The Post General Election Thread

[SWP's back]

There's a decent argument that can be made which states a 1.7% (£12bn) reduction in Managed Government Spending is hardly taking the piss as the increases in the past have been ideologically driven anyway and even with the proposed cuts we will still be spending a higher proportion (as a percentage of GDP) than we did during Blairs last term in office.

It's not as if all spending is looking to be cut.

But is there a decent argument? In the last year of the Major government, spending was at 40% of GDP. In 2007/8, when spending was supposedly "out of control", it was 41%. Now there's a good argument about whether it should have been as high as that in a period of rising growth, having been reduced significantly in Blair's first term.

Clearly we had to spend more in the period 2008-10 to counter the effect of a severe recession but what are we spending on now? Osborne cut too much too quickly and that impacted growth and productivity. In the fiscal year 2013/14 we borrowed a net £84bn, and total borrowing is forecast (in your middle graph) to be at the highest ever absolute level.

As part of that spending, we spend approximately £2 on health, education and defence (£400bn) for every £1 we spend on social welfare (£200bn). If we were to get rid of Trident, that would save a total eventual outlay of something like £100bn for a weapon system we'll either never use or, if we do, the budget deficit will be the least of our worries. But we won't.

Of the social welfare payments, Pensions make up nearly 40% and they're protected so we're looking at cutting £12bn off the remaining £120bn, which is 10%. That is not coing to be quite so easy or painless.

But as I said and showed, we will still be spending more as a percentage of GDP than we were doing in 2005.

Why was no kicking off then about a lack of spending?

 

[gordondaviesmoustache]

A starting point would be to pay them with food stamps instead of cash and only allow them to be used to purchase food no fags no booze as this is very bad for the children.

make it a criminal offence for retailers to break this rule and make the punishment so severe no one would do it.

Give out clothing vouchers so the Children could be clothed and shod
Explain to parents that Benefits are a short term Safety net and not a lifestyle choice

Having sky and games consoles isn't an automatic right so the tax payers will not fund either of them

make parents attend full time back to work classes and the children could be cared for in state run nurseries ( this would create quite a lot of full time jobs)

Make sitting on your arse being paid for nothing not an option I bet the numbers claiming benefits would drop immediately unemployed males could be made to do work that benefits the community making pensioners lives easier would be rewarding and satisfying

You have to admire the Tories, they've framed the debate on cuts as a battle against "welfare as a lifestyle", and re-defined the poor as nothing more than victims of their own poor life choices. "The battle against the deficit" they've framed as a growth strategy, which it isn't, rather than an ideologically driven attempt to shrink the State, which it is.

The state being enlarged was also ideologically driven.

Without a doubt and it's something that those on the left seem incapable of recognising. Some people hold a genuine belief that a smaller state leads to a better society. Don't agree with them, but it's a valid viewpoint.

 

[urmston]

The Tories have made modest cuts to a public sector bloated to a huge degree by 13 years of New Labour binge spending.

Over the last 18 years our public services have had it very easy compared to the rest of the economy.

Even after 5 years of a freeze, if council tax was adjusted so it had risen by the rate of inflation since 1997 we'd probably need to cut it by quite a significant amount.

 

[The perfect fumble]

The state being enlarged was also ideologically driven.

Yes.

But Attlee didn't hide the fact, he celebrated it, his political opponant Winston Churchill, railed against it, but the public were not kept in the dark as to Attlee's motives and when Churchill got back in the early 50's he did little to reverse it, the welfare state was a fact.

What Cameron is doing now is shrinking the State, while pretending to do something else.

It does look like that yet although as shown above, spending is still up (as a % of GDP from where it was both ten and fifteen years ago with Blair).

Government spending is not the same as welfare spending, I'm sure you understand that.

You can view a shrinking state in terms of what it spends as percentage of GDP or what it does in our daily lives, or even how it does it. For example the Tories make great play on the shrinking size of the public sector, just under 20% of the work force, a 40% low, but so much of what the public sector did is now sub contracted, or re-defined.

Generally right wingers like to see the shrinking state in terms of percentage of GDP. That's why the NHS is never safe with them, they might support it for political reasons but their hearts not in it, if they could get way with it they'd switch to an insurance based system in a heart beat.....

Do we want better health care, or do we want to keep the NHS?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/nhs...ealth-care-or-do-we-want-to-keep-the-NHS.html

Christ! You can't criticise the right for being sluggish in the traps, this appeared yesterday morning! The groundwork has begun.

 

[urmston]

Yes.

But Attlee didn't hide the fact, he celebrated it, his political opponant Winston Churchill, railed against it, but the public were not kept in the dark as to Attlee's motives and when Churchill got back in the early 50's he did little to reverse it, the welfare state was a fact.

What Cameron is doing now is shrinking the State, while pretending to do something else.

It does look like that yet although as shown above, spending is still up (as a % of GDP from where it was both ten and fifteen years ago with Blair).

Government spending is not the same as welfare spending, I'm sure you understand that.

You can view a shrinking state in terms of what it spends as percentage of GDP or what it does in our daily lives, or even how it does it. For example the Tories make great play on the shrinking size of the public sector, just under 20% of the work force, a 40% low, but so much of what the public sector did is now sub contracted, or re-defined.

Generally right wingers like to see the shrinking state in terms of percentage of GDP. That's why the NHS is never safe with them, they might support it for political reasons but their hearts not in it, if they could get way with it they'd switch to an insurance based system in a heart beat.....

Do we want better health care, or do we want to keep the NHS?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/nhs...ealth-care-or-do-we-want-to-keep-the-NHS.html

Christ! You can't criticise the right for being sluggish in the traps, this appeared yesterday morning! The groundwork has begun.

If the NHS is so wonderful why don't other countries copy it?

I see no advantage in guaranteeing NHS staff all our healthcare.

Monopolies work well for service providers, but never for the customer.

 

[Damocles]

I'm not going to get into every point but Cameron would state that policies such as ending the situation where thousands go straight from leaving school and into a benefits way of life with 3m new apprenticeships can both help the nation long term and cut welfare.

It's treating the disease, not the symptoms alone.

The problem here though is that the numbers don't add up. There's 859,000 people on Jobseekers Allowance. If you look at a rate of "scrounger" at 20%, which is my experience with young people is MASSIVE overstatement, that's 171,800 people. Let's suggest FIFTY PERCENT are under 25 which is an absurdly ridiculous idea and we get 86,000.

86,000 people @ £57.90 is about £5 million a week or £260m a year. If those 86,000 people paid tax at the average wage of £26,000 (which is stunningly unrealistic) they'll put in £3200 a year each or £275m.

So the net gain is about £550m a year both ways with incredibly biased and optimistic projections. £550m over 20 years is £11bn.

Trident cost £20bn right now.

You can argue the increased economic spending and NI and the like of but £10bn?

My point is that the disease isn't a disease. Unemployment and poverty is not a genetic trait but one of circumstance. People don't work in many of the working class areas because, and brace yourself here, there are not many job in the poor working class areas. Creating 3 million apprenticeships does nothing if they're on the Moon as economic migration isn't an option for many of the poorest.

If the Tories want to help then their Northern powerhouse scheme is a billion times more effective than slashing benefits and an excellent reason for people to vote for them. But it has the drawback of helping people and not punishing their poverty which like it or not, many of their more extreme voters seem to want to achieve.

I appreciate that the social benefit system is currently the most expensive expenditure that we have. But the answer isn't to slash it and let the people clinging onto to it fall of the economic Earth. The answer is to put jobs in places where there are no jobs.

I'll use my current home of Leigh as an example of this. We have no workable/reliable public transport links to Manchester, St. Helens or Liverpool. The retail sector is getting there but there are more people than jobs. We have no manufacturing industry at all. There are links to Wigan public transport wise but not really enough to satiate demand. The biggest employers in the area are a Pataks factory which mainly hires immigrants from the Ukraine and Bulgaria who will work for almost nothing, JJB which is an outlet and doesn't employ millions. We have some of the lowest business density in the country and knowledge intensive employment is almost non-existent; if I couldn't drive or work from home I think I could possibly find 2 places to potentially work. Not 2 places that would employ me, I mean 2 places that are even in the same trade as I am.

Now you're a young working class lad who just finished secondary school with middle of the road results. You want to get your own house, car and all of the other things that you want to get. What are you going to do? There's no work, your choice is to move out of the area or go onto benefits until you can scrape enough together for a driving license and car. You can't get money off of your parents because they haven't got any because there's no work. You can't get a loan because there's no work. You can't get any form of Government support in this area because the benefits are getting cut and as a kid living at home with his parents you're about 265,834 on the Housing List, and they'll sort you out somewhere to live in about the year 7000. So they end up sat on JSA, living at their Mum and Dad's council house until they're 40 with nothing to show for it apart from a lifetime of unemployment to put on a CV which makes you unemployable and probably a beer or drug habit to cope with the mental health issues of it all. Others who didn't exactly have the nicest parents will literally walk out and go on the streets.

But obviously nobody is going to do that so the choices are to turn to crime, which many people do, or get themselves into council accommodation as quickly as possible. Right wingers will go mad at this but I happen to know that it's a pretty common tactic to pretend/to be pregnant amongst young people now just because it forces the Council to find them somewhere to live so they can start building an economic base from as it's well known and discussed amongst older teenagers that "the immigrants get all the houses" and that "so and so spent 4 years on the council register". Do you want to be 18 and told that you're living with parents unemployed for 4 years? Or do you tell a lie or two and get there in 4 weeks?

This is another one of my problems with this entire debate - people are talking about benefit cuts as they are a theoretical thing that happens to theoretical people. The humanity of the argument is getting lost in it.

People in my town probably DO exploit the benefit system somewhat. They use it as a source of income so that they can economically migrate to a place where they can have a job because successive Governments, Labour, Tory and coalitions, have seemed to completely forget that the Northern old pit towns exist in terms of regional development. There's no money here so the schools are shit. The schools that are shit are producing undereducated workers. The undereducated workers all compete for the same jobs. There are no jobs because there are only undereducated workers. There is no money because there are no jobs. And without money and jobs and education there is no hope and crime, poverty, addiction, mental health and all of the major societal issues that people face skyrocket. Kids that I talk to round here tell me things like how they can't wait to move into Manchester; they talk about it like it's Disneyworld where all of their hopes and dreams will come true and they can live a proper life with a proper job. It's 10 miles down the road.

My rather Laboured point (heh) is that the idea of just creating apprenticeships whilst cutting the benefits is stupid because the majority of young kids who go on benefits don't WANT to be on benefits, but are forced to due to the lack of jobs. Out of those three million, how many do you think will touch Leigh or any of the thousands of towns like it across the UK that have been left to rot by the Governments both Labour and Tory? There's nothing here to apprenticeship in because there's no business. There's no business because there's no education and the spiral starts again.

We don't need less benefits in these places, we need better organised benefits and sustainable economic growth in line with the rest of the country. The Northern powerhouse idea if implemented as promised will revitalise this part of the country and that benefits bill will go down immediately. Putting cutting benefits to pay for it is the same idea as selling your kidney to buy beer; potentially fatal and outrageously incompetent logically

 

[Number 1 is Colin Bell]

The state being enlarged was also ideologically driven.

You'd have to be more specific but let's presume it true for a minute.

The state was being enlarged to ensure that people who needed the resources the most in our society were able to access them as an ideological move.

Why is this a bad thing? Isn't the entire point of an ideological move to help people? The cutting of the benefits for the reasoning of "getting scroungers into work" is not only attempting a form of social control but also has the problem of hurting people who aren't scroungers.

When did helping people who need help the most at the cost of a small tax increase for those who can afford it the most suddenly become a bad idea? When did a "sink or swim" approach to looking after people, especially those in poverty and from poor backgrounds, become a sensible idea?

My issue with the ideology of the "cut the benefits!" lot is that they understand that they are potentially hurting people and they don't care because it might save them a penny in tax. That is a standard of callousness that even a logical guy like me cannot manage to produce. People are literally dying from welfare cuts if the reports are to be believed and we have people reliant on food banks in one of the richest countries in the world and they are interested in tax savings.

Again, this idea that we have no money is wrong. If cuts were desperately needed then scrap the replacement of nuclear weapons. Scrap HS2 and other schemes of its kind until we are back on track financially. Freeze the defence budget. These 3 actions alone would save MORE than £12bn.

Why can we not do those cuts first before making the cuts that will actually affect the day to day lives of the least fortunate amongst us?

It's misplaced jealousy and a sense of righteousness about how your income determines your worth that drives this. The financial arguments are after the fact rationalizations to disguise the argument in a cloak of legitimacy.

Damocles - so well put and it fills me with hope that there are people like you out there. Unfortunately there are too many on the right who are callous and selfish. Tax cuts when we are in a complete mess financially ? Bloody ridiculous! All down to the self self self society I am afraid. Those that rail against the poor and disadvantaged need to take a long hard look at themselves.

 

[The perfect fumble]

It does look like that yet although as shown above, spending is still up (as a % of GDP from where it was both ten and fifteen years ago with Blair).

Government spending is not the same as welfare spending, I'm sure you understand that.

You can view a shrinking state in terms of what it spends as percentage of GDP or what it does in our daily lives, or even how it does it. For example the Tories make great play on the shrinking size of the public sector, just under 20% of the work force, a 40% low, but so much of what the public sector did is now sub contracted, or re-defined.

Generally right wingers like to see the shrinking state in terms of percentage of GDP. That's why the NHS is never safe with them, they might support it for political reasons but their hearts not in it, if they could get way with it they'd switch to an insurance based system in a heart beat.....

Do we want better health care, or do we want to keep the NHS?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/nhs...ealth-care-or-do-we-want-to-keep-the-NHS.html

Christ! You can't criticise the right for being sluggish in the traps, this appeared yesterday morning! The groundwork has begun.

If the NHS is so wonderful why don't other countries copy it?

I see no advantage in guaranteeing NHS staff all our healthcare.

Monopolies work well for service providers, but never for the customer.

If the NHS is so wonderful why don't other countries copy it?

There isn't the poltical will, there's a reason the Great Depression and the 2nd World War gave birth to the NHS.

As for....

Monopolies work well for service providers, but never for the customer

The NHS is not a monopoly, you can go private. What I think you're saying is why should we fund the NHS through general taxation rather than social health insurance.

 

[urmston]

I'm not being sarcastic, but what does this mean....

I see no advantage in guaranteeing NHS staff all our healthcare.

As for....

Monopolies work well for service providers, but never for the customer

The NHS is not a monopoly, you can go private. What I think you're saying is why should we fund the NHS through general taxation rather than social health insurance.

What does it mean? It is obvious. I see no advantage in guaranteeing NHS staff all our NHS work. We should put the work out to tender to enable the government to award it to the best providers, and remove it from failing providers.

Guaranteeing a workforce employment, regardless of performance and financial efficiency, is not a good way to promote high standards and thrift in any organisation.

Stafford and Barrow hospitals are still run by in-house NHS staff when any other provider would have had the work taken off them very quickly after such dreadful, fatal and unforgivable failures.

As for the NHS not being a monopoly, it is for nearly everyone in the UK as most people cannot afford any private healthcare.

It has a market share well above 90%, a sobering thought when you consider that the government usually acts when a private sector industry has a provider with about 30% of a market.

 

[malg]

Government spending is not the same as welfare spending, I'm sure you understand that.

You can view a shrinking state in terms of what it spends as percentage of GDP or what it does in our daily lives, or even how it does it. For example the Tories make great play on the shrinking size of the public sector, just under 20% of the work force, a 40% low, but so much of what the public sector did is now sub contracted, or re-defined.

Generally right wingers like to see the shrinking state in terms of percentage of GDP. That's why the NHS is never safe with them, they might support it for political reasons but their hearts not in it, if they could get way with it they'd switch to an insurance based system in a heart beat.....

Do we want better health care, or do we want to keep the NHS?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/nhs...ealth-care-or-do-we-want-to-keep-the-NHS.html

Christ! You can't criticise the right for being sluggish in the traps, this appeared yesterday morning! The groundwork has begun.

If the NHS is so wonderful why don't other countries copy it?

I see no advantage in guaranteeing NHS staff all our healthcare.

Monopolies work well for service providers, but never for the customer.

If the NHS is so wonderful why don't other countries copy it?

There isn't the poltical will, there's a reason the Great Depression and the 2nd World War gave birth to the NHS.

As for....

Monopolies work well for service providers, but never for the customer

The NHS is not a monopoly, you can go private. What I think you're saying is why should we fund the NHS through general taxation rather than social health insurance.

Even those with private insurance use the NHS. You just have to look at A&E departments who have professional footballers admitted during games, and during the wee small hours when private health care is asleep. Oh, and there are plenty of actors and actresses who are worth a fair few quid who use the NHS as well.