Interesting Links for 08-09-2021

[andrewducker]

By Design - How white communists, socialists, feminists, and capitalists tried to engineer society using kitchen design.

(tags:society kitchens history USA ViaDrCross )

UK to introduce health and social care tax to pay for reforms

(tags:uk tax nhs )

How Sri Lanka's overnight flip to total organic farming has led to an economic disaster

(tags:food organic epicfail farming )

The details of how the NHS/Social care budget increase is being levied seem pretty reasonable to me. Am I missing anything?

(tags:tax uk nhs )

A request for guides on how to communicate effectively with autistic people

(tags:autism communication )

Someone at The Guardian edited Judith Butler's opinions on transphobes out of their interview with her

(tags:lgbt transgender guardian bigotry )

An initial response from the IFS to the announcement on health, social care and National Insurance

(tags:economics tax NHS UK )

The here matrix teaser is fun

(tags:matrix movies )

There are many benefits to being a marine biologist (or How the internet can turn anything into a meme)

(tags:meme Ocean funny )

How to be neurotypical

(tags:neurodiversity funny satire )

Somali feminist: Facebook is being used to silence me

(tags:Facebook censorship somalia OhForFucksSake )

Government says polluters can dump risky sewage into rivers as Brexit disrupts water treatment

(tags:waste UK Europe rivers Doom )

The US health care system has collapsed.

(tags:USA healthcare pandemic )

The world's biggest carbon removal machine has just been turned on (too expensive, but will hopefully get cheaper over time)

(tags:co2 technology )

Comments

[chess]

Yes - you're missing that National Insurance is capped, which means your top earners will not be paying their fair share of this. (Unless it bypasses the cap as well as the 'not if you're a pensioner' bit, which is unclear from the article.)

Also missing:

This is headlined as 'social care' but is actually going to make up the NHS shortfall during the life of this parliament - it seems unlikely they'll drop a huge NHS cut just before an election, and thus unlikely that it will actually go to social care.

This goes with a 'care cap' which benefits only people with assets - this is the whole 'granny shouldn't have to sell the house for care' thing which only benefits people whose granny owned a house in the first place.

[andrewducker]

https://twitter.com/catherinehwyatt/status/1435260794363654148 indicates to me that it's not capped. And it will be coming, also, from share dividends. But not from retired people, so far as I can tell.

Oh, and I totally agree that protecting people's assets only helps people with assets. And as I'm generally against inheritence...

[chess]

As pointed out lower down in that thread, going up to 80k only just gets you over the cap so it's not clear from the graph that this is an issue: see eg https://twitter.com/juliman66/status/1435361963224309764 and https://twitter.com/RobShaer/status/1435264090017050627

[andrewducker]

I would like to see more detail on exactly how it's going to work.

(And if I was organising a tax system, this wouldn't be how I'd do it.)

[wildeabandon]

Also NI starts at a lower income than income tax, so low earners will be paying more than they would if we just increased income tax.

(Also NI is fundamentally stupid, and should just be scrapped and replaced by adjusting the income tax rates and bands in a sensible way)

[andrewducker]

They should absolutely merge them. And get rid of the ridiculous "contributions" system.

[emperor]

NI also doesn't catch income from dividends, renting, and other such things that the better-off are more likely to have as income too, AIUI.

[andrewducker]

Dividends are being covered by this. The rest aren't though, so far as I understand.