And to think I thought banker bashing was out of control in these parts...

This piece of prime idiocy pure malevolence comes from the Netherlands:

"The Lower House wants the cabinet to tax at a rate of 100 percent all bonuses paid out since 2008 by state-aided banks. The House has adopted a motion from the PVV asking the cabinet to levy 100 percent income tax on all financial bonuses paid out since 2008 by state-aided banks including ABN Amro, ING, SNS Reaal and Aegon. If this is not possible, the cabinet must refuse deducibility of the entire bonus sum against corporate tax....The PVV motion was adopted thanks to the support of Labour (PvdA), the Socialist Party (SP) and the leftwing Greens (GroenLinks). The SP immediately asked for a letter from the cabinet on how it is planning to implement the motion".

Fans of coal black ironies will note that PVV stands for Partij voor de Vrijheid, or Party for Freedom.  This is Geert Wilders' lot, from whom one would have hoped better.  

You too can balance the US budget

By having a go at this interactive site hosted by the Program (sic) for Public Consultation, "a newly-established joint program of the Center on Policy Attitudes (COPA) and the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland".

I started off by zero-ing anything that the founding fathers would not have deemed appropriate, and that left me with a $62bn budget deficit.  A 10% cut in the military budget would have balanced the books completely.   Thereafter I decided I did not think much of the tax algorithms in that there was no scope, anywhere, to cut taxes in order to increase the overall rake.  Paging Arthur Laffer....

See how you do.