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The fundamental problem of designing a wide scope general revenue tax can be reduced to the selection of the base used for administering the tax. Our current personal income tax is a hybrid version of a tax assessed on the basis of a tax unit's annual income receipts. An alternative to an income‐based tax that has received much theoretical treatment but little actual application is an expenditure‐based tax. An expenditure tax (also called a consumption tax or cash flow tax in the context of this paper) differs from an income tax in that it exempts net saving and investment from the tax base. Though the details of a consumption tax design are discussed more fully elsewhere in this paper, the tax base of an expenditure tax is roughly determined by subtracting net savings from gross receipts (including wages, tips, salaries, income from investments, interests, etc.). Withdrawals from savings constitute dissavings and are appropriately included in net savings. The cash flow tax, with wealth transfers deductible to the donor and included in the tax base of the recipient, would be a tax on an individual's standard of living. Similar to the present income tax standard deduction, some universal credit or exemption for a small level of consumption could be allowed.

Primary teaching trainees were given a 1‐week placement in environmental science centres, to learn about teaching children in non‐school contexts. The placements were mainly in the South West of England, and included both residential and day‐visit centres. Evaluation was through written and oral feedback from hosts and students, against a set of criteria. The article provides a rationale for such placements within a PGCE programme, describes how they operated in practice and analyses the feedback to make recommendations for future operation of the programme. It recommends provision of more documentation on placements at the planning stage, and proposes a more structured programme for working with children and materials development. The article makes recommendations for further research into the logistics of such placements, the impact of materials developed by trainees, their role and status during placement, and potential benefits of negotiating their own placements. It concludes by discussing the implications for placements more generally.

Firstly, I must point out to the reader that this article differs a little from the speech actually given at the conference. My second explanation is the inevitable statement that any views expressed here are entirely my own and do not necessarily represent official Cheshire County Council views.

I start this talk with two acknowledgements; the first, to my colleagues on the recent Library Association Working Party on Community Information Services. Our report is due to be published by the LA in the new year and I have based a lot of this talk on our conclusions. Secondly I must acknowledge many discussions with Alex Wilson, Director of Libraries for Cheshire, and the freedom that he has given me to pursue ideas in this field.

The education voucher is a method of financing education which allows parents to select suitable schools for their children. It gives each child of school age a voucher or grant equal to his or her appropriate share of State education. The parent takes the voucher to a chosen school, which encashes the voucher with the Local Education Authority. The school then has its own income to spend as the Head and Governors decide.

VINE is produced at least four times a year with the object of providing up‐to‐date news of work being done in the automation of library housekeeping processes, principally in the UK. It is edited and substantially written by the Information Officer for Library Automation based in Southampton University Library and supported by a grant from the British Library Research and Development Department. Copyright for VINE articles rests with the British Library Board, but opinions expressed in VINE do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the British Library. The subscription for VINE is £17 per annum and the period runs from January to December.

Wilhelm Launhardt (1832‐1918) is a founder of mathematical economics. His main work, Mathematical Foundations of Economics, published in 1885, was translated into English in 1993. As an engineer, he contributed to the field of not only engineering, but also of economics and, in particular, to those parts in economics which can be treated fruitfully with mathematics. Launhardt developed his work independently from the French engineers, but based it squarely on the work of the agricultural engineer von Thünen. He made references to the economists Sax, Walras and Jevons. His main economic contribution lies in founding location theory but, beyond that, he contributed to the mathematical treatment of economics, labor economics, monetary economics and technology economics with a special emphasis on railway issues from a locational point of view. Hence, it is the purpose of this paper to show how Launhardt used mathematics in his engineering‐based approach to the economics of location and technology.

Little attention has been given to the needs of local authority councillors for well over a decade; a period in which the changes imposed by national government have made it necessary for councillors to keep up to date in all areas of local government provision. This paper attempts to provide a brief assessment of the information seeking behaviour of local authority councillors and the importance of information to them. By interviewing a cross section of local councillors and sending a questionnaire to selected information providers the study has identified the sources of information available for and most used by councillors. The research has shown what information the councillors consider important and their methods when seeking information. The survey of questionnaire responses has exposed the similarities and differences in the ways that information is provided for and taken up by councillors. Pointers for further research are suggested.

C.A.R. Crosland (1918‐1977) was a British politician and a Cabinet Minister. He was also a former lecturer in economics at Oxford. His interests in Labour politics and in the mixed economy led him to write The Future of Socialism. Published in 1956, it is a contemporary classic of political economy and social economics. Abridged when it was reprinted in 1964, however, the edition of the Future which readers today will know is significantly different from the original edition that exercised so much influence in the 1950s. Attempts to provide a variorum that identifies the differences between the editions. Finds that 172 pages were subject to alteration and deletion. Suggests the ways in which the changes might have altered the message that the author intended to convey.

WHAT WITH one thing and another, and especially the weather during our so‐called Spring, not only had I attended no cricket by the end of May, but I completely forgot to make my characteristic song‐and‐dance about the fact that last month's issue of this Organ saw the completion of ten years of NLW.