Sorry if I am late to the party Rabz, Manchester United 0-3 Liverpool.
I very much like this, every now and then I will play the 0-5 rout the Mighty Reds gave them at Old Trafford.

I’ve been given it some thought on Trump policy of raising taxes through a tariff.
Instead of introducing tariffs (leaving aside the China issue), Trump should introduce a consumption tax and lower income and corporate tax by the same percentage of GDP.

What you want to see is more investment and the only way to achieve that is by encouraging savings.

Taxing consumption creates a levelling effect without penalising one crucial part of the economy in favour of another.

Offering lower earners a rebate at a certain threshold could be worked into the system.

I’ve also been thinking about an issue with unrealized capital gains. Wealthy individuals with significant unrealized gains can borrow against their assets to fund their consumption without paying taxes. On top of that, they can even deduct the interest payments from their taxable income.

FIRST BLASPHEMY CONVICTION IN BRITAIN IN OVER A 100 YEARS

@_johnnymaga

Kamala in Detroit vs. Kamala in Pittsburgh — literally 5 hours apart

The difference is insane

Trembling chin , holding back tears. Wonderful sight.

German greens after loosing badly, not even making it into the parliament

The West is trapped in a morality debate on immigration. It’s time for a big shift.

Konstantin Kisin, The Australian, 3 September 2024

Earlier this year, at a small private gathering of political and media leaders in Australia, I was asked what advice I might have for Australians with the power to shape their nation’s future. I had explained that while Australia was not as advanced as Britain and America in terms of its cultural malaise, it does appear to be on the same downward trajectory.

Having dispensed with the standard British response that I have no idea why any of them should listen to my opinion, I proceeded with the standard Russian response of telling them exactly what I think, as bluntly as possible: “The most important thing you can do for the future of your society is not allow immigration to become a moral issue!”

On the surface, this might appear to be a strange and somewhat esoteric response. Surely what politicians need to do is “take control of the border”, ensure “border security” and “stop the boats”?

These populist slogans are great for retail politics and allow charismatic anti-immigration politicians such as Nigel Farage and Donald Trump to win votes. But no matter how many votes they win, culturally the fight for a sensible immigration policy is still being lost. Why? Because immigration is no longer seen as a policy issue. It has become a matter of morality.

I recently appeared on the BBC program Moral Maze, in which I attempted to elicit from an academic his view of the negative trade-offs of mass immigration. I might as well have asked him about the negative trade-offs of curing cancer.

Of the very few skills I have to my name, understanding how to win a debate is, perhaps, one I can claim without false modesty. And I can tell you that as long as this framing is accepted in public discourse, those of us who want a sensible immigration policy will keep losing.

What most people fail to understand is you do not win debates with arguments – you win by setting the frame. You saw the power of this technique during Covid with your own eyes – all the authorities had to do was set the frame correctly and your fellow citizens abandoned reason and rationality in the blink of an eye. How did they do it, exactly?

In a battle, the deciding factor between comparable armies is often the territory on which the fight happens. A general who is able to place his troops in an advantageous position will usually win, even against a bigger, more powerful army.

This is how Edward the Black Prince secured victory in the Battle of Poitiers or, for a more contemporary reference, how a small number of Spartans were able to hold back a Persian horde in the Battle of Thermopylae on which the movie 300 is based. The same is true of a debate.

The frame is the set of unspoken assumptions that determine how the conversation happens. Whoever controls the frame controls the way the debate goes. During the pandemic, the framing was simple: all deaths from Covid are unacceptable and since all deaths from Covid are unacceptable, this is the only thing we must all focus on.

Notice how nobody ever said this out loud. Politicians never went on TV and said “the only thing that matters is Covid deaths and our goal is to reduce them to zero” because if they had, a lot of sensible people would have asked questions about how reasonable and realistic that was.

Instead, they simply acted like it was self-evident that reducing Covid deaths was the only thing that mattered, and before long so did everyone else. This is why perfectly good arguments about proportionality, personal liberty and bodily autonomy had absolutely no impact on public policy outside Sweden and a handful of US states.

Once you have drilled into people’s heads that the only thing we ought to focus on is the number of people who die from Covid, all else follows.

The reason the debate about immigration is as absurd as it is in the Western world is that we are operating within a morality-based framing of the issue. As long as we continue to do so, we will continue to lose.

What is the frame? “Immigration is a good thing. Therefore, anyone who opposes immigration is a bad person.” Once this framing is set, arguments are largely irrelevant. You can quote statistics, facts and figures till you’re blue in the face, but all you’ll ever be is an angry racist using numbers to support your immoral position. The only way to win this debate is to break the frame.

The correct framing of this issue, like any other, is that immigration policy is a slider. You move it to the left when you need more immigration and you move it to the right when you want less. Most Western countries have gone through periods when they were absolutely desperate for more people to come.

Australia responded to the end of WWII by deciding it must increase its population to avoid the threat of another invasion, and launched an immigration program under the slogan “populate or perish”.

Britain, too, increased migration after the war, encouraging colonial people to take jobs that could not be filled by British people. Canada, the US and many European countries have encouraged migration within living memory for perfectly good reasons.

In other words, the attempt to present the history of our countries as one continual process of moving from a restrictionist past to a progressive utopia is not just inaccurate, it is purposefully misleading. This framing deliberately conceals the reality that the right level of immigration varies over time. It is therefore unwise and counter-productive to argue “against immigration” or “for immigration”.

The correct frame is that immigration is good when it is good and bad when it is bad. And, as before, all else follows. Once this framing is accepted, winning the remaining argument becomes simple. If immigration policy is about making sure immigration is beneficial to our country, the correct number of illegal immigrants is zero.

The arguments often made in the US about illegal immigrants doing jobs no one wants are patently absurd – many of the people who are desperate to do those jobs are waiting patiently for their visa application to be approved and the only reason people enter the US illegally is that they know they won’t be allowed in.

In other words, illegal immigration is not beneficial to a country. As for legal immigration, once you accept that the quantity and type of people allowed to come should depend on how beneficial they are likely to be to our country given the current circumstances, the argument becomes even simpler. After decades of unprecedented levels of immigration, it is time to pause.

Notice that you’ve heard all these arguments before. But in a new frame, they land differently: Britain is not against immigration. Britons do not hate immigrants. We, in fact, envisage circumstances in which we may well be delighted to welcome more people here: I am proud that Britain has offered refuge to people fleeing Chinese tyranny in Hong Kong and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. What we are for is a sensible immigration policy – one that fits the realities of the present time.

Immigration is a working class issue – and it needs representation

Jordan Knight, The Spectator (Australian ed.) 4 September 2024

My dad was a union man. He was the secretary for the Plumbers Union Queensland, and I spent a good part of my early life at May Day rallies and protests. Quite literally, as a toddler I sat on the shoulders of giants: hard-working family men and women, marching through the streets in solidarity, and fighting for their stake in this wonderful country.

When I’d go back to kindergarten the next day, I’d get the other kids to join in union chants. Shouting with my fist in the air at passing cars, I didn’t really understand what the words meant, only that it was about the little guy taking on the big guy. This sentiment has stuck with me ever since. It’s guided me my whole life.

Back then the union movement, and the Labor Party, meant something. Today it is a shadow of its former self. Speaking to friends who work in the trade industry – indeed those who have been union delegates themselves – they feel as disconnected from those at the top of their movement, as much as they do from politics itself. They no longer feel represented any more. This is a problem that is broadly playing out across Australia; instead of battling the political class, Labor has become the political class. They stopped caring about the little guy.

There’s too many examples of this abandonment to count – from vaccine mandates to the Voice to Parliament referendum, to name a couple of recent ones – but to me the biggest betrayal of the Labor Party has been on immigration.

Labor – the supposed party for the working class – brought in 737,000 people last year. I personally know people who were evicted from their homes due to the subsequent rent hikes that followed. They were thrown to the street because landlords could get a better price in the rental market, overheating with international students, foreign workers and their family members. Almost all of my friends saw their rent go up and their dreams of owning a home and starting a family pushed further into the horizon, perhaps never to happen.

I know young workers who – when borders were shut for Covid and workers went home – saw their pay go up while companies were desperate for workers. Now that the government has brought in 1.15 million people in, real wages are back to 2009 levels. Put another way, our wages have gone backwards in 15 years. Labor was built on the back of men and women fighting for better wages, where has that fight gone?

Immigration is largely a working class issue. It disproportionately affects workers, especially those who are just getting started in their career, those in precarious positions, and those struggling to get ahead. If you’re a young person just out of school or a punter just trying to find a job, any job: be it a truckie, hospitality worker, anything, you are competing with more migrants than ever before. With so many people fighting for so few jobs, bosses can give the job to whoever is willing to work for less.

This is no small problem, the ability to earn good money, save up, live a good life and invest in your future is what this country was built on. We were a country of battlers and strivers, who worked hard, pinched pennies, made ends meet, maybe had a drink on Friday, got back to work on Monday, and kept the country moving forward. But if you can no longer get ahead despite all your hard work, if it takes 12 years to save for a house instead of four, if your wages won’t save up for anything meaningful, and you can’t even afford a bit of fun on the weekend, what is it all for? Why care about a country that doesn’t care about you?

Where are the unions? Where is the Labor Party? In fact, where is the Liberal Party? The tragedy isn’t just that Labor no longer represents the good, honest hard hard-working people that make up Australia. It’s that nobody represents them. The Liberal Party, perhaps too comfortable with big businesses and big universities, won’t sufficiently stand up for them. These guys might scream black and blue about taxes, but there is no bigger tax on workers than mass immigration.

While more Australians go homeless, many more will become politically homeless. This is a failure of Australian democracy, and it will lead to the failure of Australia if not remedied.

Jordan Knight is Adviser to Independent NSW MP Rod Roberts, runs Migration Watch Australia, and is Director of National Conservative Institute of Australia.