Michael Hawkins

@thebowlerhatman They can afford to buy thousands of tickets.

Always amazes me how many famous people get lucky in the Wimbledon ticket ballot...

@DanielPriestley This is not true - you could just take the hit happy in the knowledge that you are helping people less lucky in life and thereby contributing to a better country.

Say you have £100M net worth. The proposed wealth tax is 2% on assets over £10M… so you’d owe £1.8M every year in additional taxes. To pay the additional £1.8M each year (2% on £90M) you would need to pay a £4M dividend. Of that £4M dividend, you get zero ALL of it is tax (see calculation below). Given that most scalable assets pay less than 4% yield as it is, there is no point in owning UK assets. Especially because you’d also be paying tax to buy the assets, to employ people to run the assets and you’d be losing CGT or IHT if you sell them or die. All serious investment would dry up and the economy becomes a backwater, stagnant economic wasteland rapidly.

@BiankaB12 I think both are correct. Orwell seems to be right when looking at Russia, China, etc. and for when Western countries employ their methods. Huxley seems to be right when looking at Western societies.

One of my longest-standing arguments is that we are not living in Orwell’s 1984, where truth is centrally suppressed and censored by force (that’s former communist societies, modern-day China, Russia, North Korea). We are living in something much closer to Huxley’s Brave New World. The truth is not hidden - it is almost always readily available. But it is buried beneath an industrial quantity of noise: propaganda, outrage, half-truths, conspiracy theories, influencer theatre, algorithmic rage bait and an endless stream of content designed not to inform us, but to keep us emotionally stimulated. The modern information system does not need to censor the truth when it can simply drown it in noise. A fact no longer has to be disproven - it only has to be surrounded by a hundred competing claims, stripped of context and nuance, turned into partisan ammunition and pushed into the same feed as celebrity gossip, memes and 15 second videos engineered to deliver the fastest possible dopamine hit. By the time the truth reaches us, it appears as just another piece of content competing for our attention. That is the more sophisticated form of control: not preventing people from knowing, but exhausting their capacity to care. Orwell feared a world in which people would be deprived of information. Huxley feared a world in which they would be given so much distraction, stimulation and triviality that they would lose the desire to seek it. The defining struggle of our age is therefore not simply between truth and censorship, but between truth and indifference.

@sashayanshin You present yourself as a stats and facts man but you use words like dimwit and idiot, which are simply abuse, not facts; you haven't proven that people who oppose you are not as clever as you. Shameful. Also a stupid way to get people to adopt your point of view.

Imagine you build a successful business in the UK. It makes £10 Million profit. First you pay 25% Corporation tax = £2.5 Million. Your net profit after tax is £7.5 Million. Average UK P/E ratio for public companies is ~15.4. Let’s use that as a proxy. This business is worth £7.5 Million x 15.4 = £115.5 Million. UK Government wants to tax you 2% wealth tax on your net worth above £10 Million per year. 2% x (115.5 - 10) Million = £2.11 Million. So you have to pay yourself a dividend of £3.48 Million which will pay 39.35% dividend tax to pay the wealth tax. Remaining Company profit = £4.02 Million. If you want to have that money, you have to pay dividend tax again. After the tax you have £2.44 Million. So the net effect is that if you make £10 Million, the UK Government will take 75.6% of it as tax. Almost half of this tax comes from the 2% wealth tax. It’s an extra 35% tax on profit in this example. Problem is dimwits who were “good at maths at school” and politicians don’t understand basic maths. This will mean absolutely nobody will take the risk to invest or start a business in the UK. What is the point? If you are lucky enough to succeed, you will get punished hard. Jobs will not be created. Investment will dry up immediately. Anyone starting a business who is young enough will move. The power of FAFO will lead to a collapse in living standards and a collapse in economic growth. This will destroy the UK economy and be the biggest own goal in a generation. Why are we blindly walking into a self-orchestrated financial disaster? But hey - it sounds good because an idiot YouTuber who has no clue said so. It has good vibes. Tax the millionaires! What is so bad about a 75.6% tax exactly?

@afneil Andrew is right. When you say ""one murder", you mean one person dead. Either his English is poor or he's being tricky to "win" his point.

The cult is out in force today, arguing that black is white. And vice versa. With barely half a brain between them. Hilarious the lengths they’ll go to defend the indefensible. Dunblane wasn’t one murder. Or an incident. It was a massacre of the innocents. Which should have been explained to a US audience which knows nothing about it. #nutjobs PS I couldn’t give a monkey’s what tune Mr Lowe dances to.

Happiness / unhappiness by religion. Religion still works I guess.

@AbubakerAbedW Your characterisation of what she said in this clip has nothing to do with what she said. You are dishonest and should remove this post. Tell the truth! You are a journalist and you are lying. Disgraceful.

Ann Widdecombe went on GB News early after October 7 and invoked the historical precedents of Dresden and Hiroshima, characterising Israel's genocidal actions as a just war and implying that the annihilation of Gaza was necessary.

@CrazyVibes_1 Go for it.

Is 75 years old too old to adopt a cat? I've lost my two cats (ages 16 and 17) in the last 3 months and I miss them so. My family and friends say I'm too old. I would like your opinion. PS. I plan on adopting a s senior cat, not a kitten.

@SustainableTall Well, it is much more beautiful. I know that this is not often the focus of modern architects/town planners but......

The building on the left had 6 apartments. It was replaced by 3 townhouses. It also halved the housing provision

@hilarybennmp In Hove, they used to have the Pope on the bonfire.

The placement of a replica mosque on the Moygashel bonfire is a sickening and cowardly act of intimidation. This is not about tradition, and in no way does it represent the vast majority of people in Northern Ireland. We must stand united and completely reject such hatred.

@CapelLofft Lived in England from one month old, though. So probably more a native English speaker than a native French speaker.

@ItsJamesHall Unless you're on a very low salary, an inability to live on what you earn is always a spending problem.

A £100k salary means you’re in the top 4% of earners in the UK. If £100k is still not enough, you have a spending problem. Agree or disagree?

@SnowmanJoe25 @WanderVogel43 @MattCouture5 @bcks109 He was 29 when he moved to the US. That means he was Canadian. He may have got a US passport but he was still Canadian.

@WanderVogel43 @MattCouture5 @bcks109 By an American, Dr. James Naismith emigrated to the U.S. in 1891, developed baskets in Springfield, MA, obtained his medical degree in the U.S. and died in Lawrence, Kansas. Strange how skilled Canadians always wind up in the U.S.

Soccer is America’s like 5th prioritized sport… if the top athletes in the country focused on soccer, USA would be the best team in the world

@michaeljmcnair @dankrad Also, if a Belgian sells a house to a German, according to what you said above, isn't that all gain, as the future buyer is not Belgian?

Yes. As I wrote in a report from last year: Rising asset prices do not inherently increase national wealth. True wealth creation occurs only when an economy enhances its capacity to produce goods and services that improve living standards. Rising asset prices that aren't tied to increased productive capacity merely represent a transfer of wealth between groups rather than net new wealth for the economy. A housing bubble, for instance, enriches current owners but transfers wealth from future buyers who take on greater debt without any improvement in housing quality or infrastructure. Similarly, stock market surges driven by speculation rather than genuine corporate innovation or earnings growth simply redistribute wealth from late investors to early sellers. Asset prices can signal genuine wealth creation, but only when they reflect real economic improvements.

@michaeljmcnair @Michael73299790 This is true for all assets however -- if P/E ratios expand and businesses become more expensive, that gain also isn't an increase in national wealth (but the gains due to increase in profits are) The problem tends to be more pronounced for real estate though

@michaeljmcnair @dankrad But are Belgians richer than Americans? Or is this median wealth thing wholly irrelevant to how much an individual from these countries can go out and buy?

@MikeTappTweets Quite shocking that an MP would make such an observation so soon after they did exactly the same thing.

Farage will cost taxpayers ££ millions for his ego stunt. The man is no patriot and he doesn’t understand service.

@michaeljmcnair Grok says American wealth is 35-39% property-related. But a large number of European countries have more than double America's median wealth.

France is a great example of why median wealth is misleading. The reason France can have higher median wealth but lower median income than the US is that French median wealth is heavily tied to housing (70% of wealth for households in the 4th–9th deciles). That can create wealth for individuals. But it’s not the same thing as national wealth creation. If the same house doubles in price, France hasnt produced more shelter or productive capacity so it doesn’t increase wealth in the aggregate. The gain to current owners is a transfer from future buyers. So French median wealth > US median wealth doesn’t mean French living standards are higher. It means French middle class balance sheets are more tied up in housing.

@michaeljmcnair and have a big sum of cash to invest and/or spend as I want. Housing values are eminently realisable.

@michaeljmcnair 1. You don't say what percentage of an American's wealth is property-related. 2. You make it sound as if downsizing is not a thing. But if I live in a million Euro house and am heading towards retirement, I feel comfortable knowing that I can always sell it, buy something smaller

@GovTimWalz You don't have to be dumb about it. You know that it is not the clothing per se that has riled him.

The President of the United States is attacking a group of kindergarteners because of the clothes they wore to school.