George Osborne's speech.
Discussion
AJS- said:
It might well be a good thing to spend money on, but we haven't got any. In fact we've got minus £900 billion and growing by the day.
I take your point – but I just think it’s too easy to say something like scrap the DCMS without looking at the detail. Spending on stuff like improved Broadband is a sound financial investment that could well bring commercial benefits to the UK.rover 623gsi said:
AJS- said:
It might well be a good thing to spend money on, but we haven't got any. In fact we've got minus £900 billion and growing by the day.
I take your point – but I just think it’s too easy to say something like scrap the DCMS without looking at the detail. Spending on stuff like improved Broadband is a sound financial investment that could well bring commercial benefits to the UK.You could trim departments here and there but the whole point of these departments is that they're money chasing machines. Civil servants don't get any bonus or profit share if farmers have broadband, or rural businesses get fast broadband. Their career success is measured by budget and headcount, so they'll just keep pushing for more.
You have to slash whole departments, and when we have money and a clear need for some sort of investment then look at it again.
AJS- said:
So we must realise it's not all about money, and thus keep the money flowing to the welfare system?
Well, yes, one thing you can be sure of is that poor people will generally stay poor and spend their money week to week. You're not giving them anything, you're merely sustaining their existence. This may be immoral but when you look at the alternative it's the best thing to do. If you want a genuinly feudal society where the poor and illeterate eek out a meager existence and live by crime or by begging then that's one way forward - it doesn't appeal to me, not for any high folooted moral reasoning, just that I don't want my life interuppted by beggars and buglars.True if you assume the poor are incurably stupid and can only ever live off your generosity or patronage. I'd argue they're poor for the most part because of the raft of laws, benefits and government programmes designed to help them, and the cumulative effect of these on the economy as a whole.
Trommel said:
crankedup said:
Those FTSE100 CEO's far to many still plundering Company coffers with ever increasing remuneration packages
There's only a hundred of them and it's not costing the taxpayer a penny. Big deal. I'm really not too fussed about the contribution side of things right now...how about we sort out the expenditure side first.
As a nation, we have only one real problem: productivity. Our US bretheren, for all their social and economic problems, on average are 50% more economically productive than we are. If you strip out the financial institutions which do so much - still - to make UK plc's accounts look healthy, the productivity gap is still worse.
mattnunn said:
one thing you can be sure of is that poor people will generally stay poor and spend their money week to week. You're not giving them anything, you're merely sustaining their existence.
I agree. If the government made serious cuts to welfare now it would be recessionary, cost jobs, and lead to lower tax revenues, at a time when we need growth. The time to cut (or freeze) government spending is boom time, when business can grow more than government is cutting.
skwdenyer said:
As a nation, we have only one real problem: productivity. Our US bretheren, for all their social and economic problems, on average are 50% more economically productive than we are. If you strip out the financial institutions which do so much - still - to make UK plc's accounts look healthy, the productivity gap is still worse.
Productivity in what sense?crankedup said:
All the chat about cuts, well that seems reasonable enough, it has to be. Yet good old Channel 5 last night broadcast 'cutting salaries down to size'. Those FTSE100 CEO's far to many still plundering Company coffers with ever increasing remuneration packages.
Presumably such rises have to be approved by the shareholders, so can't see how it's "plundering" as such? You can argue that payscales are totally out of whack, and I'd probably agree, but if it's a plc, that surely is an issue for the shareholders rather than Government? I can't help thinking the people who are most vocal about such matters would make much more difference if they actually became shareholders in said organisations and started raising motions rather than just frothing about it to the press.AJS- said:
So we must realise it's not all about money, and thus keep the money flowing to the welfare system?
Well (almost) every penny that's given directly to individuals is immediately returned via consumer expenditure. They used to say that a pound in circulation creates a fiver's worth of production. Plus there's all the taxation accruing as it circulates (especially on booze and fags). So the discussion in the round SHOULD account for some of this as well. It's not as if the 'rats' are being given money they flush down the bog or hide in a hole in the ground etc. As an ancillary beneficiary of (housing) benefits I can assure you that only a corner finds its way into the groak coffers (and that's pretty fast 'circulated' too). So please take some account of the overall impact of the welfare expenditure ( payment to individuals) on tax-raising, wage paying, and as a creator of the need for production too.
AJS- said:
The problem isn't that poor people breed and rich people don't, the problem is that a class of non-productive (or even counter productive) dependents are breeding at a disproportionate rate and squeezing the productive proportion of the population.
Don't overlook that a massive amount of older people are "not dying" and they are almost inevitably "not in work".Recent initiatives to keep older people in work simply cause higher youth unemployment under current economic conditions so appear rather pointless.
AJS- said:
The problem isn't that poor people breed and rich people don't, the problem is that a class of non-productive (or even counter productive) dependents are breeding at a disproportionate rate and squeezing the productive proportion of the population.
Well for the sake of argument, I shall accept your grotesquely skewed and apocolyptic view of the state of the nation.So ask yourself how best we redress this balance and make from this human stock the best we can?
The only answer surely would be to promote children from less wealthy backgrounds, to enable social mobility and to redress the inequality of monetary wealth in the economy. To do this you need state intervention, you need to tax the rich to pay for the opportunitys for the poor.
the days of wealthy industrialist given philantropy seem to have gone, the grammer school system seems to have gone, the ability to better ones opportunitys is the role of good governance.
Your supposed ideology of cutting the dead wood, would obviously be counter productive, by your own illustration you've argued yourself into a liber and left wing ideal.
Digga said:
groak said:
Well (almost) every penny that's given directly to individuals is immediately returned via consumer expenditure.
Fine, but how many pennies, on top of those distributed, get hoovered up by the delivery system's overhead?AJS- said:
Why is state intervention the only way to give opportunity and social mobility to the poor?
Because we live in a post philanthropic age, in this country anyway, we live in an age where the collection of wealth is seen as a success not an priveledge of birth or an accident of happenstance. And because there is a veritable cornucopia of consumerist good that the wealthy can no fritter their money away on.Simply put because of people like you.
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