From the FT:
Cities and towns such as Newcastle, Swansea, Barnsley, Ipswich and Hastings have become too dependent on public sector employment and will face serious difficulties as hundreds of thousands of jobs are lost as a result of future public spending cuts, the Centre for Cities think-tank [1] warned yesterday.
All have more than 30 per cent of their employment in the broader public sector. In particular, they have sizeable civil service outposts, quangos and local government - sectors likely to bear the brunt of job cuts that could total between 240,000 and 290,000 [2] over the three years following 2011, the think-tank said...
Thirty per cent? Sounds a bit high, doesn't it? But let's not forget that across the UK as a whole, 25.5% of all jobs are currently in 'Education, health and public admin', from Table 5(2) here. Interestingly, 14.3% of 'male jobs' and 38.3% of 'female jobs' are in said categories.
BTW, any Southerners who uses this an excuse to bash the regions ought to remember that while the percentage of people in London & the South East employed directly or indirectly by the government may be lower, most of the public sector employees earning six figure salaries work in London.
Just sayin', is all.
[1] Obviously, it's not a think-tank, it's a fakecharity, ostensibly funded by some Sainsbury trust or other, and inevitably based in, er, London.
[2] If it were up to me, that would read "about three million", but I'd take great delight in sacking people in order of how high their salaries are.
Must stop scanning headlines
23 minutes ago
9 comments:
".... over the three years following 2011"
If it were up to me that would be over the next two years up to 2011!
All this sniping at the public sector is rather antediluvian is n't it?
The Guv is not a stand-alone business which can reduce costs by getting rid of workers .
They have to pay for the people they have made unemployed out of higher taxes on the private sector in an economy with lower aggregate demand.
DBC, nope.
1. There is a huge difference between coppers, soldiers (who have to be employed by the state); teachers, nurses, bus drivers, coastguards etc (maybe two million) who would be employed in private sector if they weren't paid by the state; two or three million other public sector (that I'm not sure about); and three million totally superfluous quangista, five-a-day-advisors, race relations industry etc. (= total public sector payroll of seven or eight million).
2. Why would it lead to 'higher taxes' if you sack e.g. Jonathan Porritt and his dozens of minions and just give them a Citizen's Income of £3,000 per year? That must be cheaper than their average salaries of £30,000-plus?
And if even half the people you sack found jobs in private, productive sector, that would reduce overall average taxes paid per person, it's simple maths. And as we know tax cuts do not have to be regressive - we could start by doubling the personal allowance, for example. Or increasing it to £20k as the LLC themselves recommended.
Taxes don't have to be regressive but prices and user fees always are.
You move doctors and nurses into the private sector and the fees involved will be beyond ordinary people ( the fees being higher for them in real terms than for the rich.)
Take a look at Alice Cook's blog today for an account of American private medicine. Or Neil Clark's for the difference in prices on nationalised and denationalsied railways.
DBC:
"You move doctors and nurses into the private sector and the fees involved will be beyond ordinary people"
Again nope, you are only looking at one half of the equation (the 'provision' side). The other side is the 'funding' side!
I'd envisage a system like in most European countries where a decent level of healthcare (with private and/or competing providers) is paid for via taxpayer/government-funded vouchers, so healthcare is effectively free at point of use, with voluntary private top-ups via private health insurance (a waste of money, if you ask me) or out of your own pocket.
GP's are technically private operators, they just get most of their income from the NHS, don't forget
I thought I was dealing with the funding side: I thought they would be funded by open-market prices.
I would have thought a vulture system would cost the taxpayer as much as the present system, provided you kept basic standards the same.
The top-ups would be priced ,so a) regressive b) liable to inflationary drift in search of profits.
I suppose the vulture system would
be different in respect of increased competition and choice, but nobody is going to choose professionals because they are price competitive surely.Too much like the situation described by the commander of Apollo 8:"I sit on top of that thing and remember that every one of its million parts was built for the lowest competitive tender"
DBC, I used to live in Germany, and paid my subs based on my way-below-average-salary while I was training as an accountant.
I, my wife and kids were entitled to free-at-point-of-use healthcare that put the NHS to shame, despite the fact that is was provided by private/competing providers. I never paid a penny for top-ups or private insurance, that being a mug's game.
I am not sure what part of "there is another way of doing things and it works" that I'm not getting across. It's a bit like trying to explain that "you can tax property values not wages and it works".
I'm not arguing that there might not be a better way of doing things.
The bone of contention was that the public sector is always wasteful of money and privatisation would remove all the Jonathan Porrits (Hooray,no argument on that one at least).
The German system may well be better but it sucks in more money,so decreasing discretionary spending and has been cited as harming economic growth.It amounts to over 10% of GDP,is the biggest employer in the country and is contributory with some figures showing people paying 14%of gross wages (which I find hard to believe).All these competing providers are not keeping costs down and there have, according to the BMJ, been 14 attempts to slash costs since the 80's,with the intro of copayments by punters who currently pay 10 euros for the first visit to the doctor every 3 months; the same for every day in hospital.Also the price of medicine is very high.So some rationing by price.
Another strange feature of Continental medicine is that it seems less concerned to have your records.Conversely, the current attempt to computerise the NHS system may be an idealistic folly ,as with all computer schemes which involve private-sector rogues who get more fees the longer the setting-up process goes on (the more problems the better).
Also the high salaries of head bureaucrats in the public sector came about from the conviction by Conservatives that you had to compete on pay to get the head honchos.Similarly paralleling public service managers with outside private consultants doing the same thing all stemmed from this prejudice that the private sector is innately superior and you have to bring in private sector expertise, a view which dominates the blogosphere and which led to the situation covered by the joke: Fred Goodwin of RBS; Andy Hornby of HBOS;Terry Wogan,who is the odd one out?Terry Wogan because he is the only one with a banking qualification.
I would have far rather chosen my own ground for this argument: nationalised railways (or even the more dodgy ground of [re]nationalising pubs)
DBC, it's 15.5% of wages actually (AFAICS), but it's a regressive tax, i.e. you only pay it on the first 45,000 Euros of your wages, or whatever the figure is, and you don't pay it on interest, dividend or rental income.
So if it were a flat tax on all income with no upper limit it would be something like 8%, which doesn't seem too terrible.
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