Left Foot Forward

If you have a second home in New York City worth more than $5M, check your mailbox when you’re back in the five boroughs — because you've got mail. Today, we sent notification letters to property owners, letting them know that our new pied-à-terre tax is coming soon. The best city in the world deserves the best parks, libraries, and schools in the world. That's only possible when we all pay our fair share.

@BNHWalker Theresa May on steroids. Take your 180 seat majority and willingly move to a coalition with the Lib Dems, Greens and SNP, at best. Not happening

Populist policies ≠ laying the groundwork for a snap general election

Zohran Mamdani: “A lot of what we’ve come to accept as the facts of life across our country is driven by democratic socialist principles. If today you and I were to introduce the idea of a building that lends out books for free, we would be slandered in the same way that so many new ideas are slandered today and yet that’s the library. And the same thing with the fire department and the same thing with public schools”

@AaronBastani Good for him. Just make it up. When it comes to actually pay for it, the OBR forecasts will be completely different anyway and they can claim they found some money from somewhere

The funding for the £2 bus fare cap is a complete fugazi. Climate loans to developing countries?! 🤣🤑

@Hansford4Peter @jhansonradio That’s the sort of get up and go attitude I thought you would appreciate. A bike is a one off cost but will save hundreds in the medium term and thousands in the long term on transport

@jhansonradio Some people just don’t live with in their income . Friends lodger claimed they couldn’t afford the rent. After some thought she said ok you get defer for two weeks. Next day an electric bike is delivered . How can you afford your bike well you deferred my rent.

The problem with the entire cost of living debate is successive governments keep trying to fix the symptoms, not the cause. Capping bus fares here, removing VAT from energy bills there, etc. Those measures help at the margins but don't address the fundamental issue: lack of economic growth. Until a government is able to achieve sustained increases in productivity (which means rewarding work and encouraging investment - neither of which we're doing), the underlying problem won't go away.

@jhansonradio Surface level analysis. High energy and food costs are often due to external factors and therefore growth will have limited impact on those stressors. Likewise, if we just go for growth using the traditional model, most of the gains will go to already rich asset holders

There’s people whose entire lives are just doing this under every post that mentions a trans person, every day

@flying_rodent You’re going soft mate. There is zero chance of any prominent, important person facing the consequence of their horrible choice, ever. They won’t explain it either, they’ll just deny they ever backed them, if they are forced to (they won’t be) and move on seamlessly

This would be good IMO: it would force lots of prominent, important people to face the consequences of their horrible choices, and it’d compel them to explain themselves. Rather than what they do instead, which is shout “Actually that was just practice, we’re back to 0-0 now”.

Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal.

lib dems when interest rates are 0%: "lets murder the poor to reduce the deficit" lib dems when interest rates are 5%: "let's increase the deficit to murder foreigners"

@RudolphN17 We finished 17th two seasons in a row. The rebuild was going to involve a few cracked eggs. No time for sentiment in our situation

At the start of the transfer window, if someone had told you we’d be moving on Vuskovic, Bergvall, Devine, Lankshear, Olusesi, Thompson and Phillips, would you have been disappointed and frustrated that we’re letting go of some of our brightest young talents, players who could have spent a season out on loan developing before returning to challenge for a first-team place? Or would you be delighted and proud that Spurs are finally making decisive decisions, moving players on rather than stockpiling promising youngsters who may never make the breakthrough? Key to remember that a number of our deal involving 15-20% sell on clauses are on profit only and matching rights are all well and good but requires the player to actually want to return to the club.

@Euro_toff @darrenpjones Probably both to be fair

@darrenpjones You have either been lying since January or you have jst Started lying now

Good news that VAT will be cut on electricity bills. It’s a simple way for families to save a few quid, and to mechanically help to keep inflation that little bit lower. But the DigitalID program was unfunded. The government will have to set out how it will pay for its new policies at the budget.

Getting this in early: The defence industry is one of the worst possible investments if you want fiscal multipliers. It’s absolutely terrible: capital-intensive, highly automated, low labour demand, minimal secondary impacts. Military Keynesianism doesn’t exist

@CurtisDaly_ Well he even refers to himself as a ‘centrist dad’ in his bio, so you can’t expect too much

Imagine saying that ending homelessness isn't appealing to you

@s8mb Sam, you just need to reframe this in your mind as ‘PM is going to help veterans’. It appeals to Corbyn supporters and Sun readers equally. So in that sense, it’s not at all like ‘maths to 18’

"End rough sleeping" is very "Maths to 18". We keep getting mid-term PMs who think people want them to pursue their personal agendas, when they're actually being hired as stand-ins to solve problems that their predecessors couldn't.

@OhNoezzz @meadwaj That’s the spirit, why bother trying to make things marginally better?

You will get relative peanuts from that in reality. Raising CGT will lower receipts, per HMRV Even the annual 2% above £10m would raise only £24bn a year per Gary Stevenson's estimate, and in reality far less. That will barely fill the defence black hole. Then what you going to do? The fact is we already tax wealth and business similar to European countries, and the only reason they achieve higher overall tax levels than us is because they tax average earners much more than we do. Good luck with selling that here.

Burnham tax cuts: Late 2016, in McDonnell's office, we did costings for revenue neutral income tax shift - cut at the bottom, increase at the top. Quick redistribution that gives a bunch of lower paid workers more money. LOTO didn't like it, too keen on standard tax-and-spend.1/2

Andy Burnham says his first instruction going into No 10 will be to end rough sleeping. Intriguingly, this is exactly the same first order Jeremy Corbyn told me he would have given had he become prime minister.

the author of this piece is disabled, and this is why we talk about how damaging lateral-ableism is, when having great support to manage your own disability makes you believe everyone else with a disability just isn’t trying hard enough, & so simultaneously shouldn’t get support

The key lesson of the last two years is that the only way to push UK politics away from Reform towards the left is to vote Green. This lesson is not something that the UK media will ever learn, let alone teach. Instead everything will be reframed in terms of competence and comms.