Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Over at her excellent blog, Judith Curry is hosting a discussion that in part is about “revenue-neutral” carbon (in reality energy) taxes. This is another example of where being a generalist is an advantage. I’ve started and run businesses, so I know why revenue neutral isn’t neutral at all when it comes to an energy tax.
Figure 1. The money doesn’t always end up where you think it will go.
The reason that energy taxes are not revenue neutral is that although the government does indeed return the taxes to the consumers, there is a hidden effect working under the radar that most folks don’t think about.
A businessman prices any product based on how much money he has in it. A typical rule of thumb for manufactured products, for example, is that your product should sell for around twice what you have directly invested in producing it.
So a typical product cost analysis might look something like this:
Widget Production Cost = $10 materials + $10 labor + $10 energy = $30 total cost per widget
Widget Sales Price ≈ 2 * Widget Production Cost ≈ $60 per widget
The businessman has to do that, he or she has to get a percentage return on the money that they have tied up in the product. So I go in and buy a widget, I pay $60, and go home happy.
Now, remember that the deal with a “revenue-neutral tax” is that the consumer is supposed to get the money back from the government. According to the pundits, this means that a revenue-neutral tax won’t slow down the economy, since the taxes aren’t removed from circulation, instead they’re returned right back to the consumers. We’ll ignore the details on how that is supposed to happen in a fair and equitable manner, although that’s another interesting can of worms. For our present purposes, we’ll leave that worm tin hermetically sealed and just assume that the US Government in its brilliant wisdom has decided to impose a $10 tax on the energy that’s used to make widgets. To balance that out and make it all revenue neutral, they’ll give you that money back as a crisp new $10 bill when you buy a widget. Perfectly revenue neutral. What’s not to like?
Here’s the difficulty. Let’s run the new widget costing numbers including the tax.
Widget Production Cost = $10 materials + $10 labor + $20 energy = $40 total cost
Widget Sales Price = 2 * Widget Production Cost = $80 per widget
So I go in to buy another widget, I give the widget man $80, and the Government gives me $10 and says everything is for the best in this, the best of all possible worlds. It’s all balanced since the tax was $10 and I got the $10 back, so the Government and I are exactly even, shake hands and part revenue-neutral friends …
Except for the part where I’m short ten bucks, and the widget maker has made ten dollars extra for the same widget. The revenue is neutral, but despite that, in the case of energy taxes the net effect is to slow down the economy.
Why will the economy slow? If we have the same amount of goods at higher prices, demand will fall and the economy will slow. It’s basic economics.
And that’s why a “revenue-neutral” energy tax isn’t neutral at all … and more to the point, it’s one reason why taxing energy in any form is a really dumb idea. Even when it’s revenue-neutral it slows the economic cycle, and when it’s not revenue-neutral, it slows it even more.
w.
PS – In addition, an energy tax is a very regressive tax. An extra $10 energy tax for the energy used to commute to work means little to the CEO, but may break the bank of the janitor. Taxing energy is a bad plan for a host of reasons.
Jordan you are a fake. Goodbye.
Jordan says:
March 20, 2011 at 4:47 pm
I’m sorry you have chosen a life where you have to hide your name. I couldn’t do that myself, be in a situation where I had to use an alias to speak my mind. But everyone’s different. I just hope it doesn’t end up costing you too much.
But my point is unchanged. I don’t care what your reason is for using an alias, that fine. But using an alias to call me a liar? That’s not fine in any sense, no matter what your reason is for using the alias.
You started to lecture me as if I were an infant. I have started businesses, I have run businesses both big and small, and quite successfully. When I pointed that out, you called me “incompetent” … funny, you know, I don’t recall you being there. I guess that means … well … that you were making it up. And now you want me to treat you as an adult, with respect? Sorry …
That’s bull. You walked in the door, and the first words out of your mouth were that I was “way too aggressive”, and you counseled me from the depth of your wisdom to “count to 10”.
I have a funny way of judging people who post here. If the first words out of their mouth are about science and climate and weather and Google and the subjects of the thread, I figure they are here to discuss the issues.
If the first thing they do is criticize the way I act, and then they go on to advise me how to act, I figure they are here for some other reason. So you ended up at the bottom of the pile to begin with. Very bad opening.
Then you went on a long rant about VAT, and how VAT is collected, laying out your wisdom for us again. Unfortunately, we don’t have VAT in the US, so all of your ideas weren’t worth a bucket of warm spit.
I figured “Well, he’s way off the reservation but not totally clueless.” So I answered as politely as possible to your aggravation and your nonsense, and said that VAT had nothing to do with it. I also object to being lectured to, saying
Your response? You came back and accused me of making “vague threats”, and called my responses “crap”. Mmmmm, good tactics there, Lou.
Ira claimed that it didn’t make any difference how much money was tied up in your product. He said:
To which I replied:
Ira hasn’t come back to tell us about his business credentials, and I doubt if he’s ever been in business. But he wants to lecture me about business. Do you think that a business can invest an extra ten dollars in a manufactured product and only charge $10 more for the final product? That’s what Ira claimed, and if you agree, Friedman would slap your hand for that, you’ll LOSE MONEY unless you charge for the time cost of money.
Was I too hard on Ira? Perhaps, but my tolerance for professors trying to school me about business (or even Merger and Acquisition guys trying to school me about setting prices) is very short these days. How many businesses have you run, not advised on the merger or acquisition of, but run? I don’t know, but starting out by lecturing me about VAT didn’t impress me much about your business knowhow …
But in any case, what business of yours is a discussion between Ira and myself? If Ira has a problem, he’s a grown-up, he doesn’t need you to play nanny for him.
Bro’, you came in here telling me what I was doing wrong, and advising me to take a timeout like I was in grade school. Then you blathered about VAT as though you actually understood the discussion. Then you called my ideas “crap”, said I was “incompetent”, and called me a liar. A fine run, indeed.
Now you think I should have “politely asked [you] to explain” your brilliant thoughts … perhaps they do it that way in the UK or wherever you’re from. Where I’m from, if you talk down to a man and say his ideas are crap and call him a liar, you don’t expect him to blow in your ear and ask you to explain your brilliant ideas.
Ask you to explain yourself? What, you have more information on VAT you want to give us? You clearly are under the misapprehension that I care about your ideas.
Oh, I see. You can come in here and start off the discussion by criticizing my actions and sending me for a timeout while I count to ten … but when I reply in kind your feelings get hurt? There must be a cure for that. Perhaps you should just, I don’t know … hey, I got it! Why don’t you count to 10?
Bro’, you came in here, your first words were a patronizing lecture on how I should act, and you followed that up by calling me a liar. Any man with even a scrap of honor would have apologized for the latter when it was pointed out … but not you. You want to claim that I’m “intolerant” … you are right. I don’t tolerate anonymous fools calling me a liar, particularly when they don’t apologize when it is pointed out to them.
Try out your act in a random bar sometime and see how far you get. Tell some guy you’ve never met that you read something he wrote, and he’s way too aggressive and needs to count to ten. Then say he’s a liar, and when he calls you on it, don’t apologize, just tell him how wrong he was from the start.
But let me know first, I want to watch, and I’ll help you clean up your teeth off the floor. My point is that the reception to that kind of thing is the same all over the world. As my mom used to say “Scorch around and you’ll get burnt”.
I wish you success as well, Jordan. I hope you can find a situation where you don’t have to hide behind an alias to state your opinions. I hope you can learn to talk about science on science websites. I hope you can let Ira stand up for himself without horning in.
And most of all, I sincerely hope you stop calling people a liar and telling them to “count to 10” just because you disagree with them. It will do wonders for the longevity of your teeth.
w.
PS – I was totally serious about how I judge someone’s first post, Jordan. The first post establishes the tenor and the nature of your interest in the thread. So you should choose your words, and in particular your opening sentence, very carefully before uncapping your electronic pen.
Suppose I came into your house and was introduced to you, and the first words out of my mouth were “Jordan, I’ve read some of your writings, and you’re way too aggressive, you should take a timeout and count to ten,” and when you responded, I called you a liar and said your ideas were crap. No discussion of the issues, no talk of Google, nothing. I just walked into your house and started blasting away with both barrels.
What would your response be, Jordan? At that point would you “politely ask me to explain to examine what I had to say in more detail”? Somehow, I don’t think so …
THINK ABOUT YOUR ACTIONS AND HOW THEY LOOK FROM THE OTHER SIDE
Because that’s how your actions look from this side of the screen. As far as I know, nobody likes that kind of thing, a man coming in all full of importance saying people are wrong and someone should sit in the corner and calm down. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or wrong, nobody likes it. I may have been out of line with Ira, I’ve been wrong before.
But when you come in all gangbusters like that, Ira doesn’t matter – what you have done is to establish yourself as someone who really doesn’t care about the science but is just here to make mischief. I freely admit that may not be who you are … but from here, that’s exactly what you look like.
Sorry for getting Ira’s gender wrong.
Steve – your comment is incorrect.
Willis – Well I don’t know how you leapt to the view that I called you a liar. Your ability to interpret is still obscured by your emotional condition.
Willis: “You walked in the door, and the first words out of your mouth were that I was way too aggressive”
No – my first post here was “March 18, 2011 at 11:29 am” where I initially pointed out (politely) that I found your basic argument wrong because pricing in a competitive market is not simply a matter of totting-up your costs and demanding that payment from your customers.
But when I saw your dismissive tone towards Ira and others, I followed-up with a reply to you which was much more aligned to your own combatative style . And boy-oh-boy you didn’t like it did you.
First law of getting on with people – speak to others as you would like to be spoken to yourself.
And here’s one from the schoolyard: if you cannot take it, then don’t dish it out.
To repeat -in the land of idiotic businessment, it is your competitors who are the idiots for limiting your profits.
Another tip (if that’s not too patronising): shouting from authority never works. Not in science and not anywhere else. You may or may not have been CFO for a $40M company (I basically don’t know because I don’t have evidence either way). I don’t know how successful the business(es) is/was, or how tough (competitive) the market is/was, for how long you kept that post, how you performed, or why you left. Without the full context, the basic claim doesn’t add much.
In view of what I saw as an incrorrect analysis above, I was entitled to bring that to your attention. And your refusal to respond on the substance of the matter led me to questioned your competence when you started bleating in that combatative style you like to dish out (but you cannot hack when it comes back to you).
Willis: “You started to lecture me as if I were an infant.”
No – I was explaining my reasoning, and there may have been others on the thread who could have used an explanation of net current assets/liabilities to understand where I was coming from. Your emotional state coloured your vision. But your comment does say a lot about your emotional state.
Let me sum up:
Your statement on pricing and taxation is inconsistent (I’ll avoid the word “wrong” ) with generally accepted reasoning on competitive pricing. Link given above to let you see where I was coming from.
A lesser point (which came from your post to Ira), I don’t agree with your claim that business funds every dime from shareholder funds (and therefore deserves a return on assets on that amount). It is more complicated than that since the balance of current assets/liabilities is a potential source of funding, and the balance of taxation (all forms) does not necessarily leave the taxman sitting on cash (sure, it can do that, but I believe those situations are not the norm). And whether businesses earn a return on any dime has as much to do with the competitive environment than their cost base.
On taxtation, I referred to some business accounts to show how they have a large current liability for tax due. This combines with the timing of payments in current assets and liabilities to complicate the question about whether “baked-in” taxes paid on inputs are cash-negative to business.
Willis: “I hope you can learn to talk about science on science websites. ”
Your arguments on this thread were economic.
Willis: “I hope you can find a situation where you don’t have to hide behind an alias to state your opinions.”
Yes I have – it’s no longer an issue.
Jordan,
I respect your need for an alias when posting into the blogosphere.
On reading your paragraph above on liabilities and taxation you need to go do some homework.
Anything that shows up on the liability side of a financial statement has negative cash flow issues. If you doubt that, just stop paying your liabilities and then let me know how that worked out for you.
Jordan,
As you are savvy with financial statements check out the government of Canada return for 2010.
Most people don’t know they have “energy tax” as a line item under revenue having raised over $7 billion last year.
It would be interesting to note how they would show a new energy tax.
BTW that line item under revenue shows up in the many corporate financial statements under cost of production.
A few other tid-bits: the cost of running the government is about 17.5% of revenue.
Crown corporations cost more money to run than they take in – they operate at a loss.
It would be interesting to see how a revenue neutral tax could be implemented knowing this.
Jordan,
I’m sure you know this already, but companies need to estimate their tax liabilities and these show up as accruals. When the tax bill comes – and it always does – hopefully they have set aside some cash (this reduces their cash flow but you know that) to pay the bill.
In a hidden tax, which is what Willis was talking about I believe, the tax is present inside the product. Using an obvious example such as gasoline, if the government implemented another tax the cost of goods would go up. Because business owners generally use a markup when pricing, the actual price paid by the consumer now includes both the tax and the markup on the tax. I think this was Willis’ point.
This is basic stuff. In fact my government used to have a manufacturers sales tax that was buried in the price of goods sold. It was seen as an inefficient tax because of the markup and the government eliminated it, replacing it with a tax that was charged only when you bought the product.
If you embed a tax in a product, the price paid by the consumer will be higher than just the tax added. You don’t need to hide behind tax liability accruals to understand this.
Steve:
“Anything that shows up on the liability side of a financial statement has negative cash flow issues. If you doubt that, just stop paying your liabilities and then let me know how that worked out for you.”
You mentioned accruals. Without trying to lecture, accruals are due to the matching principle: businesses report revenue and profit for a reporting period which is not the same as the timing of cashflows. A current liability sits on the balance sheet to show the business has the benefit of cash not paid out (and therefore not cash provided by shareholders).
The other side of this is current assets (typically trade debtors) for payments due to be made to the business. Basically other people sitting on your cash. It’s great to have the sales and profit, but even better to have the cash as early as possible.
So – in terms of how you are funding your business … a current liability is “cash positive” and a current asset is “cash negative” (excuse the jargon).
A really fortunate business (with no competition) could simply pass a new tax into its prices with no loss of volume. Reported profit could be neutral. The change in cashflow position would depend on relative payment terms for trade creditors and debtors (and perhaps change in stock).
A more realistic case is a business that cannot pass the tax straight onto customers due to competitive pressures (including product substitution). Reported profit will fall because the increase in cost was not simply passed onto customers. But the net cash position depends on relative payment terms. If it has increased its prices by some amount there will be more money due to come in. Change in net cash position after the tax is introduced is then dependent on when it is due to pay its trade creditors – it could even be cash-positive (but, I should stress – profit negative).
There is another point worth making. There will be a “taxable event” where the taxman identifies a tax collector business at some point in the supply chain. This is the point where the taxman intervenes to calculate and then collect taxes. Everything else is a knock-on consequence along the supply chain. Tax is usually due after the taxable event – so the tax collector business will have a creditor for the new tax due (they get the cash for a while). The tax collector business may well suffer its share in reduced profits, but it is likely to be cash-positive and its accounts will have a large tax charge in its current assets to show it.
After all of that, I do absolutely agree that a carbon tax is bad for both businesses and their customers – especially when it is being raised for some notion of saving the planet from something which (I firmly believe) is essentially harmless.
Oops – I meant to say: “The tax collector business may well suffer its share in reduced profits, but it is likely to be cash-positive and its accounts will have a large tax charge in its current liabilities to show it.” (not current asssets)
(Steve – I came back to post as you deserved the courtesy of a reply to a fair question. )
Jordan,
Thanks for your post. Sorry for the fake statement.
I could quibble a bit about corporate taxes factoring into cash flow but there are tricky things happening out there, such as carrying losses forward. We never had that problem.
Cheers.
Jordan says:
March 21, 2011 at 12:48 am (Edit)
I’ve been trying to do just that, Jordan, in response to your words. I hadn’t said a word to you., when your first words to me were that I was too aggressive, and you asked me to take a timeout and count to 10. You followed that up by saying I was “incompetent” and that my ideas were “crap”. Then, having spoken to me as you obviously must wish to be spoken to, you followed that up with:
Sure, I’ll be glad to be conciliatory. So far I’ve just been assuming that all that talk about “count to 10” was following your schoolyard rule, that since you spoke to me in that insulting manner before I’d said a word to you, that was how you wanted to be spoken to. So I answered in kind.
Jordan, I hadn’t said one single word to you, and you open communications with me by jumping into a discussion with Ira and me to tell me where I’m wrong. What business is that of yours? That’s between Ira and me, and the answer is, it’s none of your damn business. Since your opening salvo was so aggressive, I was just trying to speak your language, to speak to you as you had spoken to me.
But since you request that I be temperate and conciliatory, how about this, I’ll ask you in a nice way:
Happy now? Or perhaps you don’t like it when someone speaks to you like that, when someone treats you like a kid who needs a time-out? Because I sure didn’t like it, and that was how you came on to me in the very first post addressed to me.
Well, if you don’t like being talked to like that (and who does), as a wise man named Jordan once told me, “If you can’t take it, don’t dish it out”.
w.
PS – If you had kept your long nose in your own business none of this would have happened. If I had been out of line with you, sure, you should definitely let me know.
But to step in uninvited to advise a man on how he and a third man should communicate is just piss-poor manners. Perhaps they do that in the UK, perhaps there you just step in unwanted to tell the lower classes how to behave.
Here in the US, sticking your nose in someone else’s business un-invited just earns you a punch in the nose, either real or verbal. You got it, and now you want to complain about it. Well, when you go outside, after you count to 10, you can complain to the other kids all you want about how Willis is so mean to poor Ira, because I’m tired of listening to it. Go lecture someone else on how to behave, because you’ve tried your act out here and it hasn’t worked. You are a pompous British twit, and I’m neither impressed nor interested. I’ve seen far too many of them in my life.
Willis – I will reply to your post this evening UK time (no time right now).
If you get the chance,you still have not explained were it was in the above text that I called you a liar. I would appreciate an explanation.
Thanks.
Willis –
Still no retraction or explanation of your accusation that I called you a liar. I’ll put that down to difference in time zones. Don’t feel shy about fessing up when you get around to it.
You cannot harp-on about me intervening in a discussion between you and Ira. This place is nothing like a forum for private conversations. How often do you see people chiming-in when they have something to add to the general flow of the thread?
You attacked Ira and others in a public place. And a passer-by intervened to pull you up on your bad behaviour.
I decided it would be interesting to approach the matter with a similar demeanour to your own direct and uncompromising style. When I said “too agressive … count to 10”, it wasn’t particularly rude or hurtful compared to your own posts.
The problem may have been lack of the respect you might think you deserve. And because of that, you completely erupted. One of the most extraordinary displays of articulated handwaving and rage I have ever seen on the internet.
A sight to behold. Enough to make Tamino blush.
If you had stopped to pay attention and ask questions, you might have stopped making an AR_SE of yourself. But you had the red goggles on and you kept going. Spluttering gobshite like “you-picked-the-wrong-guy” and “poked-a-hornet’s-nest”. Plus your own version of that old favourite: “don’t-you-know-who-I-am”. (Answer: err, no I don’t, and I’ll judge you on my own experience of you).
It was unmitigated school bullyboy stuff – what an impression!
That classic bit about picking teeth up off the floor of some random bar is worthy of further comment.
Think about it Willis, I came here for years because I found generally sober discussion. Your analogy reduces WUWT to something akin to a bar full of inadequate and emotional failures, where alchohol-induced violence is the norm.
If this is the future of WUWT, I should imagin you’ll eventually learn a thing or two about elasitcity of demand. It’s a pity, because WUWT used to be much better than this.
There is a saying “if you cannot beat them, join them”. Right now WUWT is beating them, but I fail to understand why you seem to want to join them.
Not for me, thanks.
@ur momisugly Jordan
You seem to think the business world ends at the Welsh coast. You still haven’t had the grace to take your ‘umble pie on the issue of VAT. I will ask you directly, since the issue as posed by Willis is a US “wellhead” levy, if you want to retract that bit of
nonsenseanalysis?Jordan says:
March 22, 2011 at 12:06 pm
Put it down to traveling for the last four days and not enough sleep. You have my complete and unreserved apology, you are 100% correct. You made no such allegation, either directly or indirectly. I apologize totally and abjectly for my error, it was a large one and I am humbled. Please do not take this as sarcasm, I am perfectly serious.
I guess that’s the difference in a nutshell, Jordan. I’m starting to understand the nature of the culture clash.
Where I come from, in the culture I live in from the opera house to the roadside dive, a “passer-by” who “intervenes to pull [someone] up on [their] bad behaviour” is not welcomed with open arms. Far from it. He is regarded as an intruder with ugly motives. He is seen as patronizing. He is seen as assuming a superiority (the global arbiter of “bad behaviour”) for which we have no evidence. He is shunned socially at a minimum, and much worst at the maximum. And doing it using an alias only makes a bad situation worse. Now he wants to tell us what to do, but he won’t show his face? That doesn’t go down well at any level of society here.
I’m looking from the outside, but it appears that in your culture, perhaps such actions are condoned. Further, perhaps it is the function of a particular group (those who know “bad behavior” when they see it, some upper class) to pull some stranger up short for exhibiting such bad behavior in public.
In the US, no way. That’s anathema. People don’t do that here. It’s considered extremely rude behavior.
Jordan, I’m a reformed cowboy. But when a man using an alias decides to deliberately tweak my nose, as you just said, sets out to deliberately poke me with a stick, I respond in kind. It’s called “karma”.
You misapprehend me entirely. My point (which I obviously didn’t make clear) was that interfering in other peoples business is not taken lightly in my culture. It will earn you something between an immediate social freeze-out (“I’m sorry, sir, and you are???”), to losing teeth depending on the milieu. It will never get a good reaction, only a bad one, mild or large.
People come here in part to enjoy the battles. I don’t let it stop me from producing scientific work. I see it as part of the evolution of appropriate social norms for the web.
Jordan, perhaps it was bad behavior on my part to reply harshly to Ira. I’m a reformed cowboy. All of this is learned behavior for me. My wife Ellie is inherently good. Me, I’ve had to figure out how to do it along the way.
But to paraphrase my essay called “It’s not about me“, I’m tired of being lectured by profs and toffs. I was short with Ira because it was clear to me that he’d never been the man at the sharp end of the stick. He’d never been the guy whose success or failure depended on getting the prices right. He’d never had the weight of an entire company and its employees depending only his ability to make a profit, to understand why a revenue-neutral tax isn’t. On this particular subject, his was merely a theoretical claim. And I called him on it. Was I too harsh? Re-reading it in the harsh light of day, sure. Looks like I was having a bad hair day. Ira was free to respond.
And he might have answered me … but we’ll never know, because you stepped in as his champion to defend his cause. Gratuitous, intrusive, patronizing, and un-called-for. The conversation turned, my bad. DFTT, I should know better.
Perhaps I am totally wrong about Ira. I’ve been wrong before, see my apology at the head of the page as evidence … but I don’t think so. If so, he’s free to tell me.
But then you waltzed in, Bonny Prince Charlie to a turn, to advise the lower classes about “bad behaviour” … and you are shocked when I bite back? Yes, Jordan, when someone sets out to antagonize me, I bite back. I’m a reformed cowboy, but I’m still a cowboy, we’re not big on royalty. Sorry, it’s who I am.
Now, I’m more than happy to set this all behind us and move on. I certainly bear no hard feelings, don’t have time. I do hope you reconsider deliberately antagonizing people, not a good social plan in my opinion.
My best to all, sorry for the distraction, we now hopefully might discuss revenue neutral. My point was that in the US (no VAT, thanks) the tax is paid in front. If there is a carbon tax, it’s paid at the pump. So as a businessman, more money is tied up in the product.
As a result, as a general rule I have to increase my prices more than the amount of the tax. I’m a businessman, I can’t tie up money without earning a return, that’s the game.
And that why “revenue neutral” isn’t.
w.
Willis – sir, I respect you for your last post.
I thought I had been turfed out when you showed me the door and Anthony stepped in to give me a shove.
Please don’t think I’m posh or an academic. I’m from ordinary stock , I work in the private sector and I don’t have a PhD. Like everybody else who shows up here on WUWT, I come with my own particular package of background, experience and knowledge.
I accept your points about cultural differences. But please keep in mind that you present the face of WUWT to the world. Style and presentation can count for a lot.
I don’t mind hard-fought battles. But WUWT needs to keep a cap on acrimony:
To the convinced, acrimonious debate sings to the gallery and doesn’t change much. It might even encourage a gang mentality and a closing of minds.
To the unconvinced, it is likely to be a turn-off.
To opponents, it is a spoiling tactic whihc can be used to deflect the arguments.
I know that I was winding you up and I am sorry for doing that. But there came a point when I though WUWT should have a glimpse in the mirror.
I have a great deal of admiration for what people like you, Anthony and Steve are doing. For the personal quality of your last post Willis – I will say that you have a friend in me.
On the subject of the thread, I have added further explanations in answer to Steve. We could discuss it more, or we could move on. Personally, I’d prefer to move on.
Thanks, Jordan. Moving on …
w.