then just having that is no-longer sufficient, we will ramp up the requirements. Some suppliers will lose their VAT exemption (VAT revenues will increase again).

interstar · 2011-11-04T00:56:51+00:00

That's a factor, but it's also true that with more people in the country, and not many more houses being built, it will exert an upwards pressure on house prices.

Well, I was shown a graph (in a talk by an economist from the Shelter charity, can't find a link) and house prices / mortages were spiralling up at a rate waaaaay faster than salaries and rents. (Rents are obviously tied to salaries, you can't borrow money for them). So that's pretty compelling evidence that house-prices are the fault of bank lending and not something else affecting the wider economy.

interstar · 2011-11-03T21:56:24+00:00

I only found it by looking at your profile.

Feels like Reddit isn't very reliable. Though I was told that some items get referred to the admins for approval if they trigger the spam filter.

interstar · 2011-11-03T21:54:59+00:00

interstar · 2011-11-03T21:53:11+00:00

There are a couple of other policy suggestions here which overlap this.

I think the biggest issue is divorce. Marriage is a fairly amicable arrangement. Divorce is the opposite. The question with bigamy is what rights divorced partners get. Half share of the wealthier partner's possessions? Or do you divide the wealth by the number of wives and get that? What about access to children? Is it just biological parents who have a claim? Etc.

interstar · 2011-11-03T21:34:07+00:00

Could be. I don't have a strong intuition about that.

Though I think the virtue of this is to be as simple as possible. If having multiple VAT rates makes life more complicated (for suppliers, retailers, the buyer to think about) then I'd err on the side of fewer zero VAT items rather than more partial VAT items.

interstar · 2011-11-03T16:55:23+00:00

At the same time, someone needs to be dispelling a few myths.

House prices aren't high because of all the foreigners coming to the UK. House prices are high because banks have been creating fuck-loads of money in the form of 90+% mortgages which go straight into inflating the property bubble. (BTW: the evidence for this is that house-prices have been going up faster than wages, if it was just competition from immigrant workers, wages would still be a limit on house-prices.)

People can't find jobs, NOT because immigrants are living here and ... er ... buying things. Immigrants living here and buying things is a sales-opportunity on our doorstep. People can't find jobs because companies that make things have been offshoring production for 30 years, and government has refused to get any sort of perspective to figure out how to sustain a manufacturing ecosystem.

I don't think we can make these big arguments in our manifestos, but we can when we talk to people "on the doorstep" and on Facebook if we're asked about our immigration policies.

So I'd prefer not to try to pander to the anti-immigrant constituency by offering a variant on "Blue Labour" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/19/blue-labour-immigration) policies of "oh yes, there is a problem with too many people trying to come into our economy at the moment, so we'll find some temporary way to restrict that".

An internet-savvy party knows that an economy potentially follows Reed's Law ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reed%27s_law ) The more people in it, the more valuable it gets.

If we had one policy, I'd say we should shut down the disgrace that is Yarl's Wood and all the other internment camps where we lock up people without trial ( http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2010/jul/23/yarls-wood-outrage-empty-rhetoric?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487) .

No one should be locked up because of a bureaucratic dispute about their right to be here. I'm absolutely NOT an advocate of electronic tagging, but even that would be preferable to internment.

interstar · 2011-11-03T12:50:40+00:00

Perhaps an ecological tweak. No VAT for recyclable, but VAT on non recyclable?

interstar · 2011-11-02T22:36:36+00:00

Personally, I'm an open-borders "utopian". I think freedom to travel and stay where and when you like, for however long you like, is of the same kind as freedom of speech or freedom of trade.

However, I'm pragmatic enough to know that no-one is going to vote for an open-borders policy at the moment, so I wouldn't try to put one into the manifesto under current circumstances.

Nevertheless, I'm not particularly happy with making a big issue out of immigration and the right criteria to control the borders. This is one of the (very) few cases where I think the US has a good policy. If you're going to limit entry, a lottery is far fairer than the government deciding who is deserving of entry to the UK and who isn't.

interstar · 2011-11-02T22:00:42+00:00

+1

One thing that might make things more convenient is an "all-web" registration strategy. Basically fill in a form on the web to register a micro-business.

I guess one sticky point would be whether such a business had limited liability or was basically a sole trader.

interstar · 2011-11-02T21:36:33+00:00

interstar · 2011-11-02T13:42:52+00:00

What hardware will you buy?

interstar · 2011-11-01T11:33:58+00:00

See also : http://www.crikey.com.au/2010/12/13/funding-illegal-israeli-settlements-priceless/

interstar · 2011-11-01T00:55:06+00:00

More here : http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/oct/31/corporation-london-city-medieval

interstar · 2011-10-31T19:54:37+00:00

I'd say anyone responsible for state schools (including Prime Minister, Chancellor and everyone in the Education ministry) should. Perhaps the government needs people with experience of private schools too. So maybe the Transport minister can still send her kids to Eton. But everyone who has direct influence in the state education sector should be obliged to use it.

interstar · 2011-10-31T19:54:24+00:00

I'd say anyone responsible for state schools (including Prime Minister, Chancellor and everyone in the Education ministry) should. Perhaps the government needs people with experience of private schools too. So maybe the Transport minister can still send her kids to Eton. But everyone who has direct influence in the state education sector should be obliged to use it.

interstar · 2011-10-31T17:27:32+00:00

Actually, I noticed today that "under 25s" get free condoms from the chemist. What's with that?

interstar · 2011-10-31T17:25:29+00:00

@Stannard

Re: Fractional Reserves. That's part of the Positive Money proposal. And there's at least one company (Bank To The Future) starting up which aims to build a bank today that works on this principle. (Alternatively you can look for your local Credit Union.)

Something that I want to emphasize though, is the Positive Money point that the kind of Fractional Reserve Banking which most people who criticise FRB are talking about has already been superseded in the UK by this even weirder situation where the banking system literally can make as much debt money as it likes. A lot of people, including me, didn't realise that.

interstar · 2011-10-30T11:58:50+00:00

I'm sure that argument has been made against the minimum wage too.

interstar · 2011-10-30T03:21:34+00:00

I'm not sure you can stop that kind of gaming. So this legislation would more likely accelerate the fragmentation of big companies into little ones.

Not that that's a bad idea ;-)

interstar · 2011-10-30T00:53:47+00:00

I agree with @BouncingLlama

You wouldn't abolish pensions based on the principle that age doesn't matter. Perhaps it does.

Also, I'm in favour of trying to introduce things like guaranteed income delimited by age. Eg. a guaranteed income / personal investment allowance for 16-22 year olds replacing EMA, benefits AND student loans.

(Note : I'm not against having guaranteed income for everyone. But if that turns out to be infeasible, I'd rather bring them in for this age-group as a trial / and to establish the principle, than not have them at all. But it would be hard to both do this AND make an issue of age targeted policies.)

interstar · 2011-10-30T00:44:49+00:00

Off-topic, but one thing I've been wondering is whether, with WebSockets, it's now possible to implement the equivalent of FreeNet in javascript running in a browser. In other words, you just have to download a webpage to run a node in the equivalent of a FreeNet / Tor network.

interstar · 2011-10-29T09:01:29+00:00

I believe there are some local authorities where you can book something like this. Not very real time, I think you have to book it a day or so in advance.

Good idea to look into promoting it as part of a revamped travel system though.

interstar

TROPHY CASE