True, the intention of my post was to highlight that the £20bn figure was more like £30bn just to stand still, to 'improve' the service in a way that most people would perceive improvement would cost more, that's unless 'efficiency savings' of over 3% a year are found.
1. Doctors and Nurses deserve pay rises not pay cuts and 2. Seeing as you have the ability to have people sectioned under the mental health act maybe some one should be looking at this Hunts mental well being for his own good of course
Yea, but read the asterisk marked note at the bottom of the image - "Assuming NHS funding rises in line with inflation" . Considering the circumstances and attitude of the current Tory government, that's an assumption that needs to be looked at again. HA! Agree. Efficiency savings doesn't mean that the quality of the NHS will be preserved at current levels. It seems as if people assume that such efficiency savings will have no effect on the massive system that the NHS is. Again, the question should be why the cuts if the UK is classified as a rich country?
'Efficiency savings' rarely increase efficiency and seldom bring actual savings... Often it's like 'optimising' a deck of card by dropping them on the floor...
Haha! Here's another example of this government gone crazy - "But policymakers are deliberately conflating red tape, which is universally disliked, with genuine social and environmental protections, which are universally popular. The proof? The government set up a crowd-sourcing website, called the Red Tape Challenge, to give the public an opportunity to take part in red tape slashing. But when people logged on and realised that we’re really talking about laws that protect us from exploitation, they had an entirely different reaction. An independent analysis found that most comments on the website wanted more regulation, not less." http://www.neweconomics.org/blog/entry/why-another-vw-scandal-could-be-just-around-the-corner
Aaaaand another one. The Land Registry is being partly privatised along with Channel 4 - http://www.neweconomics.org/blog/entry/privatising-the-uk-land-registry-is-not-the-answer I really do wonder what does the UK even own anymore in the name of the public.
Say goodbye to one of your heroes, the shadow chancellor. I'm watching his feeble attempt at a follow up after the chancellors Spending Review. It is THE most painful follow up I've watched in any PMQ's or Budget session. Tom Watson has died inside and his eyes have glazed over, even your poster boy Corbyn looks bewildered and resigned. Thats all. Good luck.
FTFY. Not to say that Doctors deserve a cut, but they are in the top 10% of UK earners, they don't need to make more. Midwives and Nurses barely crack the top 60%.
If what you propose is based on anything other than your personal opinion i would be grateful if you could backup that opinion with some form of evidence, the reason i ask for evidence is everything I've looked at seems to indicate your opinion is wrong and when a conservative magazine disagrees with you maybe it's time to re-asses that opinion. Things like ^^This^^ are why i said earlier that i think the treasury has forgone the implementation of austerity.
Just a minute. You do realise that you still haven't made your point! Are you for or against austerity? Are you for or against the tories, labour or any other party? Are you for or against the NHS being privatised? Are you for or against government? Nothing has been made clear by you. The only thing that is clear is that just criticizing without any context or position or supporting facts makes you look like someone who's angry and ranting, much like how terrorists rant.. Just make your flipping point properly or dont make any and f*** off.
The problem with that blog post on the spectator is that it assumes that there's something wrong with the deficit per se. REMEMBER, the real debt problem's still there and its private debt, not public. The rather clever switch that was made by the powers that be shifted public discussion onto public debt whereas it was private debt that created the financial crisis and the subsequent debacle in the first place. And its still damn high. Also, do note that whenever it is said that government is borrowing, it is hardly ever said from who! If it is from the private markets, then the question arises that why isnt the government borrowing from its own central bank when the central bank's interest rate's at a historic low! Another question is that what does it even mean for a government to be borrowing from its own institution in its own currency. Question the very basics and you'll realise who writing bull and who's not.
Maybe i missed the part where the blog post said debt is a bad thing, I've read it a few times and don't get the impression that the author is saying debt is bad. The real problem that isn't a problem (debt) that you're referring to is the public sector debt not private, public sector debt it government owned debt, yes the public are eventually going to have to pay that back but it's not the same as privately held debt, mortgages, credit cards, business loans, etc, etc. Either way, public or private debt is besides the point, the point i was trying to make was that when people like forum_user say silly things like our debt would have been so much higher if the other lot were in power, that statements like that don't hold water, that despite claims of austerity and belt tightening the truth is very far from that. I would guess the reason for not mentioning who the government is borrowing from is because it's assumed people would know that it's from the Gilt markets and other securities. Long story short, AFAIK all government borrowing is from the private sector in one way one or another, as an example they say pay me £30k and I guarantee that you'll receive 2% interest on that each year, think ISA tax free savings account but on a much larger scale.
I would disagree with you about what the real problem is. Private debt is what caused the crash and is what sucking spending out of other businesses. Not to forget that the burden that it poses on people. Regarding who the government is borrowing from, well that's typical economic obscurantism going on. If you ever are in contact with this journalist or another one writing about similar things, do ask them who the government is borrowing from and to give you a breakdown. Also, do ask them whatever happened to bankers not being jailed for their crimes and the shift of the media from that to the frankly insignificant topic of UK government debt. It'll be an interesting conversation
That's going to be tricky, disagree with me that is, as AFAIK i haven't said what the real problem is, I've just been talking about debt and how, despite forum_users claim, it's higher under George Osborne than it would have been under the plan proposed by Alistair Darling. You only have to look at the recent spending review to see how profligate Mr Osborne is with money, not only is he borrowing more than the spending plan he wanted to tear up in 2010, a spending plan he called reckless, but he's also borrowing money from the future to fuel he spending spree. The question is who all this spending benefits the most. Who the money comes from is irrelevant (IMO) as in the end it all comes from a single place, people working, producing things or services others are willing to pay for with money they got by doing the same thing. The only difference between public and private debt is one is inherently more risky than the other, I'll leave you to guess what debt carries the higher risk, i think it's already been said when the private debt turned sour it was a more secure form of debt that covered the cost.
Sorry. I misunderstood you then. My point was that there are 2 types of debt here, private and government. Government debt is not really that big of a problem as its been made out to be as its small compared to private debt. Here's a graph that compares them - Source - http://positivemoney.org/how-money-works/advanced/what-about-the-national-debt/ And here's one detailing private debt only - http://www.3spoken.co.uk/2015/10/uk-private-debt-levels-q2-2015.html As you can see, private debt is MUCH larger as compared to government debt. And economic crashes very often correlate closely to private debt levels (http://www.theatlantic.com/business...-debt-isnt-the-problemprivate-debt-is/379865/). So this whole rhetoric of the UK's government debt levels being too high is nonsense when one realizes the real problem is private debt. And its a problem not just in the UK, but across the developed world! So basically the government should still be, as it was rightly in 2008-09, talking and taking measures to reduce private debt and the power of the institutions that allowed it to reach such levels. But as we all know how amazingly powerful finance is in the UK and that the tories have close ties with them, this taboo will not be broken anytime in the near future. A large chunk of the money that private finance lends to in the UK still goes into the housing market. :/ I would disagree with you regarding who the money comes from being irrelevant. Its because of the politics of it. If it comes from the private sector, its the private sector that dictates where its spent and at what interest rate its provided at. Moreover, its the rich who generally provide that money. So in the current scenario, one will simply end up exacerbating inequality. Not only will people's private debts go to enrich the already super rich(because someway or the other, the debt contracts end up paying them) but now taxes will too. If the government creates the money itself via the the bank of england, it dictates where its spent.It basically circulates around, does its job and ends back up in the bank of england(the amount depends on taxes,policies,etc). On a side note,in fact a fellow colleague of Keynes at Cambridge University even theorised that government spending can create full employment. Why it will not be allowed to do so, well.... http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/kalecki220510.html Hence goes the saying "Hitler found a cure against unemployment before Keynes was finished explaining it."
Regarding the recent spending review, here's an interesting set of graphs - http://www.neweconomics.org/blog/entry/todays-autumn-statement-explained-in-four-graphs As we are discussing, government deficits and expenditure, here's a quote from the above link - "Compared to the rest of Europe, the UK has some of the lowest rates of public expenditures – whether it’s spending on pensions, welfare or infrastructure – as a percentage of GDP. This means that the “problem” of the public deficit is not caused by over-spending, but is instead a problem of tax collection. Government revenue as a % of GDP is also one of the lowest of the EU-28."
I can't disagree that privately held debt has sky rocketed in the last few decades but that's a choice people and companies are free to make, to take out a mortgage or not, business loan or not, run up the credit card or not, while governments can exert some control on private debt levels at the end of the day if a company or person can no longer service that debt then there's measures in place to deal with that, repossession, bankruptcy, etc, etc. In a free society you can't force people not to do something, you can only encourage or discourage certain behavior, you can either make it easy to run up debts or difficult, as you rightly point out in the last few decades people have been encourage to take on privately owned debt, that's not a bad thing in and of its self as if that privately held debt goes bad it shouldn't have a big ripple effect, the problem comes, as we recently experienced, when the company is to big to fail as was the case with the banks. And that's where a discussion on economic policy crosses the line into political policy, something that I've been trying to avoid for obvious reason, no offense intended, i just don't want to enter into a mud slinging competition. I would like to think I'm fairly aware of who or what is effected by particular economic policies and what my personal opinion is on that, an opinion that's going to remain personal for fear of causing offense.
Here's an interesting read - "Orsola Costantini, Senior Economist at the Institute for New Economic Thinking, is the author of a new paper, “The Cyclically Adjusted Budget: History and Exegesis of a Fateful Estimate,” which exposes the fascinating — and disturbing — history of how a budget approach cloaked in a scientific and technical aura became a tool to manipulate public opinion and serve the interests of the powerful. In the following conversation, she reveals how austerity has been sold to the public through a process that damages the lives of ordinary people, consolidates knowledge and power at the top, and compromises democracy." http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2015...ty-got-sold-to-the-public-like-snake-oil.html
