Obama is not very popular

US is today preparing for Government shutdown. It is an interesting concept when the lawmakers will not vote to keep paying the staff. I cannot imagine in the UK for a minute how it would even be possible for the Government to stop paying the staff in the NHS, there would be a march on Parliament to burn the place down again.

America though, is a foreign land, and there the needs of party political point scoring rise even to the level of not paying peoples' wages. It is very peculiar and breaks the first and most important rule of business too, always pay the staff. So why he shutdown, well it comes down to Obama being a lame duck President without control over congress and so their being able to stop his key initiatives, such as Medical Insurance reform - Obamacare.

He is in the position of leading a minority Government in UK terms. All this will have the side effect of crashing the markets this week, how far I am not sure, but enough as the toppy markets are always looking in September and October for reasons for a nice old correction, prior to accelerating into the year end.

It is also interesting to see just how far Obama's star has fallen, the man is a fantastic orator but a poor decision maker and in many ways not even a very good politician. Ed Milliband should take note of Obama and also President Hollande in France; indeed I think he has already. He can see that making wild populist anti-capitalist statements can get you elected. I wonder though how he plans to change the end of the story, where the wild ideas prove impossible to implement and instead the populism dies?

Tax, Growth and confused Government

I don't really understand what is going on in the Government at the moment. For a bunch of people who aspire to be Alistair Campbell like they are doing a pretty bad job.

Let's take their latest efforts on tax. Bounced by the Select Committee into reacting to the news that big companies use legal loopholes to avoid tax, the Chancellor now rushing around declaring HMRC are to have more money and Companies WILL PAY MORE. In the Telegraph today they are discussing looking at the spending habits of peoples' wives to see if there is undeclared money being spent by the self-employed. This latter point, how Orwellian is this - your other half's spending being monitored before any sort of accusation or claim is made against you.

It all sounds good to the floating Lib Dems (how many of these are left I wonder?), but makes for no impact in real terms. How does going crazy about the tax take fuel the needed growth agenda? If it does at all, it is negatively. If you want to start up a social media company, why start in the UK when you can go to the Silicon Valley and avoid all this?

And yet the true Conservative answer would be much clearer and have a better long-term benefit. The tax code is now 11,000 pages plus thanks to years of efforts on behalf of Gordon Brown. Halving this over a 3 year period would reduce the opportunities for companies and their advisers to optimise their tax payments. Similarly for individuals, harmonising and simplifying taxes so that the self-employed did not enjoy such a massive benefit over the PAYE employees could form part of this.

So instead of shouty, populist nonsense, we could have a sensible reform proposal which also highlighted the blame for this mess that lay at Labour's door.