The President of The United States of America today banged on the table during a press briefing.

The Wall Street markets continued to fall.

Expressed in longhand,

$700 billion is $700,000,000,000.

That’s $5072 each from the

138,000,000 taxpayers in the US.

The coincidence of the credit crunch, rising fuel costs and rising food costs means that almost everybody has less surplus wealth this year than last year, during which the Vatican made a loss.

The Pope’s promotional tour reaches Paris and Lourdes.

The value of investment banks can go down as well as up.

Tonight, all the stock markets across the world are down.

Money isn’t moving from one to another it is evaporating.

To become again the thin air whence it was first imagined.

The Vatican reports a loss in its annual accounts of 9.1 million euros and notes currency fluctuations, particularly the fall in value of the US Dollar, as contributory factors.

The Pope is currently on a promotional tour of Australia.

Pay excess tax amounting to £116.00 over six months and receive £60.00 back as a lump sum at the end of the period.

Then

Pay excess tax amounting to another £116.00 over the next six months while receiving six instalments of ten pounds back over the same period.

Then

Write off the £112.00 in excess tax that you have not been compensated for.

Simple.

In 1999 the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, introduced the 10p “Starting Rate” of income tax “to reward work and ensure working families are better off”.

It was the same Chancellor, Gordon Brown, who decided to remove it as of 2008, apparently oblivious to the inevitable opposite effect. 

Either:

Oblivious to inevitable effects he is unfit to make any such decisions.

Or:

He knew exactly what would happen and didn’t care, making him an inappropriate leader of the Labour party according to its stated values and principles.

Every full-time worker is entitled to four weeks of paid holiday in a year.

The poorest of the poor, however, now only get paid for three of them.

Thanks to the abolition of the much praised in its day 10% starting rate of tax.

To help the better off get some perspective on the effect of the tax change:

If you earn £6.60 an hour the abolition of the 10% starting rate is equivalent to being unpaid for a week.

If you earn the £5.52 minimum wage the effect is to be unpaid for a further seven hours.

Think how losing a week of your own income would feel. Then think how hard you would find it to live on £232 a week take-home in the first place.