The first 10% off public spending could be painless for the public and popular.
|
|||||
|
We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people. Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house] Authors
Arts, Tech & CultureCivil LibertiesCommentary
EconomicsSamizdatistas |
Samizdata quote of the dayMay 11th, 2009 |
 13 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
Who Are We?The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling. We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe. CategoriesArchivesFeed This PageLink Icons   |
|||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
By “painless” I suppose it is meant that one could cut 10% of government spending without cutting the “front line services” that are (it is argued) popular with so many voters (not just the voters who staff them or whatever).
This may be the most important political debate in Britain – and not just in national politics.
For example I am in a minority of one in the Conservative group of Kettering Council in thinking that the “austerity option” (as the officers put it) is needed – everyone else thinks we can get by with admin savings.
In national politics (where the the budget deficit, however calculated, is now higher than at any time since World War II) the debate is in a similar state.
People (including John Redwood) seem to believe that we can get by doing things like a abolishing the “Regional” level of government (E.U. inspired “regionalism” has been a big thing for the present government) and scrapping things like the I.D. Card.
I do not agree – I believe that efforts to cut “waste, redtape managers, and corruption” never bring in the savings that it is hoped they will – and even if they do bring every Pound of savings that is hoped it will only be a small fraction of the government spending reduction that is needed.
However, I must welcome the change in debate in the political class (of all parties – because men like Vince Cable and Frank Field are also arguing for the reduction of government spending) – quite recently political discourse was all about “sharing the proceeds of growth” (when it was already been obvious that the “growth” was a credit money bubble) and other sillyness.
The political class have come a long way – and, again, I must welcome that.
In the United States things are worse – the Obama “spending reductions” are specifically aimed at irritating conservative minded people (the people asking for spending control) by cutting benefits to police officers (or their families) shot in the line of duty, or cutting back on border security and anti terrorism screening.
But, even more importantly, the “spending cuts” are a fraud.
A hundred million Dollars is being talked about by the President – when the same President (at the same time) has government spending increases for his term that amount to TRILLIONS of Dollars.
If the United States had broadcast (as opposed to just cable) television stations interested in holding government to account, or a press that was not just concerned with being an Obama fan club (in spite of the fact that being such a fan club means that the newspapers are so boring that even Obama supporters do not much buy newspapers anymore) then this fraud would be laughed at from coast to coast.
But that would be a “return to the age of cynicism” now we must all “work together, under our elected leaders, for the common good” as the writer of the new “Star Trek” movie put it – without a hint of irony.
“Oh that is just popular culture” – “just” popular culture?
And it was a point that had already been made in the newsmagazines (such as Newsweek) and the broadcast television stations.
If anything the “serious” parts of the American media are even more uncrtical and starry eyed than Hollywood is – because they are the “good students” from schools and universities (the people who from their most early years ate all the collectivist ideology their teachers fed them – “shit eaters” as the K.G.B. officers used to say, of people who believed this sort of thing).
In Britain there is a similar process (on government spending and everything else), but the print press is still a bit more independent of it.
In the United States outside the edititoral page of the Wall Street Journal, Fox News on cable (which most Americans have never seen – they think “Fox” is the broadcasting station with “Family Guy” and “American Idol” on it) and some talk radio (which is going to come under attack in a lot of clever ways) there is no dissent left in the media.
In the education system things are even worse.
Schools (including many private schools) and almost all unversities teach that “reform” means ever more government Welfare State spending.
It is theoretically possible to cut public by 10% (or more) without touching “front line services”, but it will never happen. Faced with the choice of sacking a five a day officer or two nurses to save £30k, politicians will always choose the nurses; no one will miss a five a day officer, but start sacking nurses and you can point out the “true cost” of taxpayers’ tight fisted and unreasonable reluctance to pay ever increasing amounts to the government.
To anyone with the least knowledge of politicians this is merely one more reason why government should be restricted to those things that only government can do (defence and law & order IMHO).
He’s nicked that idea from PJ O’Rourke. It’s in Parliament of Whores, although he applied “O’Rourke’s Circumcision Precept” (“You can take 10% off the top of anything“) after he’d cut all the other stuff.
Of course, MarkE’s right. They’ll never let it happen.
God, I hate Star Trek. The only decent one was Deep Space Nine, which at least questioned the whole Utopian nonsense of it all. Look up “Section 31” sometime. I always suspected there was something like that going on in the background.
O’Rourke appropriated the the old management truism for himself, leaving off the caveat “…but adding 10% is always more problematic”.
Who is going to do the cutting?
Back in the halcyon days of California’s Proposition 13 (when the voters cut property taxes over the objection of “elected” representatives), the cash-strapped City of Oakland laid off the streetsweepers — but kept all the bureaucrats in the streetsweeping administration on the payroll.
We are long past the point of sensible reform. Until there are politicians & bureaucrats swinging from lamp-posts, the present insanity will continue.
Trillion just isn’t comprehensible. I prefer Million Million.
Per the comment above: A hundred million in spending cuts and a million million in spending increases.
that provides some comprehension…
Sadly, a million million just isn’t comprehensible either. “Million” in the common vernacular is akin to “five” in rabbit-speak. It just means “more than I can count.”
One might feasibly compare a hundred million to, say, a thousand million, because people will ignore the million bit and think of the difference between, say, a cheap television and a 52″ flat-panel plasma display. One might even feasibly compare a hundred million with a hundred thousand million, because that’s the difference between a cheap TV and a house.
When you try to compare a hundred million to a million million, they think of a cheap TV and… huh? What’s a “more than I can count” “more than I can count?”
According to the political memoirs of Giles Brandreth (much more enjoyable and informative than one may have expected) SoS Peter Lilley – hardly a ‘wet’ on spending – when told that “it must be possible to cut a billion from the social security budget” replied “that would mean taking £1000 away from each one of the million poorest people in the country.”
According to the political memoirs of Giles Brandreth (much more enjoyable and informative than one may have expected) SoS Peter Lilley – hardly a ‘wet’ on spending – when told that “it must be possible to cut a billion from the social security budget” replied “that would mean taking £1000 away from each one of the million poorest people in the country.”
Except, Snag, more like 500 (or maybe even less).
Half of that budget would be spent on salaries for the gray eminences and their underlings who dole out that money to the poor. Of course, after a while those people gain the ‘right’ to a state-funded pension, which increases the proportion of taxes taken to pay for ‘welfare’ which don’t actually go to ‘the poor’.
‘Wet’ is, was, and always will mean ‘marginally less feculent than the rest of the bastards’.
Alice.
An examination of President Obama’s 100 millon Dollars in budget cuts (in the fact of trillions of Dollars of budget increases) indicates you are correct.
Cutting the X ray machines that scan for bombs and so on – but lots more money for ACORN activists (under the hundreds of different names that these activist organizations go under) to do such things as conduct the United States Census (on which everything else depends).
Indeed matters have gone beyond reform.
Partly because the mainstream media (including the entertainment media) regard it as their duty to hide the truth – rather than let the voters know the truth.
Nor is this just in the United States.
Out leafleting for the County Council elections yesterday I came upon the British “conservative” newspaper the Daily Express.
A writer in this newspaper explained to her readers “that there is nothing President Obama can not do” and his wife “is the most lucky lady in the world”.
“He can even do stand up, his timeing is……”
I will not quote more.
The specific incident?
The Correspondents Dinner in Washington D.C.
Where a pet entertainer made jokes about the President’s critics dying of kidney failure (whilst President Obama and his lap dogs the media laughed).
And when the President himself made a speech it was about how the people present had voted for him – apart from “the people at the Fox table”.
Que for finger pointing and shouts at the table from the “civilized” (i.e. wealthy and connected) auidience.
Oddly enough none of the above was reported in the lady’s article in the Daily Express.
Or (I make a wild guess) in the American mainstream media.
The thing that “low hanging fruit” advocates tend to miss is that any form of activity, government or otherwise, has some inherent inefficiency or waste and the elimination of that waste has a cost which usually outweighs the cost of the initial waste in the first place. Sure, your employees might be stealing a hundred pounds worth of pens a year but does that make it worth paying someone 15000/year to sign pens out of stores? Retail even has a term for this, “slippage” which is the amount of shoplifting that is tolerable and not worth trying to eliminate.
I can well remember the Thatcher govt spending 12m to eliminate 5m of waste. My, that seems like small potatoes these days.
The only way to cut government expenditure is with a razor sharp sword. Or perhaps rope and lamp-posts.
Hmm. I made the lamp-post reference before I read Alice’s post. Is this a meme in it’s early stages? Off to Google trends I think…