[blogfocus saturday] creative initiatives

As the title suggests, this Blogfocus concerns those with a new, novel, creative initiative or way of looking at a particular issue which has not been done a thousand times before. Hope you enjoy it.
1

Bryan Appleyard specializes in extra-terrestrial explanations for the origins of life and this is no exception: Panspermia - the theory that life on earth was seeded from space - finds support from the discovery of hollow spheres in meteorites. These could have rained organic molecules onto the surface and got the whole show on the road. In fact, panspermia does not seem to explain very much, but it's a theory of which I have always been fond. To my mind, it implies that we are the alien invaders of earth, which is exactly what it feels like early in the morning on the Norfolk saltmarshes. Atmospheric.

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The similarly atmospheric look of Outside Story’s blog does not prepare us for his piece on the CBI: Wat Tyler’s summing up of the CBI: If the first rule of journalism is "never let the facts get in the way of a good story" then the first rule of think tank economists must be "never let the sums get in the way of a good idea". Unfortunately Wat has done just that and found the Citizens Basic Income (a version of Friedman's negative income tax) comes up short.

He then offers some food for thought: Perhaps there is some way of cutting benefits in half and scrapping council tax altogether. This would be an obvious administrative saving because the two activities would cancel each other out - so the government would be doing nothing at all. It's something to think about at least.

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