Excitement building and more migration thoughts

Friday April 25th we are off to walk the camino norte stages from Bilbao to Santander. Well lets be fair its Bilbao for lunch if I have my way and then bus to castro urdiales for our overnight stay. We will walk saturday to Laredo. Sunday 27th to Noja Monday 28th walk, bus and boat to Santander. Tuesday - Friday will be Burgos or further along the Norte. An alternative plan might be to do the Irun to San Sebastien to Zarautz which Simon missed. So much fun but we can cross that bridge in due course. I'm hoing to put some pictures in which I taken from www.davewhitson.com of the routes. I liked the look of the wee crossing on google maps. not sure its real but I do hope we can go to Galiziano via the coast. Recovery from Chemo and Radiotherapy requires patience. I'm not very good at this but I had a reassuring update from Speech therapy and nutrition when they looked at me last week. Chemo brain is a thing which means my dementia is not as fast approaching as it feels. An example of how it manifests with me is I set my alarm to go off, like most people in the morning, after the masters 1am finish it was at 8.15am today. As I write it 14:55 and I'm still on 10 minute snooze alert. Until I'm doing the job I was supposed to do I snooze it for 10 minutes. It snaps me out of my slumber and I do something. I was to get milk bread and rolls after chatting to my dad. I potted a few things up and sowed a few seeds. I made him two coffees and offered him a bacon roll. We had a long conversation about economics and my theory from the 90's which has turned into 30 years war of words. My theory started in the 80's with Thatcher's adminstration getting it all wrong in my opinion on how to address the issues faced between 1979-83. I've gone on at length about these things but the problem I believe many politicians and economists have is that they look back selectively for answers. So my theories have always been about looking forward and for example modern migration. My area of expertise is closer to the wealth migration than the war zone and economic aspirant migration. I therefore base my thesis on glbal taxation for a global age on Wealth migration not poor, desperate and in many cases highly skilled people trying to earn a living. I dont have any expertise in that area but I do believe strongly that people 9especially skilled working people) are the lifeblood of an aspirant domestic local economy. My cure for providing a society therefore is to defend our borders from the wealthy trying to flee to our economy where they can get all the infrastructure free of charge as their wealth isnt taxed. Everybody in Manchester has heard of how the Glazers wandered in and acquired one of our community assets for free. The level of taxation is probably close to zero as it was all debt reversed in at an exhorbitant level. This debt was serviced by the community and the wider football community who funded sky sports and underwrote the business model. I dont blame the Glazers for being opportunistic and doing this, Hanson Trust and all the other investment trusts had for years been taking advantage of old school economics never catching up with new accounting practices. They werent the Only Ones. It was "Another Girl Another Planet", "There's no peace for the wicked", tax regimes have always been exploited by "the beast", I tell you "Its the Truth". That was a wee musical interlude, from one of my favourite bands and I'm so easily distracted by these things. We joke all the time about old dogs new tricks. It is the truth that people who make money deciphering tax regimes for avoidance love what they do as its a clever puzzle to solve and putting barriers in their way just creates more fun. As i mentioned during my privatisation dissertations, it was not wider share ownership during the privatisation or asset stripping in the mid 80's. There was not 2 million or even 6 million new shareholders. There was a patriachal/matriarchal ownership structure where one person bought shares in 20-40 people's names. Names were the thing back then, just as they are nowadays with people opening multiple betting accounts etc to get free bets or home deliery of food etc. Skilled practioners would ask their friends if the were going for them or not and then supply the cash. Some very brazen ones would write cheques on their own account to be presented to buy shares for their friends and family. I know this quite simply because I was part of the processing unit that received these cheques and applications for shares. History tells us this wasnt really documented but my point is simply this. THey enjoyed the game so much their greed became an arms race with colleagues in the pub. An arm wrestle using family and friend networks where people would apply for 50-100 different people. Imagine nowadays with technology how many mutiple applications you could make. Back then, there was little scrutiny of multiples. Eventually towards the end scrutiny was introduced on the last few privatisations but the game had moved on to the land grab of how these former state companies could now be dissected for most gain. Shame the dissection wasn't done at the beginning to maximise value for the state. City advisors, I laugh, were obviously very good at advising the decision making politicians. Some civil servants stood tall though and hats off to the Scottish office for retaining Scottish Water. I'm sure someone will eventually get their hands on it and drive a sale through but hopefully we've benefitted from having it these last 40 years. So how do we introduce a fairer taxation based on the global aspirations of all our people. Some want to work away and return with their riches, 30-40 years later. Some want to play the game of working away but pretending to still live here and topping up their NI contributions. You might think having a whole lot of wealthy people returning to where they were born would be a good thing for the local community. As Gary Stevenson's garyseconomics you tube channel will tell you its not all plain sailing. Someone returns home with £2m they buy 7 flats and rent them out. There's no CGT when they sell. They live hear off the income which they'll put through a property company, wash it gently flat, generate £150,000 in revenue but somehow only make about £12,000 which just so happens to be because they've spent it on the flats. They will pay £200,000 to £400,000 for the flats and by having some needing more work than others its very simple to improve them. This reverses your income into capital. The capital of course is free of CGT so no tax will ever be paid. What looks on paper as a rich person coming to your country to help the local economy has don nothing more than force the prices up of property. As they sell these properties one every 3 - 5 years the anticapted revenue for them means they probably sit with £300,000 in their account at any one time and can retire very comfortably living off what Gary loves calling their passive income. The more money you come to this country with the more outrageous it becomes. Billionaires launder their cash through sophisticated models so Football teams are good ways to create a notional loss while performing the age old bottle/glass, glass/ bottle tommy cooper trick. Ok, its time for the allotment, its 15:45 and I'm feeling a dyslexic urge.