I found existing Russian translations of ‘Spring and Fall’ impossible, so Google Translate and I have attempted the following, trying to present what Hopkins said in the way that he said it.
Маргарета, ты скорбишь из-за того Как обезлиститься Голденгроув? О листьях, как о вещих людских, ты С свежими своими мыслями заботиться можешь? Ах! когда сердце постареет К таким видам придет холоднее, вздоха Не издавая жотя миры бледной древесин
Гниющей опадью лгут; А ты все же будешь плакать и знать почему. Теперь, дитя, имя значение не имеет : Ключи скорби одни и те же. Ни рот, ни ум пока не выразил то О чем сердце слышало, дух подозревал: Это беда, для которой рожден род человеский, Это Маргаретa, по которой ты скорбишь.
On the one hand, a Newsweek survey (largely based on reputation/peer judgment) suggests that Britain’s best hospital is St Thomas’s, placed #36 in the world. It looks like there’s one more-or-less ‘world-class’ hospital (St Thomas’s) for the use of idiot Prime Ministers and then…It looks like there’s one more-or-less ‘world-class’ hospital (St Thomas’s) for the use of idiot Prime Ministers and then…
I don’t think you can blame American prejudice here – Israel, Finland and Brazil(!), all of which are violently ‘socialized’ systems by American standards, have higher-placed entries than we do.Seems that we really do need more money for development and quality improvement.
The situation for doctors is not so clear, but this source indicates that British doctors are the third best in the world, after those from the US and India.
The Newsweek tables give rise to some interesting conclusions, including that private medicine here is really not worth it (London Bridge at #14 in the UK rankings is some kind of code-sharing operation with Guy’s at #2). In general, the specialised tables have the leading British representative at about #7 (which is what you would expect – and UCL is the second best hospital in the world for having babies in. To me that implies that the leading clinicians here fine but there just isn’t the money to efficiently run large general hospitals.
I suggest that people think very carefully about whether they are willing for the NHS to degrade or whether they are willing to adopt something like a hypothecated Wealth Tax
This prospectus outlines a solution to the problem of how to maintain the NHS as a universal tax-funded service free at the point of delivery. This problem was proposed to me by one of the consultants while I was in the Critical Care Unit of Guy’s Hospital.
Limitation
This proposal addresses the problem as stated, and takes no account of questions such as what the optimum funding model for the NHS is, or what the wider economic implications of the proposals might be, or how the UK tax system should be improved in general.
Background
It is thought that the NHS requires a funding increase of 4% per annum (Social Care 3.9% per annum). There is also resistance to increased taxation, and services are essentially financed by working-age taxpayers for retired service users.
In a longer-term perspective, returns to capital are increasing as against those to labour (earnings). At some stage capital will need to be taxed or one will be left with a steadily shrinking tax base.
Proposal
We propose a recurrent hypothecated wealth tax in the region of 0.5% to 1% to develop and expand (not completely finance) the NHS.
Advantages
The yield is likely to grow in line with or faster than NHS expenditure. Hypothecation would be for a popular cause – the NHS. It raises money from a sector of the population (elderly property owners) that tends to use services and not pay much tax. It also raises the prospect of being able to abolish CGT and IHT, two rather ineffective ways of taxing wealth indirectly.
Principles of a wealth tax
No carve-outs
Revaluation
A recurrent wealth tax
An LSE report points up many (allegedly fatal) problems with the recurrent wealth tax but fails to notice that Switzerland has successfully operated one for many decades. (Note that Gini coefficient for wealth inequality is very similar in UK and CH.)
Outline
The idea would be to adopt and adapt the Swiss model (note: one model per canton). Include tradeable assets (money, property, stocks & shares) above a certain limit. Note Swiss model excludes pensions (in Pillar 2 and Pillar 3).
Features of the Swiss model
The Swiss model seems to differ from others that have been tried in that:
I) it is successful, or at least tolerated;
ii) the rate is low (no more than 1.1%), as is the cutoff (no more than about 150,000 CHF)
iii) the coverage is quite wide – in Bern, 41% of married households pay some wealth tax.
So your friendly local tax curled up by the fire. In fact, the idea of just for once allowing some local variation so that areas could vary their wealth tax parameters in response to perceived NHS needs is not entirely without merit – have a local referendum, in fact…
We further note that Switzerland does not really levy taxes on inheritance or capital gains. In the UK, CGT is expected to raise £18 bn in 2023/24 as against £ 7 bn for IHT. But a 1% wealth tax is projected to raise £ 57bn/year, so it would be quite feasible to abolish IHT and CGT, which are rather ineffective attempts to tax wealth indirectly.
SUPPORTING EVIDENCE
NHS Resource Need
For the NHS, to meet cost and demand pressures over the next 15 years, spending needs to grow on average by at least 3·3% per year in real terms; however, to improve the quality of services, reduce waiting times, increase staffing numbers, and invest in capital, spending will need to grow on average by at least 4% per year in real terms
For social care, to meet cost and demand pressures over the next 15 years, spending needs to grow on average by 3·9% per year in real terms; improving financial protection by introducing a means-tested threshold of £100 000 and a maximum contribution of £75 000 in England would require even more in social care spending. Link here.
Household wealth is growing rapidly
So we really need to tax wealth if we are going to keep up with NHS funding needs.
Incomes are not growing (much)
So we really need to tax wealth if we are going to keep up with NHS funding needs.
Initial costing
The following calculation excludes both private and State pensions, in line with the Swiss model – this may well need to be revisited.
Household net worth was revised up by £0.5 trillion to £12.3 trillion in 2021, mainly because of household pension entitlements being revised up by the same amount (link).
Planned DHSC TDEL is £187bn in 2023/24, up from £182bn in 2022/23 in cash terms (a 2.7% increase). The Treasury has set planned totals up to 2024/25, which would see the health budget rise to £190bn in cash terms (a 1.7% increase on 2023/24): link
In 2023-24 we forecast National Insurance contributions (NICs) to raise £172.3 billion. That represents 16.3 per cent of all receipts and is equivalent to around £6,100 per household and 6.7 per cent of national income.
NICS and the new tax
£57bn + £ 172.3 bn = £ 229 bn, which is greater than the planned £187bn DHSC expenditure.
ANNEX: Pensions
There is clearly a difference between different types of pensions. On the one hand, some are merely tax-advantaged savings products and clearly should be included. At the other end of the spectrum, there is an opinion that the State pension gives the pensioner no legally enforceable right and so it should not be included – it is clearly non-tradeable, in any case.
Private pension wealth makes up 42% of UK household wealth, and in 2021, £115 billion was contributed to workplace pensions by 22.6 million people and their employers.https://ifs.org.uk/articles/private-pensions-explained [Something about public pension not giving enforceable right]
In 2018, pension liabilities of central and local government comprised:
£4.8 trillion of state pension entitlements (224% of 2018 gross domestic product (GDP)) – is this the same as state pensioner wealth?
An interesting class on the Homeric Hymn to Hermes in the programme of the H M Classics Academy led to a discussion of what the lyre that Hermes made from a tortoise may have been like. I personally was far from sure what a lyre was and whether it was the same kind of thing as a lute…
I think that this video may be the most relevant from the Michael Levy collection – he has many lyre-related videos, but this one seems most directly to respond to
There is a freely-available article on academia.edu here (you may need to create an account) here on acoustic analysis of a reconstructed chelys which begins with an informative discussion of the reconstruction. And there is a lot of other material in the Internet that is either marked by imagination rather than scholarship or not freely accessible. But there is a pirated version of M L West’s Ancient Greek Music (1992) here and you can search through it for ‘tortoise’, ‘Hermes’, ‘gut’ and so on.
There seem to be two components: (a) impose VAT on private school fees (b) remove the relief on business rates for private schools.
VAT measure: What is the tax base?
The Independent Schools Council gave a total of 554,243 pupils at 1,395 ISC member schools (https://www.isc.co.uk/media/9316/isc_census_2023_final.pdf). It also states that the UK independent sector as a whole educates approximately 620,000 children in over 2,500 schools, although no source is given (https://www.isc.co.uk/research/). The ISC census gives 66,325 (11.9%) boarders and hence 88.1% non-boarders. The census gives average (mean) termly fees of £13,002 for boarders in boarding schools, £7,297 for day pupils in boarding schools and £ 5,552 for day pupils in day schools. From the same source, 30.3% of day pupils are at boarding schools and 69.7% at day schools. So the total fee income can be estimated as 13002*0.119*554243 + 7297*0.881*0.303*554243 + 5552*0.881*0.697*554243, or about £3.83 bn per term, corresponding to £11.5bn per year
For non-small businesses, business rates are levied on the rateable value at 51.2 pence in the pound. In the simplest case then, removal of the business rate relief would yield 0.8*0.512*403 = £ 165 mn/year approx.
Overall: What is the behavioural response?
So, the schools have lost 1.73 + 0.17 = £ 1.90 bn. Taking account of VAT, to restore their position they would need to increase their fees by £ 2.36 bn, or 20.5%.
Then we need to know the own-price elasticity of demand for private education. The IFS considers values between -0.2 and -0.5, though the specific research results they quote are -0.19 and -0.26. We take -0.20 for the sake of simplicity, so a 20.5% increase in fees leads to a decrease in consumption of 4.1% approximately. This can of course include moving to cheaper alternatives within the private sector, but if 4.1% of the ISC population of 554,243 pupils moved to the state sector that would give 22,700 extra pupils.
The problem with elasticity calculations here is that you start off estimating the decrease in demand due to a 1% increase in price and then apply it to a 20.5% price shock – how reliable is this. As far as I rememember, when I used to do this kind of costing for a living, we used to take it as the best we could do in the absence of further evidence. But doctrine may have changed since.
Here is my gratuitous advice to a friend whose arts graduate daughter was looking for a job that did not involve law, accountancy or numbers:
As I said, the last resort that I know of for an arts graduate who has rejected accountancy and the law would be an Executive Officer post in the Civil Service. It’s not glamorous like the Fast Stream, but once you’re inside you get to see many interesting jobs that are snapped up before reaching the outside world. Pre-selection is done on the basis of competency examples and you get some feedback on them I think. Preparing these examples is without a doubt a strange and unusual punishment, but it’s the kind of thing a history graduate ought to be able to do, and I’m sure the young woman’s father can offer some useful comments.
So, if I was Isabel I would put ‘Executive Officer’ in Job grade on https://www.civilservicejobs.service.gov.uk/csr/index.cgi and then discard ones requiring specific skills/experience I didn’t have (unlikely at EO level) and ones I really didn’t want to do and then have a go.
She could also try filtering by history-grad type things like ‘Policy’, ‘Strategy’ ‘Administration’, ‘Communications’, ‘Governance’, in ‘Type of role’ but I wouldn’t recommend it because there’s a definite tendency to label things ‘[Project/Operational] Delivery’ even if they aren’t.
Now that I think of it, I think that other non-CS refuges for beached arts graduates would be Corporate Communications and Public Relations, but I have no special knowledge in these fields.
So after having first offered my services on 29 May, I finally got to run an online ‘Speaking Cub’ with students from Kharkiv (Ukraine) on 21 December. There were six student participants – at about B1 level – and they were well pleased with the opportunity to talk to a native speaker in a session that lasted about 60 minutes.
The Oxford Kharkiv Association newsletter of 23 October had this request for native English speakers (possibly having some connection with Oxford) to conduct online sessions with students from Kharkiv.
If you want to buy a Russian book without directly supporting the Russian economy you can just put “[ISBN]” -site:.ru into Google and that will give you Internet pages outside the .ru domain where that ISBN occurs.
So in the case of the book illustrated “978-5-02-026520-2” -site:.ru. It’s also worthwhile trying differing formatting of the ISBN, like “978-5-02-026520-2”, “978-5020265202”, “9785020265202”.
Notes of an idealist 