When you have a millstone tied around your ankle, it is foolish to tread water - one must cut it loose and swim to the shore with all speed.
The Spring Budget 2011 is treading water. We have an approximately £800bln[1] debt millstone around our ankles and it is getting heavier.
Overall taxes have not been reduced, and the debt still grows - an extra £500bln by 2015/6 - the State still spends and spends too much. Even after inflation is taken into consideration, the State is spending 53% more than it did in 2001. The UK is not a wealthy nation. It has a spendthrift Government egged on by vested interests. It is a nation treading water with a millstone around its ankle.
Even now, spending is not being cut, only the increases slowed. Even this is portrayed as some scorched earth policy by those who directly benefit yet do not fund the proposals they put forward or aggresively defend. How selfish and self-serving is that?
Spending can be reduced. It is a matter of priortisation and political will. It is a matter of ending costly polices. An example is drug prohibition. It costs the nation billions in crime, policing, incarceration, lost lives and livelihoods. An example is foreign wars of adventure. An example is the scandalous PFI contracts.
There is some hope. The poor are getting a little less income taxation. The prospect of owning up to the pretence of "National Insurance" and folding it in to general income tax may be proposed, but I suspect it will be a "decimalisation" exercise, in that the transition will result in the average person being bounced into paying more.
We need to pay off our debt. We need sound money and so no more Quantitative Easing. We need enterprise to be freed so it can expand, compete. A side effect is higher, more sustainable and higher earning employment. We do not need 21 "Enterprise Zones", we need the entire country to become an Enterprise Zone.
But what is in store for us? Treading water with a millstone of debt around our ankles.
[1] Enough to rebuild quake and wave-ravaged Japan five times over. Imagine the scale of infrastructure - at Japanese prices - that needs to be rebuilt. Think of that five times over. What have the Government been spending it on?
Why is it?
1 day ago
1 comments:
When government, politicians, people want, seriously want to do something, then there are many obvious reasons to do it.
When they don't want to do something there are very serious and obvious reasons why it should not be done.
Why does the Government not point out: Excuse me, we are not actually cutting spending, we are cutting the rate of increase of spending (if they are). The fact that they do not correct a bad press when they easily could, and should, indicates they are part of the con.
It's Tweedledum and Tweedledee, pointing fingers at each other and crying "shame", when actually they run the same business as they see fit.
They may think they are benefiting their class but no one benefits when everyone is made poorer.
Can someone give Maggie a call? At least she got it half right.
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