Britain’s tax system combines the worst of the US and Scandinavia

What we’re thankful for in media in 2025

Two dozen Poynter colleagues reflect on 2025’s bright spots, including brave local reporting, ‘Andor,’ meme Fridays, WIRED scoops and … a mug warmer?

The UK’s experiment in eating the rich while shrinking the state has left everyone worse off

If I asked you which country has the most progressive tax system in the developed world — where high earners hand over an especially large share of their income relative to the average worker — what would your answer be? Perhaps Sweden? Denmark?

The answer is in fact Britain. According to the latest figures from the OECD, 45 per cent of top earners’ salaries goes on taxes and social contributions, compared with 29 per cent for the average worker, for a top-to-middle gap of 16 percentage points. Scandinavian gaps come in at about 12 points. Northern Europe’s social democracies tax everyone from bottom to top at a moderately high rate. In Britain, taxes at the top are comparable to Denmark and Norway but the average Briton is taxed less than the average American.

Britain’s tax system combines the worst of the US and Scandinavia

‘Used the influence of the union’: Ex-CFMEU leaders jailed over kickbacks

Two former NSW CFMEU officials have been jailed after pleading guilty to pocketing thousands of dollars in bribes from a construction industry figure.

Darren Greenfield, a former NSW secretary of the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union, and his son Michael, a former state branch assistant secretary, pleaded guilty this year to corruption-related offences after reaching a plea deal with prosecutors

In a decision on Friday, District Court Judge Leonie Flannery sentenced them to a minimum of 10 months and six months behind bars respectively.

The duo “used the influence of the union for their own personal benefit”, the judge said.

It marks the first time union officials have been sentenced for corruption offences introduced in the Fair Work Act in 2017 in response to recommendations of the trade unions royal commission.

“No penalty other than imprisonment is appropriate,” Flannery said. The judge emphasised the importance of deterring others in imposing full-time jail terms.

Bribes totalled $30,000

The court heard Greenfield snr took $20,000 in cash in four payments while his son received $10,000 in two payments from a union member and co-offender known as AF.

They pleaded guilty to bribery offences covering three of the six payments, totalling $15,000, but the other payments were taken into account during sentencing.

The Saudification of America Is Under Way. “Jamal Khashoggi’s plight and murder was a warning sign for the US, of the impending loss of freedom and censorship that would sweep the country.”

U.S. Office of Government Ethics – Three 278 transaction reports for Trump posted to OGE Presidential and Vice Presidential Financial Disclosure Reports

Certified reports listed here are those submitted by current (and former) President and Vice President. These reports can be downloaded without completing an OGE Form 201.

All other nominee and appointee reports->

Trump, Donald J. White House Office, President Termination Financial Disclosure Report
Trump, Donald J. White House Office, President 2020 Financial Disclosure Report
Trump, Donald J. White House Office, President 2019 Financial Disclosure Report
Trump, Donald J. White House Office, President 2018 Financial Disclosure Report
Trump, Donald J. White House Office, President 2017 Financial Disclosure Report

Pence, Michael R. Office Of The Vice President, Vice President Termination Financial Disclosure Report
Pence, Michael R. Office Of The Vice President, Vice President 2020 Financial Disclosure Report
Pence, Michael R. Office Of The Vice President, Vice President 2019 Financial Disclosure Report

“Is not it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope; perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity."

~ Vaclav Havel 

 Is not one lesson of history not to take anything for granted?

JAMES MARRIOTT

We shouldn’t expect democracy to last for ever

All political systems decay — perhaps ours is not malfunctioning but is simply growing old, and cracks are showing

James Marriott

Monday November 24 2025, The Times

Near the beginning of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire — that sprawling survey of a thousand years of crisis, decay, tragedy and collapse — the historian Edward Gibbon supplies a few sarcastic observations on the shortcomings of various forms of government.

His comments on democracy are scathing and brief. According to the system of “democratical government” in which sovereignty is handed to that highly unpromising political actor the “unwieldy multitude”, power is “first abused and then lost”. What more is there to say? All political systems are vulnerable to corruption. The most stable way of selecting a ruler, Gibbon suggests, is probably hereditary monarchy.

Few modern readers share this periwigged 18th-century elitist’s distaste for democratic government. But to those of us who cherish democracy, the perspective of an outsider for whom our system was merely one absurd aberration among many is a useful challenge.

The crisis of the democratic West (for which the latest depressing evidence is an Ipsos poll suggesting nearly half of western voters believe democracy is broken) has been endlessly puzzled over. Readers will be familiar with the leading theories: distrust of elites, wealth inequality, immigration, polarisation.

• How Spain is still wrestling with Franco’s legacy 50 years later

Doubtless there is truth in all those ideas. Less palatable is the thought that all political systems eventually decay. Why should democracy be an exception? It is a recurring human error to mistake the arbitrary circumstances of the present for indestructible laws of the universe. For believers in medieval kingship, the monarch was divinely appointed and the social hierarchy over which he ruled was eternal, the human portion of the “great chain of being” that ran from God in heaven to the lowliest earthworm. That view of human affairs did not long survive the events of the French Revolution.

While I am not aware of anyone who regards democracy as supernaturally ordained, many in the 21st century have got into the unconscious habit of viewing democratic government as predestined, the end point of centuries of political evolution. This is premature.

Modern democracy is not very old. Louis XVI could look back on 900 years of French kingship by the time he went to the guillotine. In this country, the whole adult population has enjoyed the franchise for less than a century. In the US some progressives date true democracy to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which removed the last obstacles to African American voters. In Switzerland the vote was extended to the female half of the population just over 50 years ago. To a visitor from another time this would seem scant evidence for the idea that there is anything inevitable about our way of doing things.

• 25 ways to modernise the royals… by a republican!

We too easily forget that democracy, like any other system of government, is merely the product of historical circumstance. For the duration of its history modern democracy has been able to rely on two obviously remarkable facts: the 200 years of unprecedented economic growth that followed the Industrial Revolution, and an increasingly educated and literate population.

Until recently, rising literacy meant democracies could rely on electorates increasingly capable of making rational decisions based on an accurate picture of the world. And relatively consistent economic growth gave us politicians whose obligatory election-time promises of a wealthier future generally tended to come true. What happens to the quality of democratic decision-making when screen-addicted voters no longer live in the real world? And what happens to faith in the system when a new age of stagnant growth means the endlessly promised better tomorrow can never arrive?

It may be that all political systems contain the seeds of their ultimate decay. The oligarchy of wealthy families that ruled the Republic of Venice gave their city first a golden age but then centuries of sclerosis and decline as the restriction of political and economic privileges to a tiny elite helped destroy the state’s political and commercial dynamism. Autocratic rulers possess the initial advantages of decisive action and centralised leadership. But as Gibbon well knew, even strong leaders lapse into despotism or madness.

• Belarus opposition leader among winners at free speech awards

One could assemble a similarly fatalistic account of the progress of democracy. Perhaps what we are seeing in the 21st century is not a political order that is malfunctioning but one that is merely growing old. It may be that the crucial democratic right to criticise power eventually degrades into toxic cynicism, fuelling dangerous public hatred of all leaders and discouraging talented people from entering government. And just as monarchs will always prefer to extract money from their subjects rather than cut back spending on new palaces, it may be that democratic electorates will always prefer to extract money from future generations via perilously expanding debt rather than shouldering unpleasant tax rises in the present.

The tyranny of the majority, democracy’s most widely noticed flaw, may turn out to be more profoundly destabilising than anticipated. When one demographic group becomes electorally preponderant (such as older voters in modern democracies) and allocates itself social and financial privileges, it not only punishes other groups but eventually degrades faith in the system. The young who languish in squalid rented housing are not only politically unlucky but sceptical of the existing order. Democracy may not seem so sacred to those who have been punished by it.

This is not to preach doom. Nothing in history is fated. Rather it is to caution that democracy has not always seemed as obvious or inevitable to outsiders as it does to us. An appreciation of the long view need not inspire pessimism but it should inspire a salutary sense of the extraordinary and precious fragility of the way things are. 

One lesson of history is not to take anything for granted.

We’re insanely hubristic’: how The Rest Is History became the world’s biggest history podcast

‘We’ll die before we run out of history - Sydney 26 and 27  Nov 2025 sold out’

Michael William Duncan (born February 14, 1980) is an American political history podcaster and author.  Revolutions, ran for ten seasons over the course of nine years, covering the American, French, and Russian revolutions, among others.

Mike Duncan discusses the Velvet Revolution and "Velvet Divorce" in a podcast episode of 

"Everything Everywhere Daily". The Velvet Revolution was the 1989 non-violent transition of power in Czechoslovakia, while "Velvet Divorce" refers to the subsequent peaceful split of the country into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Duncan is the host of the history podcasts "Revolutions" and "The History of Rome". 

• Velvet Revolution: A non-violent, peaceful transition of power in Czechoslovakia that occurred from November 17 to December 28, 1989.
• Velvet Divorce: The subsequent, equally peaceful separation of Czechoslovakia into the two independent countries of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, which took effect on January 1, 1993
• On Bluesky bsky.app/profile/theresthistory.bsky.social

Public service hit with sweeping austerity cuts

 

 Public service hit with sweeping austerity cuts

John Kehoe and Ronald Mizen

Nov 25, 2025 

Finance Minister Katy Gallagher’s department has ordered federal departments and agencies to outline sweeping spending cuts worth up to 5 per cent of annual budgets, in a move intended to rein in ballooning public service costs.

The Finance Department has written to cabinet ministers and public service bosses asking them to detail how they will meet the cost savings target, according to sources familiar with discussions but not authorised to speak publicly.

Finance Minister Katy Gallagher. Dominic Lorrimer

The savings are in addition to the standard 1 per cent annual efficiency dividend, which is a mandatory budget reduction for operating expenses of government departments.

The post-election austerity drive across the public service comes as Treasurer Jim Chalmers and Gallagher prepare to deliver a mid-year budget update in December, with deficits projected for the next decade.

The savings are not expected to be finalised for the mid-year budget, but are expected to be outlined in the May budget, sources said.

Federal departments and agencies include bodies such as Treasury, the departments of agriculture, health, education, foreign affairs and trade and the Australian Taxation Office.

Across the public service, departments are in the midst of laying off non-permanent contractors to reduce their costs, public servants said.

Departments are also reducing their head counts through natural attrition and freezes on hiring for non-essential roles.

For example, Treasury plans to cut 250 jobs over two years, a 15 per cent head count reduction from its average staffing level of 1600 in 2024-25.

The CSIRO announced last week it would shed up to 350 positions, in addition to more than 800 roles it has cut over the past two years.

Officials said voluntary redundancies for permanent public servants appeared to be inevitable to meet cost-saving targets, sources said.

At the May federal election, Labor pledged to find $6.4 billion of savings in the public service across four years, with the bulk of the savings in the final year of the forward estimates.

However, the savings goal of up to 5 per cent that departments have been ordered to fulfil is for a single year.

The revelations come after The Australian Financial Review in January reported that Labor had not budgeted for as much as $7.4 billion in increased public service wage costs caused by a hiring boom and a big pay deal for about 185,000 workers.

Public sector wages data published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics this month showed spending on federal public sector wages was $40.9 billion last financial year, an increase of 9.5 per cent, on top of a 10 per cent rise in 2023-24.

The Albanese government faces billions of dollars in public sector funding “cliffs”, which bureaucrats warn threaten service delivery, key government initiatives and thousands of jobs.

Key government departments including Health, Climate and Energy, Social Services and Attorney-General’s sounded the alarm in their incoming briefs to ministers, warning of budget cuts as large as 50 per cent in coming years and asking where they should plan to cut workers.

The worst of the looming budget shortfalls take effect from 2026-27, when funding expires for at least 100 programs, and likely dozens more.

Even before the latest savings directive, departments were scrambling to cut spending as thousands of new hires, above-inflation pay rises and a surge in workers’ compensation expenses caused blowouts in public service budgets last year worth more than $1 billion.

In its analysis of Labor’s election costings, the independent Parliamentary Budget Office assumed that the public service would have to shed 22,500 staff to meet Labor’s $30 billion wages forecast.

Asked about the planned spending cuts across the public service, a spokesman for Gallagher said the Albanese government was continuing to find responsible savings while delivering the services Australians expected.

“We delivered almost $100 billion in savings and reprioritisations in our first term, including $5.3 billion in savings from non-wage expenses like contractors, consultants, and labour hire – and have committed to a further $6.4 billion in savings over the next four years,” the person said.

“Departments and agencies are responsible for managing their allocated resources and finding savings and reprioritisations to assist with budget repair.”

Canberra-based former Department of Finance deputy secretary Stephen Bartos said the public service was finding it challenging to meet budget targets.

“Anecdotally, a number of agencies are feeling pressure on departmental expenses and finding it hard to make ends meet,” said Bartos.

Labor’s under-the-radar efforts to rein in bureaucracy costs come after it criticised former opposition leader Peter Dutton during the election campaign for vowing to slash 41,000 public service jobs in Canberra.

The total public service workforce has grown by about 38,200 since 2021 to 193,500, according to the Australian Public Service Commission.

Across the public service, the head count jump has been partly offset by reducing reliance on contractors and consultants, which grew rapidly under the former Coalition government.

John Kehoe is economics editor at Parliament House, Canberra. He writes on economics, politics and business. John was Washington correspondent covering Donald Trump’s first election. He joined the Financial Review in 2008 from Treasury. Connect with John on Twitter. Email John at jkehoe@afr.com

Ronald Mizen is the Financial Review’s political correspondent, reporting from the press gallery at Parliament House, Canberra. Connect with Ronald on Twitter. Email Ronald at ronald.mizen@afr.com

Andrej: “Software 1.0 easily automates what you can specify. Software 2.0 easily automates what you can verify.”

 

Trump moves to roll back protections for plants, animals under Endangered Species Act

AP: “The Trump administration moved Wednesday to weaken the popular Endangered Species Act in an attempt to restore changes made during the president’s first term that were later blocked by a federal judge

 Andrej: “Software 1.0 easily automates what you can specify. Software 2.0 easily automates what you can verify.”

Reform piles high the politics of hate

Judge issues order blocking IRS from sharing taxpayer information with ICE

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly found the Trump administration policy was "unlawful."

 

Issue 97 – This is hardship Molly White

 

Trump buys millions in Boeing bonds while awarding it contracts Responsible Statecraft

 

Trump and big tech take two more stabs at ending AI democracy Blood in the Machine

 

 ‘The whole thing stinks’: outsourced ATO call centre workers shocked by conditions as callers complain about inexperienced staff

Big fines, little paid — the battle in Australia's illicit tobacco market

Donald Trump Faces New MAGA Discontent Over AI Proposal Newsweek

Trust Is The Missing Factor in The AI BoomEdelman

ICE Is Hiring Literally Anybody,

ICE Is Hiring Literally Anybody, and It’s Terrifying Many recruits have criminal backgrounds or can’t pass open-book exams on officer conduct, yet they’re allowed to tear children from their beds at night.

Does taxing the wealthy control inflation?Q

I was asked recently by an email correspondent if a government that uses taxes to control inflation will always end up taxing the middle class
Read the full article…

Reform piles high the politics of hate

I have already posted once this morning on hate-fuelled politics. I have to do so again. The Telegraph has reported Reform’s hate-fuelled Budget proposals, about
Read the full article…

Dorothy Vogel, Librarian - Collector Who Fills His Los Angeles Home With Carefully Sourced Clutter

Dorothy Vogel, Librarian With a Vast Art Collection, Dies at 90

On modest civil servants’ salaries, she and her husband amassed a trove of some 4,000 works by art-world luminaries, storing them in their one-bedroom Manhattan apartment.

Dorothy Vogel, a librarian who, with her postal-clerk husband, Herbert, bought thousands of works from future art stars like Sol LeWitt and Donald Judd, stashing them in their cramped one-bedroom New York apartment and eventually handing over the entire collection to the National Gallery of Art without ever turning a profit, died on Nov. 10 in Manhattan. She was 90.

A Collector Who Fills His Los Angeles Home With Carefully Sourced Clutter 

Jonathan Pessin has stuffed his apartment with the fruits of his obsessive search for the “best, weirdest version” of seemingly everything.

It HAD TAKEN several months of scouring flea markets before Jonathan Pessin finally found the weathered, hollow fiberglass Coke bottle that now stands sentry between the dining and kitchen areas of his loft in Los Angeles’s industrial Frogtown neighborhood. Reportedly produced by the Coca-Cola Company circa the 1970s or 1980s, the six-foot-tall sculpture was one that Pessin, a collector and dealer of strange objects and furniture, says he had been “thinking about seriously” for quite some time, a kind of white whale in his yearslong pursuit of tracking down various quotidian items rendered in Claes Oldenburg-like proportions. He’d recently lost out on a plastic rotary phone fit for a giant (“It still haunts me,” he says), though who knows where it might have gone in a 1,500-square-foot space already overstuffed with a to-scale sculpture of the Modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe; a massive leather chair modeled on the glove of the legendary Yankees center fielder Joe DiMaggio; a human eye-shaped bowling ball that lolls on Pessin’s couch in place of a throw pillow; and a papier-mâché Ticonderoga pencil, nearly as long and yellow as a school bus, that lines the balcony railing of the bedroom upstairs. There, lying across the duvet, is a pair of jeans so large, it makes the mattress seem as if it’s taken off its own pants.

I want the best, weirdest version of something, and I want to live my life like I’m in a sculpture garden,” says Pessin, 51. He glances down from the sleeping alcove into a raw open-plan apartment with 22-foot-high, wood-beamed ceilings that’s filled wall to wall with his many aesthetic fixations: Before his oversize phase — which he’s now renouncing, having noticed ironically large objects becoming trendy in design circles and online — there was the tangential-but-different papier-mâché one. Prior to that, he collected art with donkey iconography, including a beat-up painting in his stairway punctured with two bullet holes that “supposedly hung in a Mexican bar, where they used to get drunk and shoot at it,” he says. Over the years, he’s accumulated several heavily patinated brass Rubik’s Cubes, an assortment of coin-operated kiddie rides and myriad hand-shaped sculptures in plaster or wood. Lately, he’s into perforated metal pieces and bringing outdoor furniture inside, whether the towering cactus-shaped planters that flank his 1970s B&B Italia white leather sofa, or the trio of textured fiberglass boulders that serve as his coffee table — for now, at least, until he once again rearranges the hundreds of wares within his home. (His friend the Los Angeles-based designer Pamela Shamshiri sometimes helps.) “I buy ridiculous things, but I like to think my taste is evolving,” he says. “In a way, this loft is like the inside of my brain.”

Pessin never intended to have this much stuff. Nearly a decade ago, he began building his object library — best viewed, perhaps, as a collection of many subcollections, worthy of its own cataloging system, not that he’ll ever be that organized — after falling for the thrill of the chase, that sense of unexpected discovery, at flea markets like the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. He now shows up before sunrise, flashlight in hand, ready to race through its hundreds of stalls as the doors open at 5 a.m., hoping to snatch up treasure before the other pirates. This quest led him to estate sales, junk shops, art auctions and prop houses, where he’s always searching for an acquisition that might “somehow fill the hole in my heart,” he jokes, “though it rarely does.” And yet living with clutter may have always been his destiny: As a child in Brookline, Mass., he collected rocks, went antiquing with his mother, rarely missed “The Price Is Right” — even today, he prides himself on knowing how much something should cost, a skill that proves useful when haggling — and slept in a converted closet under the stairs, which he says prepared him for the series of flexible, atypical Los Angeles dwellings that he’s inhabited since he moved to the city in his 20s to work in the film industry. “I gravitate toward heavy things and metal things, and I’m sure that has to do with some sort of permanence,” he says. “Glass makes me nervous. Ceramics make me nervous.”

NOT LONG AFTER Pessin became a staple on the collecting circuit, he had amassed enough inventory to become a dealer himself. At the time, he was mostly focused on the kinds of small objects and quirky knickknacks that now crowd his own tables and bookcases, as well as anonymous art, unsigned works that might — though probably not — have been made by a master, or just someone talented enough to create something visually interesting or at least replicate something well known. In Pessin’s home office, tucked into a nook under his staircase, there’s a verdigris Jean Prouvé-esque desk beneath a wall-hugging facsimile of a geometric Frank Stella painting. He also owns works reminiscent of those by Ruth Asawa, Piet Mondrian, Alexander Calder, Richard Diebenkorn and many others; when he once tried to get a wooden sculpture authenticated by an auction house via representatives of the Colombian sculptor Fernando Botero, the artist himself wrote back in all caps that the piece wasn’t his, only further arousing Pessin’s suspicions.

As his name and collection grew, top interior designers such as Kelly Wearstler and Sally Breer also took notice; he soon began selling them art and furniture for their projects. “His perspective is so refreshing and irreverent,” says Breer. “He’s not precious, and he’s got a sense of humor, but there’s also a refined elegance to how he appreciates quality.” Pessin’s hobby had, in effect, become a full-time enterprise. He named it NFS, after the industry term “not for sale,” referencing his own habit of inquiring about items that other dealers weren’t willing to let go. At first, he sold directly from his own loft, which he moved into in 2014; he’s since taken over both an adjacent showroom and overflow storage space from artists who’ve given up their studios within the complex, a maze of low, gray stucco warehouses that were built around the 1940s. The only problem, Pessin says, is he “sometimes experiences pangs of pain” when a customer tries to purchase a piece he’s not ready to relinquish. And there are certain items that are, indeed, NFS, notably his series of works by the late 20th-century artist and designer Robert Loughlin. Employed by both Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat as a picker at New York’s flea markets and vintage stores, Loughlin repeatedly painted the same strong-jawed, cigarette-smoking beefcake visage on mugs, tables, chairs and other surfaces. As the lore goes, his eye was so discerning, he once found a genuine Salvador Dalí painting for $40 that later sold at Sotheby’s for $78,000, which perhaps explains Pessin’s fascination.

“I connect with things more than I connect with people,” Pessin says, pointing out several of his Loughlins. “But I don’t want to have to have so many things.” Still, he can’t seem to help himself — he shops seven days a week — and, really, what’s the harm in that? All this stuff will continue to glut our planet whether he buys it or not. And in an era that fetishizes minimalism, upcycling and constant self-optimization, the collector’s life is a reminder that there is, in fact, no moral imperative to the accrual or disavowal of objects. There are merely those who enjoy things — and those who don’t.

Photo assistant: Andy Cullen

In Brussels, a Designer’s Home Awash With His Own Vibrant Creations

Nov. 24, 2021

In Brooklyn, a Couple With Opposing Tastes Strike a Balance

Sept. 24, 2021