From The Metro:
"We have to make tough choices in public spending and we will need the support of the Labour movement in protecting the front line first..."
What do most people understand by "frontline services"? I'd guess...
1. The NHS. The official stat's show we've got 320,000 nurses @ £30,000 a pop and 120,000 hospital doctors/GPs at £100,000 a pop, that's about £20 billion. Let's give them an equal number of cleaners, cooks, porters, secretaries, geeks and so on at £20,000 a pop, that's £9 billion, plus £12 billion for medicines, plus another £20 billion for occupancy costs and machines that go *ping*, bringing the total cost of the NHS to £61 billion (as against current cost of well over £100 billion).
2. State schools. Ten million school-age children divided by low pupil-to-teacher ratio twenty = 500,000 teachers @ £40,000 = £20 billion, let's double that for school books, food, cleaners, cooks, caretakers, school nurses etc, £40 billion. Universities shouldn't be taxpayer funded, full stop.
3. Armed forces cost well over £20 billion but we could easily cut back to that if we concentrated on defence rather than endless stupid invasions.
4. Law and order. There are about 150,000 police officers (one per four hundred of population) let's assume they cost £50,000 each (including overtime, cars, fancy gadgets) that's £7.5 billion. There are 80,000 people in prison, 10,000 of whom could be deported which apparently cost £40,000 each to keep in jail, that's £3 billion.
Stick on £40 billion for debt interest and repayments and £200 billion for a Citizen's Income-style welfare system to smoothe things out a bit and to show there are no hard feelings, and we arrive at the princely sum of £371.5 billion, less than 30% of GDP, as against planned spending of £700 billion or over 50% of GDP (including eight million taxpayer-funded jobs, FFS!).
That's how you reduce the size of the state without affecting front-line services! I'm not sure which part of this they can't work out for themselves.
See here for further stat's and links.
Elevate their cause?
3 hours ago
12 comments:
Cracking post!
From memory, annual police budget my area £22m plus £11m police pensions. Really, what can you say.........
OTC, thanks. Or as you once said "That, Gordon, is how you do nothing!"
L, OK, I could chuck in £30 billion for public sector pensions, but any pension over £10,000 p.a. will be taxed at a much higher rate than the usual flat rate of income tax, so the net cost won't be much.
It's the fake charities and Quangocrats they want to protect from cuts.
Excellent post, sir.
I've wondered about such figures for some time yet never bothered to research it.
Goodun Wadsworth....only trouble is if you cut public sector pay and benefit pay you lose public sector votes and the support of those on benefits....
But it has to be done.....
/applause
Anon, exactly.
F, JM, thanks.
EV, sure, I'll lose four million public sector votes and gain forty million from everybody else! PS, I've pencilled in £200 billion for a universal Citizens Income welfare scheme (kids £30 pw, young adults £45, adults £60 and pensioners £120). You can't say fairer than that.
Damn it Wadsworth you have solved the riddle of the u.k.'s public sector cuts again........
So now get that to the Tories before they do something stupid.
Mark, don't you have a corner of your mind that wonders whether if something is a bit too obvious it may be wrong?
"Wadsworth works out how to deliver first world heathcare for 2/3 the price by multiplying numbers from the bottom up"
King's Fund, Government and the whole of health policy slap their foreheads and wonder why THEY didnt think of it first.
He repeats the trick on law and order, and education. Naturally, it all works, and the world votes for BloggersUnited to come into power and smoothly make it happen, immediately.
Well played sir, you have clearly fixed it all.
@ Giles, NHS spending has increased by two thirds (relative to GDP growth) over the last ten years or so, and we can guess where all the extra money has gone.
May I refer you also to The FT...
"... this is the second of two huge spending surges under Gordon Brown. The first took spending as a share of GDP from 36.3 per cent in 1999-2000 to 41.3 per cent in 2005-06. The second will take it from 41 per cent in 2007-08 to a Budget forecast of 48.1 per cent in 2010-11..."
So in ten years, govt spending as % of GDP has gone up by A THIRD. Would it be so terrible to reverse that? Remember always that it is possible to cut taxes such that it benefits lower earners!
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