A picture can sometimes be worth Trillion$ of words:

Farther Down the Slippery Slope:

This is where we probe the current demonstrable limits of government absurdity.

A Licence to own a TV?

"Using a television without an appropriate licence is a criminal offence. Every day we catch an average of 1,200 people using a TV without a licence. There is no valid excuse for using a television and not having a TV Licence, but some people still try - sometimes with the most ridiculous stories ever heard. Our detection equipment will track down your TV. The fact that our enquiry officers are now so well equipped with the latest technology means that there is virtually no way to avoid detection."
-- from the official website of the British Television Licensing Authority, May 2003

In the United Kingdom, citizens must pay a licence if they own a television set. That's right, a TV tax. For Americans, the whole idea of an annual tax to own a television borders on the absurd. However, in the UK, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a government agency that has the power to tax and enforce laws. In order to obtain funding, the BBC requires that anyone using its services must pay for them. So, if you own a TV set and live in the UK, you could conceivably turn on the BBC broadcasts, so therefore you better pay.

A colour television licence is £116 a year (around $192 US) and a black and white TV licence costs £38.50 a year (around $64 US). The cost goes up each year and this has lead some lawmakers to question the way the BBC is funded. However, until the law is changed, the TV licence remains -- leading to harassment of those who proclaim not to own a TV set and jail time for those that own TV sets and don't pay the tax.

So much for theory:

From Stanford professor John Taylor's paper "The Financial Crisis and the Policy Responses: An Empirical Analysis of What Went Wrong"




Another policy response was the Economic Stimulus Act of 2008 passed in February. The major part of this package was to send cash totaling over $100 billion to individuals and families in the United States so they would have more to spend and thus jump-start consumption and the economy. Most of the checks were sent in May, June, and July. As would be predicted by the permanent income theory of consumption, people spent little if anything of the temporary rebate, and consumption was not jump-started as had been hoped.

The evidence is presented in the figure above. The top line shows how personal disposable income jumped at the time of the rebate. The lower line shows that personal consumption expenditures did not increase in a noticeable way. As with the earlier charts, formal statistical work shows that the rebates had no statistically significant increase in consumption.

O Canada!

Very Nice: