Why I despise the Tories

Firstly, for their paucity of ambition; they waffle vaguely about spending cuts, and the best they can come up with is this:

With total public borrowing set to reach £1 trillion, the Tories would cut tax credits for households earning more than £50,000 and bring in road tolls on newly-built roads, [David Cameron] said.

Scrapping the 50p tax rate for high earners, proposed by Labour, would not be a priority, and it would be several years before the party could consider cutting inheritance tax, Cameron said. Cutting tax credits to the proposed £50,000 level would mean 130,000 families losing an average £500 a year.

So they aren't going to scrap the ludicrous 50p tax rate that will raise bugger-all, and they hope to repay £1,000,000 million of public debt with road tolls and by making means testing even more savage - 130,000 families x £500 a year = the princely sum of £65 million, or about 0.1% of planned government spending? As to Inheritance Tax, that ought to go straight in the bin and be replaced by adding a few more Council Tax bands, all the way to "Z" (ditto Stamp Duty Land Tax), as far as I am concerned.

Secondly, for their paucity of ambition. Alice Cook did a chart on government spending yesterday - basically, if we reduced government spending by planned borrowing of £175 billion per annum, that would still only take us back to 2004 spending levels of about £450 billion per annum. Were 'services' that much worse five years ago? Were welfare payments that much meaner five years ago?

Thirdly, what is their obsession with means-testing? It's just taxation by another name. If they want to make sure that families earning over £50,000 don't get Tax Credits, then they are going to have to increase the withdrawal rate by 5% or 10% for some or all recipients, i.e. put up the effective basic rate of tax by 5% or 10%, only instead of doing it in an honest in-your-face manner, they do it by drafting in another army of administrators to pinch a few quid here and a few quid there.

Wouldn't it make more sense to reduce the basic level of Tax Credits (or replace them with a much higher tax-free personal allowance) and scrap means-testing entirely? Have they overlooked the fact that fraud, error and overpayments of Tax Credits are running at £1,000 to £2,000 million per annum, most of which arises because of the complications and means-testing? Now, that's money worth saving!

And finally, for their paucity of ambition...

Cameron said he would not axe budgets for overseas aid and the NHS, but cuts would be made elsewhere.

The 'aid budget' can go straight in the bin as well, as to the NHS, see this fine article on the IEA 'blog.