Ex Lion Tamer

I'd seen it before and it is a scary and quite entertaining (if overlong) piece. I wouldn't take it seriously though. As the response article says, it's something that has been written by their marketing team rather than proper economists, and is littered with poor assumptions/practices. If I was in their editorial team, I would be embarrassed that they have put that out. It does seem to be doing the job of raising publicity, but at the expense of the magazine's reputation.

I think it's because we've had so few genuine box to box midfielders in recent years. It was exciting to have a midfielder who would get into the penalty box and he gave us an added dimension when, as good as Cork, Morgan and Hammond were, they weren't that sort of player

I know I'm late but this is an excellent post. For all the perceived benefit of preventing terrorists there will be innocent people whose lives will be badly affected

It's the old debate of public vs private. Yes, public services like RM are badly run, but for all the efficiency of the private sector you will find prices rising and minorities not being supported (i.e. remote locations will find themselves without a postal service because it isn't profitable)

Chelsea quickly turned round their reputation from an ok upper mid table team to a major player. The thing is though it takes billions to do it. As Chelsea have found, it is very difficult to adopt a sustainability model and still be at the top. We will need more than the Liebherr millions if we are to really change the club and become a top team.

You can argue that it is necessary to monitor everyone's email in order to prevent terrorism, but to not even tell anyone you're doing it is massively undemocratic. Suffice to say I am not of the opinion that he would have tried to save Bin Laden. It's completely different and I don't really know why you would think it is the same. Bin Laden was one very dangerous man whereas millions of innocent people around the world are not terrorists.

'Betrays his country' is pretty subjective. His country betrayed its people by keep a massive programme of surveillance secret from them.

The UK is a representative democracy, which means we elect politicians who then make decisions for us. This is better than direct democracy i.e. referendums on everything because, let's be honest, the general public doesn't have much of a clue about most issues, let alone the complex pros and cons of the European Union. If people care that much they can vote for UKIP. Some will, but probably not enough.

I think the problem is the media fanning people's instinctive misconceptions. The current government isn't doing anything to try to educate people however, because these misconceptions fit with their agenda. They prefer to capitalise by introducing caps on immigration and benefits rather than educating people about what is best for the economy or necessary for people on the breadline. Labour has been guilty of this too, for example when ignoring scientific evidence and changing cannabis back to class B, because it was worried about public opinion. But at least that wasn't a serious economic matter. And of course there was the Iraq war lies which is worse really but slightly different because there wasn't a pre-existing prejudice among the public.

Anyone willing to own up to any of the top 10 misconceptions? http://www.rssenews.org.uk/2013/07/rss-commission-new-research-into-public-perceptions-of-statistics/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Autotweets Teenage pregnancy: on average, we think teenage pregnancy is 25 times higher than official estimates: we think that 15% of girls under16 get pregnant each year, when official figures suggest it is around 0.6%. Crime: 58% do not believe that crime is falling, when the Crime Survey for England and Wales shows that incidents of crime were 19% lower in 2012 than in 2006/07 and 53% lower than in 1995. 51% think violent crime is rising, when it has fallen from almost 2.5 million incidents in 2006/07 to under 2 million in 2012. Job-seekers allowance: 29% of people think we spend more on JSA than pensions, when in fact we spend 15 times more on pensions (£4.9bn vs £74.2bn). Benefit fraud: people estimate that 34 times more benefit money is claimed fraudulently than official estimates: the public think that £24 out of every £100 spent on benefits is claimed fraudulently, compared with official estimates of £0.70 per £100. Foreign aid: 26% of people think foreign aid is one of the top 2-3 items government spends most money on, when it actually made up 1.1% of expenditure (£7.9bn) in the 2011/12 financial year. More people select this as a top item of expenditure than pensions (which cost nearly ten times as much, £74bn) and education in the UK (£51.5bn). Religion: we greatly overestimate the proportion of the population who are Muslims: on average we say 24%, compared with 5% in England and Wales. And we underestimate the proportion of Christians: we estimate 34% on average, compared with the actual proportion of 59% in England and Wales. Immigration and ethnicity: the public think that 31% of the population are immigrants, when the official figures are 13%. Even estimates that attempt to account for illegal immigration suggest a figure closer to 15%. There are similar misperceptions on ethnicity: the average estimate is that black and Asian people make up 30% of the population, when it is actually 11% (or 14% if we include mixed and other non-white ethnic groups). Age: we think the population is much older than it actually is – the average estimate is that 36% of the population are 65+, when only 16% are. Benefit bill: people are most likely to think that capping benefits at £26,000 per household will save most money from a list provided (33% pick this option), over twice the level that select raising the pension age to 66 for both men and women or stopping child benefit when someone in the household earns £50k+. In fact, capping household benefits is estimated to save £290m, compared with £5bn for raising the pension age and £1.7bn for stopping child benefit for wealthier households. Voting: we underestimate the proportion of people who voted in the last general election – our average guess is 43%, when 65% actually did.

Tax may not be quite the correct term but the point is that there is a shortage of 1-bedroom properties, so people are finding themselves having to pay more but unable to move. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/mar/08/bedroom-tax-shortage-small-homes It also doesn't account for people with special needs who may require the extra space for equipment etc.

Obviously I can't speak for everyone, but I think most people on the left would acknowledge that the economy is now starting to pick up. Indeed it was some people on the right who argued that stagnation is 'the new normal' and that we had to cut our cloth accordingly. The key thing is that cutting too deep and refusing to put in place Keynesian stimulus when the economy was weak led to to three years of stagnation when we could potentially have achieved a similar result in terms of debt as % of GDP by encouraging growth. At the least we would have avoided some of the human suffering caused by unemployment/under-employment/benefit cuts/stagnant wages. The other issue is that growth will again be hindered when the next tranche of cuts come into play. Let's hope underlying growth is strong enough to counteract it. Certainly the government's infrastructure stimulus should not be scheduled so late. Whoever heard of cutting during a recession and then providing Keynsian stimulus once the economy is recovered/recovering?

Michu was the top scoring midfielder in La Liga, one of the best leagues in the world. Bony has an admittedly excellent scoring record in a league where Mateja Kezman scored 105 goals in 122 games. Bony may be great but you can never be sure when players come from Holland.

I think it's too early to be concerned about our transfer activity but I do wonder whether Cortese will decide to go on his summer holidays at a critical time in August again this year.

QT is a joke in that the left always ends up being represented by someone like Brand. It's because they are keen to have celebrities for the ratings, and most celebrities are left wing, so the non-politician spot gets taken up by them. As a result, intelligent left wing commentators are ignored

Not to mention appalling levels of poverty and inequality as a result

If free enterprise is stifled at somewhere approaching 50% then shouldn't we go for 40% or so? Why do we have to go all the way down to 20%, and go without all the benefits that government spending can bring?

Because it's beneficial to our economy to have fresh supplies of labour and skills from elsewhere in the world? And because when people are unfortunate enough to be born into countries with terrible poverty or wars the nice thing to do is let some of then get away from it and start a life here? Ultimately, why should people have to accept the hand they're dealt? The capitalist system is such that some countries with resources or which managed to get ahead hundreds of years ago have built up massive financial strength and it's very hard for other countries to catch up. Sure, we can say tough luck to poorer countries, but it's nicer to try and let some people come and share our wealth. People who write off multi culruralism are taking too short term a view. Yes there will be teething problems is the short term, but if we keep embracing different cultures, then over the next hundreds years or so these issues will cease to be relevant

And hand power to labour because elections are won on the middle ground. Although I would love the tories to return to the failed right wing policies that lost consecutive elections to Tony Blair...

Spoiling the ballot is a legitimate position but you also have to think that if none of the candidate are good enough then shouldn't you stand yourself if you think you could do better? These are all people who are trying to make a difference and ultimately no one is going to be able to exactly match your views, because everyone is different

But equally you can't have the state indefinitely propping up unprofitable businesses, they have to be allowed to fail if they really can't make enough money to pay staff enough to live. I would suspect that, in fact, even if these companies aren't making a profit, the directors are still taking home a tidy salary. But of course it's the low paid who have to make all the sacrifices

I think that bit is overly generous to Cameron and contradicts the rest of the article to be honest. So I just quoted the bit that had proper facts in it.

"Britain has control over its monetary policy in the way Greece, as a member of the European single currency, does not. As economist Giles Wilkes has previously highlighted, as Britain borrows in its own currency it could effectively print more money to pay its debts if required. Indeed, the Bank of England’s programme of Quantitative Easing has already done this – using some of the £200 billion it has injected into the UK economy to buy government bonds. The key indicator of investor confidence in buying sovereign debt lies in the price of government bonds. Although Britain and Greece have similar deficit levels, markets are prepared to lend to Britain at a much lower interest rate than that offered to Greece. Comparing ten year bond yields suggest that while the UK can borrow at around 4 per cent; Greece is facing commercial borrowing rates of over 9 per cent. Greece faces a debt crisis. Britain has a very large deficit also, but the structure of the British economy is different and our freedom of action to address the debt problem is far greater. It is clear that the markets do not consider the UK to be facing the same perilous situation as Greece; if they did, prices would reflect that fear." http://fullfact.org/blog/is_it_economically_illiterate_to_compare_greece_to_the_uk-2262

I'm tired now and can't take both you and Duckhunter on so am going to give in. But I just explained why we can't compare ourselves to Greece, please read it again. When the government compared us to Greece it was actually being pretty irresponsible (or it really is stupid). The Euro is also the reason why you can't compare us to Spain, Italy, Ireland and Portugal.

I accept that there are differences of opinion and it is impossible to get a conclusive answer. But what you've done there is pick out the only one with a low figure and ignored all the others