Tim's Rant

This is where I get to express and hopefully justify why I am a Green. This isn't necessarily Green policy, it is just my simple take on the world of economics. It is a rant and therefore quite negative but unfortunately there are significant minority of very greedy people who have stitched up the system to ensure they win ...

Shares / market exploitation

Short selling is nothing short of gambling with a stacked hand. Those "in the know" sell now at X before a dip, then buy back shortly afterwards at X-1. The time period between the transactions is short, often the selling takes place before the buying!
Futures are gambling on the future price of commodities, agree to buy now at price X in the hope that it can be sold at X+1. The process has a significant effect on reducing stability by yo-yoing prices or keeping them artificially high. It is again open to exploitation by the biggest players. If a major player can buy enough of a commodity then the price will rise due to shortages, the increased price is passed on to the innocent end user while the trader keeps the excess.

All of these and many other financial market tricks are highly destructive on genuine business. We want to encourage proper long term investment in wealth creating industries ...

Wealth Creation

The creation of wealth involves doing work. This might be growing a crop (farming), processing some material in order to make a product (industry). We have positive wealth facilitators too, such as education, training and health. The health service keeps us available to do work and from an economic view be useful.

A bank might be seen as a wealth facilitator, but not the way they are working today. In fact they are wealth destroyers, as they move money around they cream-off a percentage.

Quantitative Easing

Results in inflation - no ifs or buts.

Money is a representation of the value of work. Quantitative easing is the creation of money out of thin air without doing any work. Since money represents wealth, if there is more money for the same amount of wealth each unit of money is worth less and that is inflation.

August 2010 ... the Bank-of-England Monetary Policy Committee is reportedly "surprised" that inflation is remaining so high (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-10995527).
RPI inflation has been at ~5% for some time, whereas bank base rate has been at 0.5% for 18-months and pay is frozen for public sector workers. This means those with modest savings are dramatically loosing value (circa 4% per year), those at the lower pay levels are being disproportionately effected by the difference between RPI and pay increases.
As is usually the case those with larger cash savings can invest in other areas like rental property and make bigger returns.

Tax

Is historically unfair with the richest able to avoid paying, this is especially true of multi-national companies who exploit tax havens to usurp their social responsibilities. An analysis of who pays what corporation tax shows how easy it is for big companies to gain an advantage and compete unfairly with local smaller companies who don't use tax avoidance techniques. If you want to do some digging check Google and Amazon.

VAT

In principle a tax on consumption is good and to a limited extent VAT fulfills this role. However, there are some major shortcomings:
VAT disproportionately affects those with low income, to overcome this we need a ensure that essentials are removed from the tax, or that the flattening the disposable income spread making the difference between rich and poor smaller.

As the name suggests business only pays VAT on the "added value" which means there is a complicated system of assessing this difference. Complicated systems are open to fraud and VAT fraud is a very big loss. Also the overall cost of administrating the scheme is high, but a lot of the work falls to companies rather then the government (HMRC).

Nuclear Power

Who pays? Investment now ... big profits for 25 years, decommissioning will be handled by a separate company which will eventually run out of money, we then pick up the pieces. There is no way a business can be kept going for the tens of thousands of years needed to monitor the high-level waste, even if annual cost is low there is no income stream without government support. The long term liability is extreme and impossible for a business to support.
Would the business get any investors if the rules were changed to make investors fully liable for ever?
Q:Which is cheapest overall? A:Gas
Q:Which is cheapest renewable? A:Wind - and a lot cheaper than nuclear