The Purple Scorpion highlights more crass and heart-breaking examples of government waste.
My comment was as follows:
"Hurray for accountable transparency!
It also strikes me that every layer of gummint involves waste and corruption. So the answer must be for local councils to be in charge of as many functions of the State as possible, i.e. just about everything except defence, immigration control and prisons (which have to be at national level), and maybe a gummint department to arbitrate in the event of disputes over e.g. where a new road or railway is going to go.
People get confused with millions and billions, but if you can see how money is spent locally, line by line and department by department, we'll soon track down that 20% of gummint spending that is pure waste.
Further, there should be a lot less national taxation and more local taxation for much the same reasons.
(Yes, of course local councils waste money and are corrupt, but at least there'd only be one layer thereof.)"
Monday, 15 September 2008
"Accountable transparency"
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4 comments:
Why not do it the other way round,start with the assumption that all Govt spending is waste and then make everyone justify their spending on a bottom up basis?
I agree localisation will be a good start and at figures with figures people can relate to. The argument against this (apart from MP's losing control) is that they don't raise revenue and so there is a disconnect in people's minds between tax and spend. So you would need to go for some local taxes - yes I know, LVT, but that won't raise everything you need.
GS, that's called 'zero-based budgeting' and a bloody good idea.
But that's the beauty of the my suggested system - local spending (as currently defined) is about £60 billion per annum (or it would be if all councils spent the same amount per person as low spending councils do).
£60 billion is also (by happy coincidence) the total current revenues from taxes that LVT could and should replace (Council Tax, Business Rates, SDLT, Inheritance Tax, CGT, VAT on domestic fuel, TV licence fee, Insurance Premium Tax etc etc).
From there on in, every year, you just reduce national taxes a bit and delegate more functions to local councils, so that there is a gradual transition from taxes on production to 'user charges' (primarily LVT but there are plenty of other examples, like auctioning land slots, auctioning off smoking licences for pubs etc).
I don't see why prisons can't be run locally. Most crime is committed locally.
When you say 20% is waste, is that 20% of taxes, or of GDP?
I am definitely coming round to the idea of an LVT replacing Council Tax, etc.
M, to clarify, of course prisons should be run locally, but IMHO should be paid out of national taxation.
20% of gummint spending (over £100 billion p.a.) is pure and utter waste/corruption - overstaffing (by about 2 million workers), Whitehall duplication, over generous pay and pensions in public sector, consultants, quangos, EU contributions, DBERR, Regional Development Agencies, PFI, PPP etc etc etc.
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