In this Institute of Economic Affairs Free the Power podcast, the IEA’s Andy Mayer interviews Nicholas Leighton-Hall from the Marginal Cost of Everything blog about the recent government decision to reject zonal pricing for UK electricity markets.
Very interesting guys. It all sounds like price fixing to me. Nick is correct. The government has back tracked, because they are frightened of making a decision, in case they get criticised for it! God, this is an unholy mess! Thatcher sold off the utilities to get rid of the headache and transfer blame, whilst getting money for our family silver. Blair took competition to its extremes, making competitors where hitherto there weren’t any! One fool after another mucking around with a fully working and fully funded system. We used to make our own power stations! We can’t even do that now. We are crumbling from top to bottom. Having contracted out vast sums and promises of return and profit for wind farms and solar, it is now stalling because a fixing of prices can’t be agreed. It’s all about swindling the consumer! Some pay more than others is a disaster. Bills must be the same for all. But everyone in line wants to charge extremes to cover costs if management and debt for the original investment and do putting levels of profiteering in the mix just makes the price sky rocket. We have to ask, why are we putting ourselves through this mill in the first place? America China and India aren’t! But honestly it’s been a time bomb waiting to go off for decades. Pre Thatcher it was all under our own ownership. Now it’s all foreign owned and the investors are foreign. Even industry is abroad not at home. We need someone to get a grip and Milliband isn’t it! As I said it’s price fixing. And until they know the costs and the profits charge points no price can be set. Governments in a straight jacket of their own making. All for the good of the City! Instead of the good of all. We need to have started long ago a planning regulation to fit all new housing development estates to have solar on all houses. Air snd ground source heat pumps in the planning on every new home. Heavily insulted new houses with air conditioning. As a must . This will prevent mould! And turbines with all communities. All better than a small nuclear reactor on every street corner! We don’t need one industry run by multi faceted foreign interventionists profiteering who have just a strangle hold over us as Putin has with gas. Like cars have virtually no emissions these days, coal powered stations can also run clean but even so it’s still dirty. But you see what I mean, what innovation could have occurred in power stations had we still been building them. Look at China! They still have them. I see poorly designed and poorly built housing stock being built today. It’s been magnificently mismanaged for decades. Because no one has the brains to make the right decisions. All that said it has to change. In my opinion all our infrastructure needs to be back in our control. Non profit for the people. But, for that to work, we need an economy that works! For 50 years or more each government has made cuts to try and make ends meet. So every aspect of public services has been slowly eroded. Successive governments job has been to decide where to cut and who to cut. Never making a choice to really improve. Making people work more for less in real terms. Not cutting to the bone… they are now cutting through the bones! Just look at every sector, from NHS to education and defence. And it’s exponentially got worse as the cuts didn’t work and we have had to borrow. It’s chorded every aspect of life. It will never work. Not with the system we have. Every politician decides either cuts, raise taxes or borrow! So they have done all three for years together with sell off everything from power stations to gold reserves. It has to stop! We need to grow the economy, but that is just words. How can you grow anything when your starting point is MINUS £3,000,000,000,000.00 trillion pounds! His can you grow a positive position from that minus point? And what is the growth you all talk about? You all think it’s GDP. But it’s not, no! Not really!! GDP is calculated using borrowing! The more we borrow, the higher the GDP. Think about that? We value our wealth by the larger our debt is growing! If that isn’t ridiculous then what is? It’s another price fix. It’s so stupid! Nobody questions ‘growth’. Well I shall tell you what we need to grow, TAX revenue!…yes we need more tax take!! It’s that bloody simple. Not by raising taxes though! No!! As an increased tax take is the only thing that will balance our books, we need to know what triggers tax? Well it’s SPENDING that triggers tax. When employers SPEND on employees wages it triggers tax. When we SPEND on goods and services vat and duty are triggered. And when we buy a car, house or insure them tax is triggered. And guess what we need to SPEND with? Yes, you guessed it MONEY! And who has more money than we already have? Yes!…. The rich! They gave it all. In fact the top 5% of people have 95% of money. That means, 95% of us only have 5% of money to work with! That’s why we can’t pay our way! And who do we borrow our own money from to fill the deficit? Yes, the same rich 5% of oriole who have 95% of our money! It’s do bloody obvious yet, why don’t you see it??…for any economy to work their has to be MONEY and SPENDING. Without both it doesn’t work. We have been devoid of most of our money for decades and that’s why nothing works! The equation is MS=R. Money multiplied by Spending equals Revenue. You can add in TIME to that to ensure money is SPENT back in time to be required. But it’s my simple equation that makes sense of a working economy. Please debate the need to grow our tax take through increased SPENDING by those who have it and are not SPENDING it each month (TIME). The rich who don’t SPEND pay no tax on that unspent money. None! Nor is it returned to our revenue pot that pays the taxes that are collected,albeit too small an amount. But, if we had a tsunami of SPENDING from all that unspent money, we would have the coffers of the exchequer overflowing with money! That’ll pay our way! Debate that!!!!
Very interesting guys. It all sounds like price fixing to me. Nick is correct. The government has back tracked, because they are frightened of making a decision, in case they get criticised for it! God, this is an unholy mess! Thatcher sold off the utilities to get rid of the headache and transfer blame, whilst getting money for our family silver. Blair took competition to its extremes, making competitors where hitherto there weren’t any! One fool after another mucking around with a fully working and fully funded system. We used to make our own power stations! We can’t even do that now. We are crumbling from top to bottom. Having contracted out vast sums and promises of return and profit for wind farms and solar, it is now stalling because a fixing of prices can’t be agreed. It’s all about swindling the consumer! Some pay more than others is a disaster. Bills must be the same for all. But everyone in line wants to charge extremes to cover costs if management and debt for the original investment and do putting levels of profiteering in the mix just makes the price sky rocket. We have to ask, why are we putting ourselves through this mill in the first place? America China and India aren’t! But honestly it’s been a time bomb waiting to go off for decades. Pre Thatcher it was all under our own ownership. Now it’s all foreign owned and the investors are foreign. Even industry is abroad not at home. We need someone to get a grip and Milliband isn’t it! As I said it’s price fixing. And until they know the costs and the profits charge points no price can be set. Governments in a straight jacket of their own making. All for the good of the City! Instead of the good of all. We need to have started long ago a planning regulation to fit all new housing development estates to have solar on all houses. Air snd ground source heat pumps in the planning on every new home. Heavily insulted new houses with air conditioning. As a must . This will prevent mould! And turbines with all communities. All better than a small nuclear reactor on every street corner! We don’t need one industry run by multi faceted foreign interventionists profiteering who have just a strangle hold over us as Putin has with gas. Like cars have virtually no emissions these days, coal powered stations can also run clean but even so it’s still dirty. But you see what I mean, what innovation could have occurred in power stations had we still been building them. Look at China! They still have them. I see poorly designed and poorly built housing stock being built today. It’s been magnificently mismanaged for decades. Because no one has the brains to make the right decisions. All that said it has to change. In my opinion all our infrastructure needs to be back in our control. Non profit for the people. But, for that to work, we need an economy that works! For 50 years or more each government has made cuts to try and make ends meet. So every aspect of public services has been slowly eroded. Successive governments job has been to decide where to cut and who to cut. Never making a choice to really improve. Making people work more for less in real terms. Not cutting to the bone… they are now cutting through the bones! Just look at every sector, from NHS to education and defence. And it’s exponentially got worse as the cuts didn’t work and we have had to borrow. It’s chorded every aspect of life. It will never work. Not with the system we have. Every politician decides either cuts, raise taxes or borrow! So they have done all three for years together with sell off everything from power stations to gold reserves. It has to stop! We need to grow the economy, but that is just words. How can you grow anything when your starting point is MINUS £3,000,000,000,000.00 trillion pounds! His can you grow a positive position from that minus point? And what is the growth you all talk about? You all think it’s GDP. But it’s not, no! Not really!! GDP is calculated using borrowing! The more we borrow, the higher the GDP. Think about that? We value our wealth by the larger our debt is growing! If that isn’t ridiculous then what is? It’s another price fix. It’s so stupid! Nobody questions ‘growth’. Well I shall tell you what we need to grow, TAX revenue!…yes we need more tax take!! It’s that bloody simple. Not by raising taxes though! No!! As an increased tax take is the only thing that will balance our books, we need to know what triggers tax? Well it’s SPENDING that triggers tax. When employers SPEND on employees wages it triggers tax. When we SPEND on goods and services vat and duty are triggered. And when we buy a car, house or insure them tax is triggered. And guess what we need to SPEND with? Yes, you guessed it MONEY! And who has more money than we already have? Yes!…. The rich! They gave it all. In fact the top 5% of people have 95% of money. That means, 95% of us only have 5% of money to work with! That’s why we can’t pay our way! And who do we borrow our own money from to fill the deficit? Yes, the same rich 5% of oriole who have 95% of our money! It’s do bloody obvious yet, why don’t you see it??…for any economy to work their has to be MONEY and SPENDING. Without both it doesn’t work. We have been devoid of most of our money for decades and that’s why nothing works! The equation is MS=R. Money multiplied by Spending equals Revenue. You can add in TIME to that to ensure money is SPENT back in time to be required. But it’s my simple equation that makes sense of a working economy. Please debate the need to grow our tax take through increased SPENDING by those who have it and are not SPENDING it each month (TIME). The rich who don’t SPEND pay no tax on that unspent money. None! Nor is it returned to our revenue pot that pays the taxes that are collected,albeit too small an amount. But, if we had a tsunami of SPENDING from all that unspent money, we would have the coffers of the exchequer overflowing with money! That’ll pay our way! Debate that!!!!